The 3-year-old males

[Pedigree Ann]

Originally Posted by King Glorious

I've always said that if you don't go into the Derby with the intention of winning it, you shouldn't go at all. If you do go planning on winning it, the next step is obviously the Preakness. The point is, if you aren't preparing your horse for the entire series, you are asking for trouble. How can you expect a horse that's conditioned to run once every 6-8 weeks to be ready to run three times in six weeks? You can't.

As for the hype of the horses, I think it's really a case of people are looking for hope where maybe it's not really there. But this is what the sport has left us with. Horses don't run enough anymore for us to properly evaluate actual talent and ability against other top horses so all we can do is watch a good horse beat mediocres and pin our hopes on them as future stars. I think back to my first year as a fan, 1986. We had Java Gold, Polish Navy, Gulch, Capote, Bet Twice, Talinum, Temperate Sil, Demons Begone, Qualify, Alysheba...the list goes on.....and they were competing against each other regularly as 2yos and on the TC trail as 3yos. We KNEW who the top horses were. Yearly, that was the case. It wasn't like now where it's mostly speculating and guessing.

I couldn't agree more with you. This 'resting' horses after even easy races just gives their bones and muscles time to lose the remodeling that the race gave them. And it seems to have been instituted by the 'sheets guys' analyses. Don't run him back too soon or he'll bounce! They have no training in exercise physiology or anything similar, and they haven't trained a racehorse in the flesh, yet everybody listens to them anyway. Madness. I am a mathematician, holding a doctorate in mathematical statistics, and I can tell you that a complex situation like a racehorse's performance in a race can't be described by a single number.

My first 'Derby' season was 1971 and I had latched onto Jim French, the hickory throwback to an earlier era who seemed to run every 10 days or so. He took part in all 4 parts of the Hialeah Derby series (won the Bahamas but had to give it back) with a couple of placings, then ran in the Bay Shore, Florida Derby, and Santa Anita Derby on consecutive weekends, placing in the first two and winning the last. And since it was then 4 weeks to the Derby, he ran in the Wood Memorial (4th). If that critter Canonero II hadn't shipped in from Venezuela, Jim French would have been the Derby winner, because he was a clear second on the day. None of the US-raced 3yos that year were all that much - except Hoist the Flag, who got hurt early - but they ran against one another all spring. Bold Reason, Executioner, Good Behaving, His Majesty - all nice horses who won good races in their lifetimes, but nothing even Riva Ridge-style special. Nobody was worried about their stud value being diminished by a loss because it wasn't until they had run 8-10 times that any of them HAD any value as a stallion.