Does Fitness Matter?

To the Japs apparently so. Taking a page right out of Preston Burch, the Jap trainer Kazuo Fujizawa breezes Casino Drive every three days.

How far and how fast are those breezes? You have to paste it together since the training reports out of Belmont have been pitifully spotty.

If you count gallop ins and outs I'm taking it that CD breezes from 6f to 1 mile every three days and that its in :14s with 2f sub :12 accelerations thrown in here and there. I'm guessing there might be a couple of those 2f licks in :23 and change over a mile work and that this is (hopefully) sufficient for fracture resistance.

Please NOTE: doing :14s (compared to e.g. a 2 min. lick) crosses that threshhold into true speed, and doing :14s a mile or 6f every three days will most definitely create a significant amount of cardiovascular fitness. Throw in the accelerations and possibly you have a very formidable horse over 1.5 miles.

Unknown how long CD has been at this, but if you watch the video and have an eye for it, this looks like a fit horse. In any event consider all this compared to Big Brown who has done one breeze since the Derby.

Then there's the now famous walking, supposedly 45 min pre and post track work though I'd wager it's closer to 30 min most days and that the "power walking" is primarily for the camera. Nevertheless, that's a lot of walking under tack, but again is hardly without precedent. Ross Staaden's book, "Winning Trainers" notes that T.J. Smith (Australian leading trainer 33 years in a row) in the old days used to walk his horses pre-dawn for an hour on an asphalt parking lot attached to Randwick race course. "Why'd he do it" asks Staaden to T.J.'s vet Percy Sikes? T.J. felt his horses slept a lot because of all this exercise, and that the horse being down frequently was one factor in T.J.'s success. Humorously, when the riders unionized T.J. quit this practice.

And so, we have the question whether sending a fit horse up against the best striding horse ever will win the race. The question I asked: "How do you beat these guys (IEAH)?" next post.

Training:
Wed. 6/4/08: riderless for both: 4f warm up then 4 x4f in :15s with some :14s as our 2 yr. old Rod poops out last 1/2 mile. Art then did .8 mile trot under tack, and Rod did some ground work under tack.
Thurs. 6/5/08: both horses off.