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.