Tues. Misc.

A busy and distracting week behind and this blog is back. Many problems with the retired horses. Avoid that whole story for the purpose of talking about racing instead of OTB and the personal pets now perfecting their new pasture lifestyles.

Anybody including me have any doubt at all that Baffert's horse would run down the other one in Saturday's Rebel Stakes? My thought process watching the stretch run with Baffert's horse momentarily fading was that there was zero way in which that other horse would keep his stride to the wire because, although never looking at the PPs, I was absolutely positive that horse, whoever the trainer was, was unprepared for the distance, and that Baffert's horse undoubtedly was prepared for the distance. Sure as tootin' Baffert's horse maintain his stride and the other horse faded as predicted. Always great when ur thought process comes to pass, eh?

My other thought was, and there's Lukas horse finishing second. Oh how the mighty have fallen. What logical explanation is there that in the '80s and '90s Lukas was winning everything and now ur unable to find Lukas in a winner's circle with a search warrant. A detailed explanation for this is embedded somewhere in this blog. Suffice to say Lukas's former training methods, to which he has returned by the latest accounts, fail to work against a trainer community that has ratchet things up quite a bit since the 1990s/early 2000s. For those new--relate for certain that in those times of softer training TC horses almost never breezed once a week. I also enjoyed Lukas playing the Zenyatta copy cat whereas he used to be the copied.

And, there's the Pressey comment last post. Take note. It's something I observed from day one in racing. West Coast trainers train and East Coast trainers Coast with the Kiaren McGlaughlin Training--why do more when less will do. In those days it was the the West Coast was at least breezing 4f once a week ala Bobby Frankel in the 1980s and the East Coast was hardly ever breezing at all. Both East and West have increased their intensity with East still significantly backward in their methods. On that same note--observe that what shows (who knows what they're doing with him otherwise) Union Rags is skating on the edge on insignificant work to prevent injury by the definitions previously established on this blog. As with Barbaro, if this continues it's fairly safe to say that unfortunately UR likely will fail to make it through the TC. Again, this has to be qualified that I have zero idea as to what Matz is doing on the off days, and perhaps that Matz is still doing the 2m miles with 4f at the end thing, which would change my opinion. Stable plans coming here soon.