The Belmont: Why and How?

Congratulations to all the supporters of Rags to Riches! The familiar crow in full glory appears again as he will again soon, undoubtedly. And hats off to those astute handicappers who picked the filly over the colts before the race was run!

The visual image of Rags to Riches scooting by a beaten Curlin in the stretch undoubtedly will stay with us for the ages. And so, before rendering the RR opinion of the race an acknowledgement that this was a special performance by a very good horse who happened to be of the female sex, an extraordinary accomplishment!

The focus of the blog is on training, and so the question HOW a filly suddenly beats a talented group of colts including a three million dollar horse that was touted even on this blog.

This gate to wire Pletcher performance took me back to February and March when it seemed that every horse Pletcher entered seemed the only one in the field able to run all the way. And, I was posting about this as to how it was happening and what Pletcher might be doing to bring about such performances. We saw this again yesterday as it appeared to me that Pletcher's horse was the only one in the race with any pizazz or spirit or running with energy throughout the race.

As I consider it there might have been a lot of ingredients here--the mundane ones include a horse from the top of the thoroughbred world both in terms of breeding and ownership which alone brings to the race a certain degree of intelligence and sophistication difficult to match by the Larry Jones-Bill Kaplan-Greg Foxes of the world. These latter trainers are in the RR world and I understand what they're up against.

Then there are the handicapping factors that I ignored in my pre race analysis a couple of posts ago. There was the normal Pletcher series of three pre-race breezes spaced about three weeks apart. I've noted this in February and March--all of Pletcher's horses were doing this every race and for unknown reasons he seemed to depart from this pattern in the midst of the triple crown. I also speculated that there is more going on here in Pletcher training than the published 5f breezes, and I still believe this to be so in the training of R2R. Unknown to me how a filly runs that strong a race off of a couple of 4 and 5f zips, and a 5f in 1:03 and 1.5 mile slow gallops. Doubt it happens or happened in the training of this horse. There was something else which is unknown.

Then, and maybe this was the deciding factor, R2R has been training at Belmont. She was the only horse in the race with the home field advantage which probably at Belmont with the long distance of its turns and straightaways makes home field more important than at any other track particularly when being ridden by a local jock. (just remebered--cpwest also)

But, in my view, the most significant factor in the R2R win was the flatness of the the rest of the field. Besides Tiago the only other spirited performance was the winner's. Let's take them briefly one by one:
Wild and Crazy--pretty much as expected though I was impressed by the number and quality of pre-race breezing--predictably Kaplan got this all backward though.

CP West--typical Zito performance. Good horse to last a mile running for Nick Zito.

Slew's Tizzy--something happened there. He faded way too fast for any other explanation.

Hard Spun--looked predictably fat and out of shape in the post parade. Ran according to this and his training or lack of training. Good horse--typical conventional good old boy soft trainer will never compete at this level.

Tiago--looks like a Grade II horse developing due to his training into a significant Grade I animal. He was too far back but maintained distance in the stretch. Nice training job!

Curlin--In my last post on Asmussen training instead of endorsing it I wrote that I'd think about it. I never saw any of the Preakness spark from Curlin at any point in the race. Flat as a board, flat as a pancake describes what I saw. Biorhythms? Training? Lack of rest? Something else? It was other than the Curlin that we've seen in several prior races. Curlin at the top of his game runs away from this filly. Think we might have seen the problem with Asmussen training yesterday--I was continuing my thought process on this after my yesterday post: is the horse tight enough? As this blog goes on, hopefully we can identify the correct formula.

R2R--while I congratulate Pletcher and the connections my questions on the WHY of this entry remain the same. Pletcher and Tabor in their "let's give it a shot" conception ignored the possibility of a breakdown, which had it occurred would have rocked racing. Fillies compared to colts train lighter, race lighter, and when forced to extend themselves against colts on a hard surface endanger themselves. My "what is the point" remains despite the win.