Derby Worries

Flapping tongues, and trainer of the Derby favorite whose hobby is bass fishing. I'm neutral but conflicted about hunting/fishing but, does anyone find something incongruous about an animal trainer--Eion Harty--that enjoys killing fish in his spare time? Forget the Nafzger like job with Colonel John, after the Derby I'm inviting Harty to my place in hope of teaching him how to apply a tongue tie.

Then Barclay Tagg and the green European saddle(rump) blankets. Barclay possibly has a subliminal wish that he were at Newmarket, in employ of the Queen perhaps, anywhere but Churchill where his horses look anything but comfortable. Little details seems to escape, as I noticed Tale of Ekati this morning taking off after a deficient warm up. Any wonder the horse was gassed by the wire? Trainer "obliviousness". You may look up the word at Dictionary.com.

Then Dutrow Jr. puffing away with his horse on the track in bell boots, a piece of equipment I'd thought reserved for the idiot wing of the hunter/jumper community. Possibly Richard Jr. was too busy in his lab to notice that his horse might be uncomfortable with those contraptions ricocheting over his fetlocks. But then, perhaps you need bell boots with turn downs. Jr. is also invited to my place post derby where I hope to teach him the art of avoiding hind-front interference prior to hitting Louisville, no bell boots necessary. I'll off him a little weed if I can find some.

And then Zito fretting over his latest $650,000 casualty. Who else could observe his horses are "not robust" and they are the best conditioned horses all in the same sentence? If the race were 4f I might put Cool Coal Man in my exacta.

That's almost enough for one post, but at the top of my worry list would be Eight Belles. I'm supposing the jock will have the good sense to protect this lightly trained very vulnerable filly with her lengthy front cannons trying to compete against a bunch of colts many of whom have twice as much distance on their work tabs. The Hall of Shame to these connections if anything happens to this filly.

And, to finish up, no sighting of the Pletcher horses today or almost anyone else (from the reports so far). We'll be keeping tabs if all those workers over the weekend completely detrain what little they gained from those "maintenance" works. Maintenance works, peaking works, that's what you'd want, I'm supposing provided you had anything to maintain.

Enough barbs for this one Derby. Back to workouts and fit horses tomorrow. I've yet to figure it completely except I'd agree with Dutrow that they've got quite a specimen in Big Brown.

Training:
Mon. 4/28: Rod was off after three work days. That youngster, unlike his 3yr. old counterpart, has yet to miss a beat. Art did a nice riderless fast work followed by 10 min trot-walk under tack in the pasture. We're getting there again with the tack work according to Mr. Nob after the 2 weeks off with the chest injury. The riderless was planned as 6 x 1f sort of fast, but, since the horse kept insisting on going 2f instead of one, we called it after four of them. Looked very decent after the layoff!