Animal Was An Animal

A no doubter Derby and winner heads and shoulders above the field. The last time a Derby winner galloped this strongly to the wire.?

Next post will analyze Animal Kingdom training. Can the horse be defeated? How? Does this possibly refer to Rule #1 as to performance for this Derby--if your horse is to beat Animal Kingdom, is it necessary to train a little harder than AK? A little differently than Ak, or, however we term it.

Some misc. Derby observations:

Shakelford visibly shortens stride at the 3/16 and yet only 3 thereafter are able to get in front of that horse, i.e. the field pretty much mostly all died by the 3/16th.

Mucho Macho Man at about the 1/8 gets caught behind somebody's butt, has to swerve to the outside to regain his stride and is gaining at the wire. Nice job by Ms. Ritvo although unsure that 2 mile gallops the day before the race is the ideal.

Perfect ride off a slow pace by a fairly obviously great horse results in KY Derby for prickly Barry Irwin and cohorts. Congrats to them! The more strong groups in the sport, the better!

Regards Graham Motion, mixed thoughts. Indeed, had I handicapped I would have seen the nice, logical series of speed work for AK starting 3/26 to the Derby in the crucial pre-race phase of training. Yet, this colt ranges near the bottom (see 2 posts ago) of training since 3/12 that puts into question his overall soundness and fracture resistance (FR) going foward. Thus, with AK we're right back to soft training being successful for the Derby. Given that much of this horse's training was packed right in before the Derby (although less so than the ridiculous 8Belles situation), I have some concerns going forward.

Will Ritvo continue to train her horse for the Preakness or completely back off as so many soft trainers do? Ditto Nehro and Shackelford. What will Zito do with his horse?

Zito--guess it's back to the drawing boards as to those 2 mile gallops instead of breezing.

Nehro-- The handling of this horse is puzzling in terms of the game performance that resulted. How does a horse look that muscular on doing one slow 4f work in the 3 weeks to the Derby, and have this much pizazz. Steroids come to mind, or possible steroid substitutes. That's other than to impugn anyone, but this very nice performance makes less sense on paper than any other than I am seeing.

Pants On Fire: bled badly apparently. "we've been working on his immune system." This brings to mind--exactly how have they been doing that, and what degree of knowledge does this display? Anything but actual training for this trainer which was identified on this blog a couple of years back.

ArchArchArch: Both Arch horses out. A shame? What happened? The superb NBC camera shot of the horse's legs coming out of the gate, looked to me AAA collapsed on a front leg with the very first stride, which would have been before any bump with another horse. Was the horse put into the race injured? Bad step? We'll never know, but brings to the fore once again, when will the sport require scientific pre-race diagnosis for TV races.

Training:
Fri. 5/6: riderless trot with a little gallop + 3 times trot-walk up and down the hill under tack. Still getting dangerous horse back under control.
Sat. 5/7: Riderless paddock play with some full speed bursts + walk-trot three times up and down the hill in dangerous wind conditions.
Sun. 5/8: Riderless: in our paddock lazy Rod for now is history and instead Rodney races with and catches the other horse followed by a display. I'll have to get this on video as the scenes are hilarious as to how much this horse enjoys heading the other horse. At any rate, for the first time we're getting very willing full speed stuff from Rodney--last night several spurts and than a 2f romp. Tack work: 3 times up and down the hill trot-gallop. Nob reports the horse seems back under control.