2011 Breeders Cup Preview Part I: The Year in Racing to Date

Churchill Downs, home of the 2011 Breeders Cup

For all the kvetching about racing getting no attention and the sport having no stars, recent years have seen a lot of memorable horses and dominant story lines, many of which have crossed into the mainstream.  Let's take a look back at the last 8 years at what were racing's memes:

• 2003: Empire Maker gets a ton of hype and buildup for the Derby as the Super Horse, but it's Funny Cide that emerges and becomes the People's Horse.

• 2004: Smarty Jones' three year old campaign lands him on the cover of SI.  If you're a little more interested in racing, you know that this is the year Ghostzapper ran lights out and establsihed himself as one of the best horses in the last 25 years.

• 2005: Afleet Alex and Alex's Lemonade Stand.

• 2006: Barbaro, Barbaro, Barbaro....

• 2007: In hindsight, there was no dominant horse or story line this year.  This was a stellar crop of three year olds (Street Sense, Curlin, Hard Spun, Discreet Cat), and Lawyer Ron turned out to be a good older horse, but nobody really dominated the scene.  Rags to Riches' Belmont was a deal, but for about 2 days.

• 2008: Big Brown, Curlin, Zenyatta's emergence, and (sadly) Eight Belles.

• 2009: Rachel Alexandra and Zenyatta.

• 2010: Zenyatta.

So now 2011 rolls around and the dominant story line is....well, not much.  It's been a fairly benign year in racing, mainly because the horses have been so inconsistent.  To wit:

• Three different horses won the Triple Crown races, and as we noted in June, this was the second most unpredictable TC series in the last 50 years.

• No three year old has won more than one Grade 1 race all year.  Last year Lookin at Lucky was the champion 2 year old and won the Preakness and Haskell, so you knew he was at least a nice enough horse.  The best 3yo this year has been... I dunno, Stay Thirsty?

• The older male horses have been equally uninteresting.  The leader in the clubhouse for the Older Male Eclipse is Tizway based on winning the Met Mile and Whitney, which were on Memorial Day and the first week of August.  You're not going to build any momentum on two wins in 5 months.  Next in line is Flat Out, who's lost to Tizway and a filly.  California has produced absolutely no horses of interest.  The most consistent male performers  have been Acclamation and Cape Blanco, who (a) ran on the turf, and (b) are now injured.

• The three year old filly crop has been replete with decent horses who keep beating each other.  All of Plum Pretty, It's Tricky, Zazu and Royal Delta appear to be nice horses, but none is a standout.

• The two horses that would have had some cache from last year's Breeders Cup, Goldikova and Uncle Mo, have had years out of the limelight.  Goldikova's absence from US racing isn't surprising--she's a European filly after all, and she's had a decent year, just far removed from US racing.  It's Uncle Mo whose absence has been felt.  He won an ungraded stakes race in Florida in March, lost the Wood Memorial when stopping badly, and missed the Derby with an alleged illness.  He re-emerged in a sprint race on the Travers undercard, where he lost by a nostril to the not-bad Caleb's Posse, then throttled Jackson Bend and Jersey Town in the 1-mile Kelso two weeks ago.  This makes him interesting for the Breeders Cup, but it hasn't been the Year of Uncle Mo, to say the least.

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By far the most interesting horse this year has been the 4-year old filly Havre de Grace.  She emerged in the second half of last year, with narrow losses to division winner Blind Luck in the Delaware Oaks and Alabama, turned the tables on Blind Luck in the Cotillion, then ran a good third in the BC Distaff behind Unrivaled Belle and...Blind Luck.  She figured to be one of the top older females this year and hasn't disappointed.  She won a pair of graded stakes at Oaklawn--including the Grade 1 Apple Blossom--beating Blind Luck and the fast filly Switch in the process.  After winning a meaningless Delaware race, she took on Blind Luck once again in the Delaware Handicap.  The result was the best race of the season:

