Bongo

You can find the Bongo horses here:
http://www.bongoracing.com/
The website shows entries and results for about 31 horses puffing that they deal in $75,000+ types only, again reminding me of the joke of my old acquaintance trainer Robin Keller circa 1990 confronted in the Prairie Meadows kitchen by a fat short breathed owner in gold chains seeking expert advice on what he should do with his "$30,000 horse". Keller paused, long pause, and responded "sell him". I forgot the good fellow's reply, possibly total silence for a second or two and a few chuckles from surrounding tables.

Looking at all the Bongo horses they seem to lose value twice as fast as on of those spanking new loaded F-350s. Again, the disclaimer, we look at only what shows.

Weirdly, in this regard, if you look closely at Bongo they do, comparatively, a very decent job with their horses in terms of breezing/racing frequency. Of the websites I've looked at so far in terms of speed, distance, frequency, consistency, and good sense, the patterns that show impress a bit more than the others on the blog to date.

I looked at ten Bongo horses racing in order after 1/1/08 to see what they did for they year and how many of them are still around as follows:

Smokin Stogies 4 races for the year, last shows 7/5/08.

Mount Orient 8 races, last seen 10/9. Benefit of the doubt and say he's still going.

Debbie Ginzburg 2 races for the year, last shows 4/17.

Courtly Jazz 4 races for the year, last shows 5/13

Uffize 10 races for the year, still going.

Adhere 7 races for the year, last shows 8/24.

Bob Benoit 6 races for the year last shows 8/2.

Meet With Destiny 5 races for the year, still going but came back after a long layoff.

Manaman Mclir 2 races for the year last shows 4/19.

Starstruck Kristen 4 races for the year, last shows 6/3.

10 horses, 52 races for the year, 5.2 races per horse, 3 still going--the same 30% survival rate we're seeing on the other sites.

So, what does $75,000 with horses get your these days? With Bongo we need to consider that this active sales outfit probably looks to move horses at a profit. The 30% survival rate, thus, has possible inaccuracy as horses may have been sold instead of injured.

Some Bongo e.gs.:

Uffize raced 10 times for the year and is still going. I'll summarize the number of breeze/races per month from January to the present for Uffizi:

2
3
4
3
4
2
4
2
3
1
2

With Uffizi frequency does seem to correlate with performance, although there might have been an injury thrown in there in mid summer. U's best success rate is March to May when indeed they get him to the track most frequently. U's March to May performance results in the following finishes: 2,1,3,3. When they slack of with their work thereafter we get to 10/5/08 finishes of 6, 4, and 3. Possibly pure coincidence of course, but overall I'd say we can trust what were seeing here relating frequency to performance. Why do they suddenly reduce the horse's work? Unknown but also typical.

More Bongos next post.

Training for Saturday, to come.