Thoughts On Oxbow

A bit long toed possibly though vid may be taken just before final shoeing.  Ridiculous neck contraption.  Lukas explanation?  Expect to see more of these now.  Could be that the horse is near uncontrollable without it.   Awesome Again, again, and out of a Cee's Tizzy (Relaunch) mare.  Physically unimposing. Got one looking just like him in my back yard.

The good news: one can still win the Preakness in :12.37 sec/f.  How could a major three year old race with this years highly talented crop possibly be run that slowly, and without any challenge to the leader.  Fairly obviously a track so deep the big hoofed horses were exhausting themselves paddling through it. I'm all in favor of a deeper track to lighten the concussive load.  There is, however, a point of seriously diminishing returns in terms of safety and where navigation becomes compromised.

This being noted, Lukas and company, unlike Orb and company perceived the pronounced bias of the outer track.  Given Lukas's background he likely also fully understood that Golden Cents would fail to challenge likely for two reasons:  1. they exhausted the horse with :13s ever day, and 2. :13s is the wrong conditioning for trying to go 12s, particularly on a deep track.  Different stride, different effort.  Golden Cents was going to fade.  One could see that in the post parade.

And so, the smaller hoofed Oxbow was skipping over the outer surface while the inner horses were paddling with Rosie skillfully pinning Orb to the rails with Orb's rider asleep at the switch.

The most likely explanation imo was the nice development that Oxbow had through his many races. I'd doubted the horse was sufficiently talented to take this field overlooking the stupidity of the Orb connects, Orbs lack of speed, and the track.

In this field, if not Orb, then who? And so, with opposition out to lunch we get a strong gate to wire performance from a horse that finally was prepped to go that way.  Watch Oxbow's races and his development in those races.  They push the horse a little more each race--the perfect e.g. of the snow ball rolling down the hill.  It's impressive what Lukas did with this horse

Training:
#17 is galloping. #148 seven days away. We're calling tracks! A barn at Celestial Acres just below.