The O'Neill 23 Since 10/22

In bad times a lot of stuff get's exposed. Money dries up and people get chewsey. It hardly helps to have gadflies poking around on your website.

And so, we get back to the Doug O'Neil trainees followed by this blog. There were 23 of them I believe, maybe 7-8% of the total stable for the year. A random sample of horses actually racing that I picked up off the website in the order they appeared as entered in a race from August 1 on. I excluded most of the two year olds and ignored unraced horses.

I last looked at the stats for these as of 10/22 here:

http://ratherrapid.blogspot.com/2008/10/more-doug-oneil-stats.html

As of 10/22 it looked as if 12 of 23 horses were still actively racing, i.e. more than half of those racing 8/1 had disappeared, i.e. in a period of 2.66 months O'Neil lost 1/2 of his racing animals.
Many reasons for this perhaps including injury, and certainly that a horse drops out for a time, even in prime racing season as this, may mean a minor injury instead of a career ender.

But, it is now 22 days (if you want to count entries to 11/13) after 10/22. Almost another full month has passed for us to look again at those 23 horses and see if any of them have reappeared in either works or races.

The short answer is that more have disappeared instead of reappeared.

The big success story is "A Lil Dumani", a hard knocker type who breezed 1:00.2 on 10/22 and 1:01.2 on 10/29 on 11/5 won a $39,000 allowance purse. You'll see below some frantic and sudden working of horses in tighter time patterns than before. Did they learn something since 8/1? Horse works consistently, wins. Hmmm....

The only other appearance of the 23 original 8/1 horses between 10/22 and 11/13 are:
11/3 Doggie Bear breezes 5f in 1.03.2
11/10 Doggie Bear goes 1:01.6
10/27 Doggie Bear goes 49.6
11/9 Lightening Diablo 49.4
11/9 Richer Gear goes.49
11/9 Azul Leon goes .48.6
11/1 Atticus Jack gets an unusual (for O'Neil) 46.4
10/29 A Lil Dumani shows a 5f in 101.2
10/26 Mr. Chairman, the most talented of my group of 23 goes 48.6
11/2 Mr. Chairman breezes 4f in .50
11/13 Mr. Chairman will race.
11/1 If Not For You goes 49.2
11/8 If Not for You goes 47.4
11/13 If Not For You will race
10/23 Socerers Spell raced


Summarize this( gruesome) exercise--of the 23 horses racing right after 8/1 only 9 had a breeze/race in the 22 days between 10/22 and 11/13 (might we have another worker or two the next two days?). For the 23 in this same 22 day period there were a total of 16 breeze/races. To magnify this a bit more, in a 3 week period the original 23 (were they still around) would have averaged about .75 of 1 work. "Mr. O'Neil, a rhetorical question. Are you still collecting training fees?" Unnecessary to answer. Just wondering.

Am I interpreting this right? The stats seem so godawful it's almost beyond belief. You can check it yourself right here:

http://www.dougoneillracing.com/trainers/oneill/index.cfm?enter=true

(I've mispelled his O'Neill's name omg.)

Tomorrow I'll summarize how many of the original 8/1 sample are still around on 11/13 and what this presumably indicates about this sort of training.

Training:
Mon. 11/10 Off
Tues. 11/11 Off. Reluctantly. Too wet to do anything productive. Puts our working fast instead of doing slow tack work on Sunday to good use.