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HANDICAPPING INSIGHTS MAY 23, 2008 by Dick Powell How good is BIG BROWN (Boundary)? The answer seems to be as good as he needs to be. Unlike in ski jumping, where the final score is a combination of distance jumped and style points, racing is just how did you run against the competition that showed up that day. Style points do not count but right now, Big Brown has both. I speculated last week how Big Brown would do if he was caught behind horses or forced to shorten stride. Well, the answer was, "quite nicely," making me wonder why I even asked in the first place. There have been other Preakness S. (G1) blowouts before, but this was ridiculous. Here's how easy Big Brown's Preakness win was: if you tuned in late and saw him on the turf course being walked around, you would be hard pressed to guess whether it was before or after the race. Not only did he win throttled down, he hardly broke a sweat. NBC's overhead shot of the run he put in from the quarter-pole to the eighth-pole was incredible. Yes, it was probably against one of the least talented fields ever assembled in Baltimore for the second jewel of the Triple Crown. But, he did it so effortlessly that it really shouldn't matter. So what does any of this have to do with the Dick Powell Diet or Rocky Marciano? In the Dick Powell Diet, rather than lose weight, it's easier to hang around people that are bigger than me. Suddenly, without any work, I start to look pretty svelte. It's all relative. Rocky Marciano retired as the undefeated heavyweight champion of the world. But he came along at a time in the 1950s when Joe Louis, Jersey Joe Walcott and Ezzard Charles were all past their peak. There weren't many young heavyweights on the way up, and Marciano retired in 1956 at the age of 32. Unlike most fighters that retire many times, Rocky stayed retired and remains the only undefeated heavyweight champion. Marciano has become a controversial figure for boxing historians. Some have him at the top; others have him near the bottom of the top 10. But, he was never beaten in the ring, where it counts, and it's not his fault that he came along at a time when there wasn't much competition. Big Brown is what he is -- the best three-year-old this year. How he compares to last year's stellar crop is irrelevant. If he wins the Triple Crown, how he compares with other Triple Crown winners might be good for late night discussion on the blogs but shouldn't affect how you play the Belmont S. (G1). With rain on Friday, the track was blazing fast on Saturday. By all quantifiable measurements, Big Brown's final time of 1:54.80 was a bit slow. Considering how fast the main track played on Saturday, it earned a modest BRIS Speed rating of 101, far below what he had been running. But, besides how easy he won, I thought that the track slowed down some for the Preakness. After watching all the previous main track races, it looked like the main track had been harrowed differently and it seemed deeper. The Preakness didn't go off until 6:17 p.m. (EDT), it clouded up and was very blustery for the race. Based upon the earlier running times, I thought the final time of the Preakness would be faster. But some or all of the above factors may have played a hand in Big Brown running a final time that indicates that his pattern of races from the Florida Derby (G1) through the Kentucky Derby (G1) could be going in the wrong direction. I know many are saying that his Preakness wasn't much faster than CASINO DRIVE's (Mineshaft) Peter Pan S. (G2) win. And, certainly, Rick Dutrow has become an even bigger lightning rod since winning the Derby. But it says here that Dutrow, a student of performance figure patterns, knows that there is no way that he could keep Big Brown at the peak level he showed in his prior two starts with only two weeks rest. He jogged Big Brown up to the Preakness, got the race he needed out of him (thanks, partially, to the company he had to face), and now goes on to the Belmont with a fresher horse than any of the 10 recent Derby/Preakness winners that came up short in their Triple Crown quest. Dutrow knew Big Brown was going to "bounce" in the Preakness, planned accordingly, and now has three weeks to get him back to peak form. Three races in five weeks is very demanding, but Big Brown's Preakness was so easy that it should serve as the perfect workout for his Triple Crown bid. Whether he is Rocky Marciano, Rocky Balboa or Rocky J. Squirrel doesn't matter. If he finishes first in the Belmont, he is only the second undefeated Triple Crown winner in history and that's all that counts. NBC and ESPN spent a lot of time on Saturday going over the events surrounding the fatal breakdown of Eight Belles after the finish of the Derby and both held panel discussions. The industry had a chance to respond and luckily, the PETA demonstration at the Preakness was not a factor in the running of the race and all the participants finished. Bullet, temporarily, dodged. However, HBO Real Sports has an expose of the horse slaughter issue that is shocking and far more damaging to racing than what happened to Eight Belles. HBO went to Mountaineer Park and tracked one of the horses that went from being an also-ran in a race to being auctioned off for meat consumption a week later. They graphically show what happens to horses that go to slaughter and watching it will haunt you. Horse slaughter is the killing of horses for human consumption. Unfortunately, HBO made it a horse racing issue as if the only horses being slaughtered were Thoroughbred racehorses. They totally ignored the thousands of horses of all breeds that meet this fate that have never set foot on a racetrack. After Eight Belles broke down, many defended our sport by stating that the horses are well-fed and well cared for. That may be true for many, but HBO has shown its viewers that some horses that can't cut it on the track wind up with an unspeakable ending to their lives. At no point in the piece done by Bernie Goldberg is racing allowed to defend itself or extol the efforts of Thoroughbred owner/breeders like Madeline and T. Boone Pickens, Roy and Gretchen Jackson, and Jeffrey Tucker to get Congress to ban horse slaughter as well as the interstate transportation of horses being shipped to slaughterhouses in Mexico and Canada. This was ambush TV at its worst and racing better respond powerfully because those graphic images of the horses being slaughtered will be there for a long time.
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