After posting a 106 Gowanus Speed Figure in the Delaware, Havre de Grace's connections looked at the unexciting older crop of horses and decided to take a chance by running her in the Woodward, the 9 furlong race for older horses at Saratoga Labor Day weekend, the same one Rachel Alexandra won in 2009.  Their logic was straightforward: if they weren't meeting Blind Luck, there was nothing to gain by beating other females, and the male horses weren't exactly formidable.  Sent off as the favorite, she rewarded her connections with a very strong win:

Knowing the Horse of the Year game isn't won in September, her connections wisely then sent her to the Beldame--1 1/8 miles for fillies and mares at Belmont--where she romped over pro tem 3yo filly division leader Royal Delta.  With Blind Luck out for the season with an injury, it looks like she'll go to the Breeders Cup Classic and take on the boys once again.  And in this race, she'll meet an interesting crop of horses: the aforementioned Uncle Mo, Stay Thirsty, Tizway and Flat Out, international star So You Think, and some intriguing prospects like To Honor and Serve.  If she wins the Classic, she'll be Horse of the Year in a landslide.

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So it this the year of Havre de Grace?  Maybe.  To date she's received no attention from the non-racing press because...well, we're not sure exactly why.  She's a large and beautiful horse who's neat to watch, she does not look outmatched by colts.  Her trainer is Larry Jones of Eight Belles fame, who's very good with the media and is always sporting cowboy attire.  Her owner is Rick Porter, who some would dub insufferable, but we see as refreshing, as his barn always has fast horses entered aggressively (e.g., Eight Belles in the Derby) that run well.  And she hasn't emerged out of nowhere, because everyone in racing knew that the players in the older ladies division this year were her and Blind Luck.

Maybe it's just fatigue from the recent run of great fillies.  As we noted last year, we've had an amazing stretch of exciting fillies.  Rachel Alexandra and Zenyatta were 1-2 in HOTY voting in 2009, Zenyatta won last year, and Goldikova has been omnipresent since 2008.  Havre de Grace, while good, has none of the flamboyance of these three horses.  She isn't a steamroller on the front end like Rachel Alexandra.  She isn't an explosive closer that's always exciting like Zenyatta.  And she doesn't have the amazing versatility of Goldikova.  She's just a strong, honest, fast filly.  Given that she's accomplishing things that these other three gals have accomplished so recently, maybe we're just taking her for granted.

What that gives us is another Breeders Cup Saturday that's laden with intrigue.  We'll get to some of the other storylines in the coming days, but the big one is what happens with Havre de Grace.  If she runs in the Classic and wins, she'll have quietly put together a fabulous year for a filly, one worthy of Horse of the Year, and one that should be remembered along with recent great fillies.  And if she loses...well, it's a veritable mess, because there are a lot of holes in all the other contenders for Horse of the Year and the Classic itself.

Does Super Filly = Super Mom?

Four months ago, we questioned the hype that accompanied Rachel Alexandra, stating "her reputation is beyond her accomplishments at the moment." Four races later, including 3 victories over male horses and having beaten every single dirt horse of significance in America, Rachel Alexandra has established herself as one of the greatest female horses in American history. We hear the word "great" thrown around a lot with horses that are merely very good. This isn't the case with RA. She's truly an all-time great.

What isn't true, though is that this guarantees that her offspring will be fantastic. There's a lot of talk in the Interwebs that when she and 2007/2008 Horse of the Year Curlin mate, they will produce the next Pegasus. Take, for example, Billy Finley:

The next stop will be a farm somewhere in Kentucky and a date with Curlin. Want to get really ahead of ourselves? The foal should debut sometime during the 2013 meet at Saratoga before winning either the Spinaway or Hopeful.

Putting aside the fact his date is wrong (if she retires after 2010, as his article suggests, her first foal wouldn't hit the track until 2014), it's just wrong to think that because she's great, her foals will be great. If anything, history has proven the exact opposite. Let's take a look at how well the offspring of arguably the greatest fillies of the past 30 years have fared. We've excluded horses that died before they could breed (Go For Wand, Ruffian) and those that retired too recently to have much of a sample size (Azeri, Ashado). To make this manageable, we're only focusing on North American horses.

