St. Paddy's Day 2008!

Our local St. Pat's day venerables run their annual parade in pouring rain today with RR somewhere deep within himself unable to pump up even one small ounce of sympathy for our little green buddies. Zero sign of the parade so far that always goes right by my window in downtown KCMO, though I read in the KC Star that they've resolved to run the parade come heck or high water. LOL is all I can say as I'm having an awful time feeling the slightest bit sorry and darn guilty about it. Instead I'm just sitting here chuckling to myself. Let the rest of the human race get a little taste of this stuff. Makes me feel so much better!

But, back to serious business. We've had a couple of days to mull over the Tampa Bay Derby, and that short Zito statement yesterday that WP passed all the tests, allegedly. Zito seems like an honest straight forward sort, but, do you really publicise that your horse bled? But then we might imagine that WP hardly ran enough to bleed, so we're left with figure how or why Zito would be baffled by the performance.

Really, would you be all that stunned to see your horse finish up the track if you'd done two fast works in 27 days with your horse with the last one 9 days out from the race. How this horse is handled from here on out should be interesting!

Then there's the question can Zito and really also the likes of Barclay Tagg compete with the sort of training being done by S. Asmussen. Whatever you think of Asmussen, and I'm other than a fan of his sort of mindset--read his explanations for his suspensions--Asmussen has stepped up training for his top horses even above where it was two years ago in 2006 when I did a little personal study of Triple Crown candidates PPs (Asmussen had a minor horse in the 2006 Derby), and to my surprise identified Asmussen as one or two of that bunch of trainers that was giving his horse legit training.

Tagg this year seems to be holding a full deck of horses and doing a heck of a job. This year's Nafzger perhaps, thus far maybe Barclay has learned something from his past errors. Again, Tagg training from here on in bears watching.

Then there's our old friend D.W. Lukas. From that horse Lukas raced in Arkansas yesterday, and same deal with his Derby candidate last year, can we see how the old Lukas training--and you'd put Baffert, Zito, McGlaughlin and quite a few others in there--fares against the stepped up training that's going on now with a lot of others?

This years TC training will provide a great lab for the blog for the present subject, which I'll get back to tomorrow, frequency of breezing and racing injuries.

Training:
3/14/08 Friday: both horses did short spurts of speed in course of a fairly rigorous riderless workout.
3/15/08: Sat: Off
3/16/08: Sun:
Rod: Repeated just a few riderless spurts about 80% speed. This youngster is quick!
Art: This was the first workout of the year that I'd call a race prep w/o instead of mere strengthening that we've been doing in recovering from the weather. Art was driven 4 x 2f riderless fast in the mud. The footing was soft instead of deep. I'm afraid Art pulled a War Pass on me in that he seemed completely unenthused and lazy. First time that's happened, so I take note and we'll see. Like Zito I'm without explanation, though I declined any investigation for the flat performance. Nevertheless the horse was driven to go 2f at a time fairly quickly in the soft going and it was a nice conditioning workout. First one of the year.