Breeders Cup Preview Part I: The Forgotten Horse?

We're three weeks out from the Breeders Cup, which means it's time to start taking stock in the quality of the fields and getting some general ideas about the potential runners. Let's start the process by looking at a horse that may get overlooked in the big race, the Classic.

So far the Classic has taken a beating in the horse racing media, and they haven't even drawn the field yet. Sea of Stars, who was hailed as the best European horse since Mill Reef, retired after the Arc despite being perfectly healthy. The best horse in America, Rachel Alexandra, has called it a year, having beaten every three year old of note and all the east coast dirt horses that are any good. The next best storyline, the undefeated filly Zenyatta, may or may not decide to take on the boys in the Classic, and even if she does, she'll be overbet based on her record.

Turning to the probable favorites in the Classic beyond Zenyatta and it stays a little dicey. In the wake of two Euros making up last year's Classic exacta, the favorites on everyone's tongue are Aidan O'Brien's pair of accomplished milers, Rip van Winkle and Mastercraftsman. While clearly they can win, they're going to be 2-1 and 5-1 respectively, and offer no paramutuel appeal. Summer Bird, winner of the Belmont, Travers and Jockey Club Gold Cup, is a nice horse, but hasn't won anything outside of New York and has trained like garbage over synthetic tracks. American turf sensation Gio Ponti should be competitive with his usual effort, but his previous efforts on synthetics are unimpressive. California mainstays like Colonel John, Tiago and Richard's Kid do not exactly get the pulse racing. And the top East Coast older horses like Macho Again and Bullsbay look to be too slow.

However, still lurking out there is a colt that once made headlines and has since disappeared from the public's eye....


...this year's Kentucky Derby winner, Mine That Bird.

We know, we're the same guys that ranked him 20th of 20 in the Kentucky Derby, where all he did was rally from DAF'ing last to win by the largest margin since Assault. What's he been doing since then, for those of us who haven't been paying attention?

Preakness: Mine That Bird loses jockey Calvin Borel to Rachel Alexandra and picks up Mike Smith as his new rider. Perhaps as a result of the bad karma that came with Smith (his ex-girlfriend, Chantal Sutherland, was MTB's regular rider in Canada), Mine That Bird runs a huge race, but doesn't get a great trip and has to settle for second behind Rachel Alexandra. Arguably, it's more impressive than his Derby win.

Belmont Stakes: Calvin Borel has one of the odder weeks for a jockey. Even though he's based out of Kentucky and is not particularly familiar with the Belmont surface, Borel takes the entire week of the Belmont off and doesn't ride a single race at the track until the Stakes. Bad idea. He fails to appreciate how quirky Belmont's enormous turns are and misses a pronounced rail bias, makes a premature move in the turn with MTB, who flattens out to run third to Summer Bird and Dunkirk. It's unclear if he would have won with a better ride but he certainly would have had a shot if Borel knew how to ride at Belmont.

West Virginia Derby: Eschewing the big early August races (the Jim Dandy and Haskell), the connections of MTB send him to bucolic Chester, West Virginia to run in the West Virginia Derby for a seemingly easier paycheck. Wrong. Sent off at 9-10 odds, he gets the quick pace he wanted, but Mike Smith, back in the irons, sends him after the leaders way too early, and he has nothing left for the stretch run as he settles for third place. This prompts the connections to decide to take off the rest of August and September, and have one prep for the Breeders Cup:

Goodwood: With Borel back in the saddle, MTB sets in at dead last about 12 lengths off the lead, and runs 6th. Oddly, this was his best race since the Preakness. He wasn't asked to move until 2 furlongs out, and did respond, albeit not with rocket speed. He closed nicely into a moderate pace and looked like a horse that needed the race to "tighten" up for a big spot. (As noted by Steve Crist, Zenyatta, who ran that same day, would have lost to him.)

So where does this put him for the Breeders Cup Classic? Well, there's still no guarantee he likes a synthetic track; he ran dead last in the Breeders Cup Juvenile last year, and Borel's comments after the Goodwood weren't that inspiring. What is true, though, is that we can expect a fair pace in the Classic this year and the extra furlong will be to his benefit. We're not sure he can win. But you're getting a horse that likes the distance, likes the race shape, and may be peaking at 15-1 or possibly higher. Is he the answer we're looking for? He just may be.