All Along--13 foals to race, none did anything.

Bayakoa--4 foals, none of which did anything.

Dance Smartly--This Canadien filly foaled 2 winners of the Queen's Plate and another stakes winner in 9 foals.

Genuine Risk--only successfully carried 2 foals to term, neither raced.

Heavenly Prize--9 foals to race, 2 of which were solid: Good Reward won a couple of Grade 1's on the turf and over a million dollars, while Pure Prize won almost half a million bucks. Neither horse was ever considered for an Eclipse Award, but both had their moments.

Life's Magic--14 foals, the only one who did anything was Simon Pure, who was in the money in a couple of stakes races.

Open Mind--2 foals, one of which did well in Japan.

Paseana--1 foal, who never raced.

Personal Ensign--The best of this group by a mile. She foaled My Flag, a multiple G1 winner and the 1995 BC Juvenile Fillies winner (who foaled multiple Grade 1 winner Storm Flag Flying); Miner's Mark, who won the JC Gold Cup and Traditionally, the winner of the Oaklawn Handicap. Additionally, she foaled Our Emblem, a consistent stakes horse (who sired 2002 Derby winner War Emblem) and a couple of other useful horses in Proud and True and Salute. And still, she had 3-4 foals who did little or nothing.

Princess Rooney--7 foals, one of which won over $100,000.

Serena's Song--9 foals to race with varying success. Grand Reward and Harlington earned money, but were never world beaters. Serena's Tune and Sophisticat were oddly managed and may have been better than they appeared on track.

Sky Beauty--7 foals, none of which did anything of note.

Winning Colors--10 foals to race, only two of which won over $100,000, and both of them did it in Japan, where the purses dwarf ours, making the comparison difficult.

From this group of leading ladies, we've got 96 foals, which have produced a total of 7 Grade 1 winners, i.e., a 7.3% batting average on being a very good horse. (It's probably notable that 4 of the G1 winners came from Heavenly Prize and Personal Ensign, which are regally bred fillies from the Phipps family.) At best, therefore, Rachel Alexandra is a 50/50 shot to produce a single Grade 1 winner, and there's a pretty good chance that her offspring will be anonymous. Remember, Serena's Song did great against the boys too, and hasn't produced anything that's contended for a title. What's to make us think that Rachel Alexandra is any different?

Sleeper Horse of the Year Candidate?

We're about 60% of the way through the meaningful horse racing season, and there are exactly three candidates for Horse of the Year. Barring something less foreseeable than Mine That Bird's Derby win, there are no other potential HOTY candidates. Who's in the running?

1. Rachel Alexandra. The prohibitive favorite at this juncture, she's 7-for-7 this year, has won four straight G1's, and has a pair of wins over the boys in the Preakness and Haskell. She's legitimately 1-5 to win HOTY, and looks like she's the best filly since Personal Ensign.

2. Zenyatta. She's done nothing wrong with year with three wins this year, two G1's, and is still undefeated in her career. The problem is that she's done nothing exciting by staying on the West Coast and appears to be ducking Rachel Alexandra. She has no shot to win this award without shipping east to face RA, which seems unlikely. If she changes her mind, ships, and beats RA, then she's got a shot.

3. Gio Ponti. The horse that no casual fan has heard of, and the real sleeper member of this trio. He's the only horse besides RA this year to win 4 Grade 1's, with wins in 4 turf stakes from 1 mile to 1 3/8 miles. He won the Arlington Million in fantastic fashion on Saturday, and looks to be legitimately one of the best turf horses we've had in a while.

Still, a male turf horse has no real shot against RA for HOTY. Unless...he ventures a little outside of his comfort zone and goes for the Breeders Cup Classic. Ridiculous? Not at all--the race is being run on synthetics this year, and as we saw last year with Raven's Pass, turf horses often like synthetic surfaces. Heck, his breeding even indicates that he'd like non-dirt surfaces.

