Evidence Gathering Continues

Thanks to the commenter for the update on "Rexxy". Officer Sheila T. Rex is now at Fingerlakes and recently finished 2nd in a $7500.00 claimer. This is after my prediction that the horse probably was hurt in October with my prediction based what I saw on paper. I'll stick with my prediction since I'm most generally correct. How, you say? When you've been in athletics for 50 years you get a feel. Nothing special. It's just experience. But, let's hope for the new owners of Rexxy that in this case I'm wrong and Rexxy will go on to be a great horse for them at Finger Lakes. Best of luck!

As to Linda Rice and her training maybe a word more should be said. In the multi layered world of thoroughbred racing getting to the heart of accurate trainer evaluations are as difficult as anything else these days. Depends on what you're looking at, focusing on, and what's available comparatively.

Whatever you want to say here in the negative, there's also Russian Prospector racing 19 times for the year of which I'm fairly blown away. I took a closer look at the website. There's more there than bare stats. They all look good in the winners circle, but this horse is harldy in bad condition:
Less condition than you'll see with the next trainer I look at, Joan Scott. But this is other than a fat out of shape looking horse as the training might suggest. It's unknown (to me) what Rice does on off days, so you do have to reserve judgment just a bit on the trainer's overall program when all you have available is breeze/race stats.

Nevertheless, the inquiry here was other than to announce judgment on Linda Rice and her training. The idea was to find further evidence as to injury prevention, fracture resistance and the place of "frequency" of the breeze/race schedule. Think the blog has looked enough at the 8-9 day stuff to observe definitively, if you want to preserve your horse and keep 'em running you might want to look for a trainer that does speed work more often than every 8 days. Put another way: my opinion is that the horse needs to "average" more than 8 days for race/speed work for fracture resistance. Just an opinion at this point. I'll be looking at a lot more in support as the posts go on.

Next up two more stables whose stats are available. Joan Scott is interesting as a small sample size. Bongo Racing Stable announces partnerships in $75,000+ horseflesh. Hmmm.. I have an open mind as to what we'll find. Should be interesting.

Training:
Tues. 12/2: For both horses 1 mile trot under tack and a riderless continuous 1.5 miles in :15s in the mud.
Wed: 12/3: We move from the refrig to the freezer. All hope of a 40 degree December is just about gone. We do a test run at 30 degrees and are pleasantly surprised by Mr. Nob who says he thinks he'll be ok up to at least 10 degrees colder. Each horse does a mile of tack work with Rod mostly trotting with Nob letting him canter when he takes off on his own. Nob is letting this youngster dictate how he goes at this point. We're trying to teach him to like his job. Art trotted 1/2 mile and galloped smoothly and strongly the last 4f. I'm itching to get this horse to the track, but have to find time to fix several transport problems. With the track threatening to freeze we opted for riderless speed work for both. After a warm up and as fast as we could drive them with mud caked in their shoes it went 2f + 2f +2f + 4f. Probably about 95% speed with 60 seconds rest between. Nice work. Conditioning and toughness continues to improve.
Thurs. 12/4: After 2 hard w/os in a row we're off.