2008 Kentucky Derby Preview, Part I: The Synthetic Track Quandary

Let's say it was a week before the Derby, and the esteemed connections of a well-bred and successful steed in Europe announced they were coming over. To date, all the horse's races were on the grass, and he had a good amount of success: wins in half his starts, in the money finishes in the rest. However, he had never left the British Isles, never run on dirt (despite being bred for it), and none of his serious competitors were coming over for the race. What kind of odds would you get on this horse in a year where the competition was so-so at best? Probably somewhere between 10-1 and 20-1, and he'd be regarded as an intriguing oddity at best.

Sound far-fetched and irrelevant? Hardly. Ladies and gentlemen, let me formally introduce you to the world of racing on synthetic surfaces and the probable second choice in the Derby, Colonel John.

Mostly seen prior to 2004 at training tracks and in Europe, synthetic surfaces are replacements for dirt tracks where instead of using conventional dirt/sand combinations as the racing surface, the dirt is replaced by polymers and other odd chemical compounds that create a faux-dirt material to run on. These tracks, which have several forms and names (Polytrack, Cushion Track, Tapeta Track) have some clear advantages over dirt for tracks. They don't hold water like dirt tracks, meaning you always have a "fast" surface and never a mud soup. They don't freeze, which is key for tracks with winter racing. And allegedly (though not definitely), they're easier on horses joints, meaning that it's less likely that there will be breakdowns on the track and that horses will start more frequently. (Or so tracks were told--the data to date has been fairly inconclusive.)

The movement towards synthetic surfaces began about 3-4 years ago, when a few minor tracks decided to adopt it, and were followed by Keeneland, who runs an elite boutique meet every April and October, both in the interest of horse safety. Then, in the wake of the injury to America's Horse, Barbaro, in 2006 California took the amazingly over-aggressive step of mandating that all tracks convert their dirt surfaces to synthetics within a year. Their rationale was simple: it's dirt but safer! Horses will live longer! What was wrong with that?

Here's the catch: it's not remotely the same as dirt. Time after time, race after race, we've seen horses that do well dirt flop on synthetics, and vice versa. Instead, a goofy trend has emerged: horses that do well on grass have proven to do well on synthetics. Additionally, synthetic tracks have turned American breeding on its head: whereas dirt tracks generally favor early speed and thus breeders will breed with an eye towards speed from the gate, front runners flop on synthetics, as the tracks are too tiring in nature. This became so apparent in California that stalwart Bob Baffert took all of his young horses out of Del Mar last summer and shipped them to Saratoga, which has a conventional dirt track.

We had our first look at racing in a synthetic world last year, as the 2007 Blue Grass, Keeneland's Derby prep, was run on Polytrack. The result was a bizarrely run race where the horses did nothing for the first 2/3 of the race, and sprinted to the finish line with four horses finishing in a blanket finish. One was Street Sense, the Derby winner 3 weeks later. The other 3 horses, Zanjero, Teufelsberg and Dominican, could only be found in the Derby if you brought a telescope. Essentially, the race was a total toss-out and a paid workout for the quartet, and you had to handicap the Derby by basically ignoring the last race.

Fast forward a year later, and we've got synthetic tracks wreaking further havoc with the Road to the Kentucky Derby. Firstly, we had another Blue Grass Stakes last Saturday, which was won by Monba over Cowboy Cal, and where the favorites, Pyro, Visionaire, Cool Coal Man and Big Truck did next to nothing. This creates the quandary of figuring out how to evaluate those that ran well (especially Cowboy Cal, whose other wins came on turf), and what to do with the losers, as it would buck history to run 10th in your race before the Derby then win the damn thing.

Second and more problematically, we've got horses that have run only over synthetic surfaces to date, the most notable being Colonel John, whose Santa Anita Derby win was very impressive, but once again, not on a dirt surface. Colonel John's record to date is pretty impressive, and his breeding is a pure thumbs-up on getting the Derby distance. But all he's proven to date is that he's a monster on fake dirt. What the hell is he going to do on real dirt?

I refuse to go the route of Cranky Plagiarist Andy Beyer and call it impossible or unfair to handicap the Derby. But the omnipresence of these synthetic surfaces is adding a new wrinkle that's making the Derby puzzle even more challenging and a lot less fun in the process. (The flip side, of course, is that everyone is more confused, meaning if you're right, you'll make more money as a result.) It remains to be seen if there are any benefits of synthetic surfaces, but we've definitely found a downside: racing now has a 3rd surface, much like tennis, which is difficult to equate to anything else, and makes evaluating developing horses even trickier.

Coming up in the next few weeks: another look at what it takes to win the Derby, and then our annual countdown from worst to first.