So let's say he caps off his year by winning another G1 turf race and then the Breeders Cup Classic. Is that enough to take down RA? Depends. If she falters in her last few starts, then maybe it's worthy of consideration. If she does something else ridiculous such as winning the Travers or the Woodward, however, she can retire, make the Hall of Fame and wrap up HOTY before Labor Day. Which frankly, would be amazing.

2009 Preakness Preview

Okay, a 50-1 shot (who was well over 100-1 in overseas books and exotics pools) won the Kentucky Derby. What do we make of this implausible upset?

After Mine That Bird's shocking victory in the Kentucky Derby, everyone has rushed to try to compare his victory to either Giacomo's win in 2005, Cannero II's victory in 1971, or Doneraile's 91-1 upset in 1913. Two of the three comparisons are utterly wrong. Doneraile may as well have run in the Middle Ages; the horse ran 62 times in his career. Giacomo, as previously noted, basically won by default on a day where Afleet Alex and Bellamy Road turned in subpar performances, and nobody else stepped up to the plate. While it wasn't surprising that Giacomo only won one other race after that, it also wasn't a shocker that he finished in the money in the Derby. Before the Derby, Giacomo had shown some ability in graded stakes races and head been keeping good company. We actually know people who bet Giacomo in trifectas and superfectas. By contrast, only person we know that cashed a ticket on Mine That Bird is Angelo's mother, who pulled out of a hat a $10 win ticket on the horse at a Derby party.

Cannonero II is an interesting comparison, because like MTB, he was dismissed based on losing races at crappier tracks (in Venezuela, for crying out loud), and shocked everyone by being better than thought on Derby Day. He carried this over to the Preakness, before flopping in the Belmont and having an undistinguished career afterward. The problem with the Cannonero II comparison is that there wasn't an obvious reason for the horse's win besides talent. Mine That Bird, by contrast, clearly took advantage of a muddy track and a superb ride from Calvin Borel. Had the track come up fast on Derby day, it's likely that Mine That Bird would have run well, but not won.

So what else did we learn from the Derby besides that Mine That Bird likes the slop and is a better horse than his PP's showed? Shockingly little. The muddy track clearly impacted other horses as well, as absolutely nobody showed any improvement in the race, and most horses regressed. It's very reminiscent of 2004, where a storm annihilated the track an hour before the race, and everyone besides Smarty Jones and Lion Heart ran like garbage as a result. Which makes handicapping the Preakness even harder, because we still have no real answers on our synthetic surface questions and are presented with some interesting new shooters this time.

So even though we flopped miserably on handicapping the Derby, let's turn the page and do a countdown for the Preakness. We note that we've picked the winner of the last two Preaknesses, meaning that the safe play is probably boxing the first four horses we eliminate. For the record, we're making these picks assuming the track is fast; if it rains, we'll update it the day of with some thoughts and changes.

Huh?

13. Flying Private. As we'll explore a little later, there's good reason to think the slop at Churchill Downs hid the true ability of at least one of the horses that ran in the Derby. This guy isn't him. To put it bluntly, he ran dead last in the Derby and was a longshot to begin with based on a career where he accomplished nothing. There's zero indication that he should improve by moving to Maryland. For all the hullabaloo over whether Rachel Alexandra would be excluded based on ringers being entered, people should be more focused on Lukas potentially ruining a perfectly decent horse in the Triple Crown, yet again.

The Wrong Newcomers

12. Tone it Down. This year's local hope for the scions of Maryland, he faded to third in the Federico Tesio stakes two weeks ago to finish behind the immortal Miner's Escape and Hehasnosay. His speed figures are slow enough that he's not competitive (then again, so were Mine That Bird's), but more problematically, he's outclassed and should get fried on the front end. Pass.

11. Luv Gov. If the name sounds familiar, it's because we briefly mentioned this guy last summer as one of two horses owned by racing doyenne Marylou Whitney that pays tribute to the erstwhile governor of New York. (Check out this piece, where Whitney's husband tries to admit that they don't hate Spitzer, and then commits a bigger party foul by admitting that they read the New York Post.) While he ran nicely breaking his maiden on the Derby undercard, there's good reason to think that was a function of the slop and no real reason to think he'll be competitive at this level.

