Toyota Blue Grass Stakes

Yes, it is the "Toyota" Blue Grass Stakes with the 2009 Camry Hybrid at left. Toyota, Japs, horse racing has a good ring.

On a sluggish busy day I'll limit myself to going through the training mechanics of this weekend's TC race, again in terms of the training and spacing of works/races investigating whether we may pick the competitive horses strictly on works.

Begin by acknowledging both that only part of the training for each horse is considered as we know only a part, and that I'll avoid taking a closer look in that I've avoided more than glancing at breeze times and distances.

Primarily I looked at:
1. Number of works/races for the year.
2. Number of works/races since 2/23/08--roughly the last 45 days pre-race.

What does this get us? It tells us which horses have the better preps long term and might be strong enough to carry speed, and tells us which have the most intensive recent preps and thus might be most dangerous in terms of immediate readiness to race.

So, break it down in the following e.g.:

11(total number of breeze/races for the year)-5(total number of breeze/races last 45 approx. days).

Here's the field ranked by what I perceive the best overall training job using only these variables: best on top, worst on bottom:

Pyro 14-7 big surprise, eh? Asmussen's recent success? His training sits at the top of this field.

Big Truck 13-6 ditto Barclay Tagg

You'll see hereafter the training is varying versions of "conventional".

Stonebird 12-6 Good grief~as Wayne ("we don't work horses") Lukas works his horse once a week since 3/1. Catch up perhaps for the uneven training before that? What's gotten into D.W. suddenly?

Visionaire 11-5 At last we see how Matz probably trained Barbaro under the radar. Once a week breezes since 3/1. Barbaro did work, quite obviously from his performance, though nothing from Fairhill ever showed.

Stevil 11-6 another attempted catch up job by Zito. Who knows? Injury, other factors?

Monba 11-5 This talented colt is going to get beat by Pletcher's soft training. A shame. Though I'd be other than shocked if Monba runs away with the race. Happens in Pletcher's barn and I've yet to figure it.

Kentucky Bear 11-4 Can Reade Baker train? A rhetorical question.

Next, horses with shallow training:

Medjool 10-5 David Hoffman. Let's see? 10 work/races in 3.33 months, that's one every 13 days.

Miner's Claim 10-4 Mark Casse

Halo Najib 10-4 Romans.

last but not least:

Cool Coal Man 10-3

There's more to racing than workouts, and this is a talented field. Additionally, differences amoung these trainers seems subtle instead of large. Were we to look at other factors--distance of breezing, speed, spacing we'd identify more characterstics of the good compared to questionable training.

I'll look at this more closely tomorrow, but, so far--on the above training stats, could we expect Big Truck and Pyro to run away from this field?

Training:
Wed. 4/9: just dry enough to get a nice riderless work with Rod in the mud. He tried hard and got very tired, unlike the older horse he was running with. Ways to go for fitness, obviously. Art is off with his chest.