Ask Sam

Does O'Neill crash everything he trains or train successful athletes as Australian Marathoner Samantha (Sam) Hughes at right? Thought we'd Ask Sam. As it turns out, "Ask Sam" is (was) one of O'Neill's horses having for us some pertinent info.

Loosing half your horses over a 3 month period hardly seems a ringing endorsement of your training methods. But, that's exactly what happened to the Doug O'Neill horses that raced immediately after 8/1/08.

As the sample covers less than 10% of O'Neill's stable for 2008 the question arises whether taking horses racing on this one date would create a possibly aberrant result.

To answer this question I decided to take another albeit shorter look by extracting from the website a second sample of horses for the purpose of seeing how the fared in 2008.

I thought it would be interesting to take the O'Neill horses that were racing on 1/1/08 and thereafter and follow them through the year with the aim to see how many survived to be still racing. To put this into perspective, if O'Neill does indeed lose 50% of his horses every three months, do any of them survive for a whole year?

The glimpse of this follows. Please note that with this sample I declined to take a further look to see what O'Neill does as I've pretty well established that already. O'Neill breeze/races every 6-8 days (normally--Not with Mr. C you say, which is true, but Mr. C is an exception in this stable. Unknown why they choose to breeze that particular horse that sporadically.) and gives about 2 weeks off from fast work after races. His breeze spacing, times, distance tends to be spastic instead of consistent varying both from horse to horse and for the same horse.

So, unnecessary to look at works and get further evidence of what these horses do or did. We already know. Thus I took, as the sample, each horse that raced on 1/1/08 and 1/3/08 and looked only at race results. These are listed below.

Beside the name of the horse I have listed the last day the horse was raced, the number of races for the year and any first, second or third place finish. I have listed these horses in order from those that had the most 2008 races to the least. The aptly named "Ask Sam" you will see is at the bottom of the list. Ask Sam about these results. They are truly amazing.

Harlene raced 10 times with the last race being 11/9/08. Has a 1, a 2 and a 3rd place finish.
Still going, which, in view of what follows, says a lot for the horse.
Harmony Creator last raced 10/17 and has 9 races for the year.
Bazzom last raced 8/25, has 7 races with 1 win and 3 2nds. Pretty Good, comparitively speaking!
Macadamia last raced 5/9, has 4 races for the year and finished 2nd twice.
Stalemate last raced 2/29 and has 1 win in 3 races.
Moogie last raced 3/23 and raced twice.
Mahalo Lani last raced 3/31 and raced twice finishing 3rd.
Good Man Dan never made it past 1/3/08. 1 race finishing 4th.
Stella Mark, last raced 1/3, 1 race and finished 4th
ASK SAM our posterboy last raced on 1/1/08 and finished 6th.

Ask Sam what the heck happened here???

Let's summarize:
12 horses raced 40 times which is 3.33 races per horse.

But, only 3 horses had as many as 7 races and only 4 had as many as 4 races. 8 of the 12 had 2 races or less for the year.

This sample proves to be quite consistent with the prior sample in terms of racing results and how long the horses last. 4 months into racing for this group O'Neill had already lost half of them. On 11/13 it seems that only 2 out of 12 are still racing which is 17%, and per the prior sample most of them simply disappear to be never heard from again. I'd expect the same of the prior more recent sample but will revisit them in about 5 months.

Believe I'm finally ready to conclude on O'Neill. The post will be titled: Unable To Do This Kind Of Training (and survive).

Training: I've scheduled my training to what hopefully will be a start on 2/10/09 at Will Rogers Downs. We'll see how it goes. First Eureka trip scheduled for 12/16.
11/13: both horses do light tack work on water.
11/14: Most we could do with tack was what we did yesterday. With rain due Friday and Saturday (it started this evening), I wanted another conditioner, and so instead of tacking we ran the horses fast as they could go in mud riderless. Part of track after two days of drying was solid enough to get some spurts. Good but short w/o. Unknown how many shoes we lost.