10. Big Drama. A lot of people are giving this newcomer a big shot in the Preakness, but we're just not seeing it. He's been out once this year, where he crossed the finish line first in the Swale (at 7 furlongs, 2 1/2 shorter than the Preakness), but was DQ'd to second for bumping the runner up while tiring in the stretch. His previous successes were in Florida statebred races and at the Delta Jackpot, which is Louisiana's equivalent of the now-esteemed Sunland Derby. While Mine That Bird did teach us a lesson about scoffing at stakes at slots-fueled tracks, we still don't see much class in this horse. To top it off, he's an intractable front-runner and has pure sprint breeding (Montbrook out of a Notebook mare) that doesn't suggest he'll stay the distance against good horses. We like him as a toss-out, which is good, because he'll probably be around 8-1.

The Derby Repeaters

9. General Quarters. There appear to be two strategies for this horse: either send him to attend to the pace and have him try to waltz home after being near reasonable fractions, or have him make one run later, and watch him finish badly. Given that he probably can't survive a speed duel, and jockey Julian Leparoux is more known for patient rides (a la Pat Day, the Good Hands Man), it's more likely we'll see him at the rear of the field, and out of contention.

8. Friesan Fire. The beaten Derby favorite! While many will invoke Louis Quatorze, Point Given and Afleet Alex as examples of Derby underperformers that roubounded in the Preakness, we're against. We had an almost identical situation two years ago, where Circular Quay ran poorly in the Derby off a long layoff and then was rushed into the Preakness. How'd that fare? Poorly, he was well out of the money and looked like a short horse. Making FF's case worse, he's supposedly a slop monster, but did nothing in the soup at Churchill except get his beat up on his legs from contact with other horses while finishing next to last. As there's no indication that this horse is anything special away from Fairgrounds, we'll bet against until he proves us wrong, especially if he's 6-1 or so.

7. Musket Man. While we'd argue the slop changed the outcome for a lot of horses in the Derby, we're not so sure that's the case here, as this horse ran roughly what you'd expect him to run: a high 90's GSF while showing no punch in the stretch. It just so happened that because I Want Revenge scratched and nobody besides the winner ran a lick that this made him the show finisher. We're still unconvinced this guy wants any part of a route race, and while he'd be a fun horse to own, we think he's set here to regress and vacation until the late summer stakes races.

6. Mine That Bird. Yes, he's better than everyone thought. He's got some talent and his horrible rides in New Mexico clearly made him appear worse than he was. But it's impossible to dispute that he didn't get a perfect confluence of events on Derby day. A solid pace. A wet track. The scratch of I Want Revenge and Quality Road's withdrawal. A perfect ride by Borel. Luck when the rail was open pretty much the whole way around. Take away any of those things, and we're probably talking about a different winner of the Derby and he's this year's version of Sedgefield.

Is he going to get all of those breaks again? Clearly that's impossible, because Borel isn't riding him, and he instead gets salty veteran Mike Smith in the irons. While Smitty's a perfectly fine jockey and a Hall of Famer, we can't think of a single race where he was the difference between winning and losing. (And he's ridden Skip Away, Holy Bull and Zenyatta, for crying out loud.) Even worse, it's unlikely that we'll have a wet track again, and it's even less likely that he'll get a perfect rail-skimming trip . What's more likely is that his Preakness resembles Giacomo's: clunk up for a piece, but never threaten the winner.

5. Pioneerof the Nile. Minor and useless prediction: this horse, and not Mine That Bird, will be the second choice in the Preakness. He's a horrible idea at 5-2, as we still have zero proof that he can crack a 100 Gowanus Speed Figure, still hasn't proven he likes dirt, and is wheeling back off two weeks after having all his prior races strategically spread apart. It's unlikely he'll be at the back of the pack come the end of the race, but this is not the spot to jump on his bandwagon.

