Top 5 Derby horses at this point

[ArlJim78]

Originally Posted by kentuckyrosesinmay

Not all horses who are sore will walk sore. Bute hides a lot of things. Sometimes it requires a jog, a canter, or even a gallop to pick it out, or a good feel of the legs.

That's why the people that I am associated with feel the horse's legs at the two year old sales. They can't tell everything by watching them walk or just by looking at their legs. We saw some that walked sore at a recent sale while we were pulling them out and looking at them, and some of the others who didn't walk sore had something majorly wrong with them like a bad tendon or suspensory when their legs were felt upon.

Street Sense definitely does not move as pretty as he did as a two year old, and I have never been a fan of the way Any Given Saturday moves, but it is not as fluid as it was when he was a two year old.

I always thought that if I was an expert horse person like yourself, that I could use that knowledge to predict how a horse would run on a given day. Now I'm realizing that it is a complete waste of time.

Any Given Saturday ran his best race to date. Street Sense ran not as good as his juvenile race but NO ONE expected that he would repeat that effort first off the layoff so his performance is perfectly in line with his previous high standards. They both achieved very nice 101 beyers and equaled the track record. And all this was done while they were sore and did not have the pretty strides that they had last year. I'm also kinda shocked that two training icons could have done such a poor job not maintaining the horses pretty two year old stride, and allowing plainly obvious sore horses to compete.

The whole thing is quite perplexing, why wouldn't the soreness and lack of stride fluidity show up in the actual performance?