The Interesting Newcomers

4. Take the Points. Speedster from the Todd Pletcher barn with very obscure breeding (Even the Score out of a Fred Astaire mare?), this guy's an interesting read who may offer value underneath if he doesn't get fried on the front end. He possesses good tactical speed but isn't a need-the-lead horse (unlike, say, his stablemate Join in the Dance), and should be near the front. His last two dirt efforts were very good: a nice win in the mud, followed by a strong showing in an allowance race at Gulfstream. He followed that up with a pair of mediocre efforts on a synthetic surface, which Pletcher pretty clearly sent him to so to avoid Pletcher's other horses. Can he improve moving back to the dirt at 30-1? We say yes, and like him to round out superfectas.

3. Terrain. We've been waiting for this horse to get a dirt fast track for a while now, and we're finally going to get our wish. Too bad it's in the Preakness, where he might be a little outclassed. But our like for him is not dissimilar to our reasonsing for liking West Side Bernie in the Derby (yeah, that sucked, but shaddup): he hasn't had a fair shake to run well in a while. His Delta Jackpot race to close out 2008 was compromised by a moronic ride his jockey sucked him into a speed duel, making him fade. His Louisiana Derby and Blue Grass weren't awful, but they occurred, respectively, on slop and Polytrack, neither of which is probably his optimal surface. Finally, he's united with a competent rider, a fast track, and should get first run on the deep closers like Mine That Bird. Look for him to come flying late at a huge price.

2. Rachel Alexandra. Okay, we'll say it: Rachel Alexandra is this year's Big Brown. She's a very talented filly, but her reputation is beyond her accomplishments at the moment, given that she's won a whopping one Grade 1 race, her 20 1/4 length romp in the Oaks last out. And as pointed out by many (including Steve Crist), the field for the Oaks, like last year's Derby field, was atrocious. This makes it pretty tough to gauge if this girl is really a freak like everyone thinks or is simply another very good horse that got lucky that her competition stinks.

More to the point, she's being asked to do a lot here. Take on 12 other horses. Run back in two weeks time. Tend to a pace that should be somewhat brisk. Adjust to a new trainer (okay, this may not be a big factor). And for all this we're supposed to take 2-1 odds? Look, if she wins and she's the next Ruffian, Go For Wand, or even Surfside, we'll eat crow and admit it. But for now, she's a horrible play at short odds in the Preakness, and we're looking elsewhere for the win slot.

(As a total aside, Rick Reilly gets paid $3.5 million apparently to get the facts wrong. By no measure is Rachel Alexandra "the fastest racehorse in the world". Hell, she's not even the fastest filly in the world, that title would probably go to either Goldikova or Zenyatta. She's not "undefeated in four tries", she's 4-for-4 this year and is 7-for-10 life time. But hey, great job otherwise.)

The Pick

1. Papa Clem. We have no idea how much horses like Pioneerof the Nile were hurt by the slop. By contrast, we do know this guy was hurt by the slop. His Louisiana Derby was a definitively meh effort on a wet surface, which he followed up with a good win in the Arkansas Derby on a fast track (he improved by over 10 GSF points in between). Given that history, it wasn't really a surprise to see him run a meh 4th in the Derby in the mud, especially since he was slammed by Pioneerof the Nile in the stretch and may have finished 2nd with a slightly cleaner trip. It's not at all a stretch to think he'll return to his Arkansas Derby form, which would have everyone not named Mine That Bird and Rachel Alexandra playing catch up with him. Since we're against those two because of the lack of slop and the suspect nature of the filly's competition, he's the most logical pick, and should be a square price (8-1?).

Playing the Race

Once again, if you like anyone in this race, a win bet is a very good way to go, because everyone other than Rachel Alexandra should be an okay price, if not commensurate with their chances of winning. If you're looking for a 4-digit payday though, check out the races preceding the Preakness and look into Pick 3's an Pick 4's. Tossing Rachel Alexandra and Pioneerof the Nile will inflate the odds in the multi-race exotics tremendously, even if you catch a couple of favorites early on. And to make it formal, our official picks:

1. Papa Clem
2. Terrain
3. Take the Points
4. Rachel Alexandra

Good luck to all and enjoy the race!