 |
“Da’ Tara is a longshot to get five furlongs,” says fellow Dispatcher Nick Tammaro as I watched the horses walking around in the minutes before the Belmont Stakes.
I didn’t need to ask him why he felt that way. It was obvious.
This horse was a mess. The dark bay son of Tiznow is far from imposing, a rather diminutive horse, made even less attractive by a slathering of white equine perspiration. As if you’d taken a paint brush dipped in some glossy Sherwin-Williams white paint, and flung your wrists in the direction of the eventual Belmont Stakes winner.
He hobbled around like a rocking-chair horse, tossed his head about, and jockey Alan Garcia didn’t seem to care. As a bettor, I always fear the jockey whip sweat scrape. You know what I mean. The horse you bet on is a lathered mess and his rider, noticing the unattractive white streaks, scrapes the sweat with his whip, then typically wipes the excretion from the whip from the bottom of their boot.
Garcia didn’t even do that.
Just about every element of visual handicapping I’ve ever done – looking to see who seemed to be taking the heat and the crowd in stride – told me that if I was standing there with a ticket on Da’ Tara, that I should go try to cancel it right then and there.
Of course, I didn’t have a ticket on Da’ Tara. A maiden winner over a sloppy sealed track at Gulfstream in early January did not instill confidence, nor the fact that he had just run his lifetime best Beyer Speed Figure in the lackluster Barbaro Stakes at Pimlico. In that effort, he got away with a opening quarter in :24.3 on the lead and couldn’t last the 8.5 furlongs, headed by Roman Emperor in the shadow of the wire. A bounce felt imminent, and no one would have talked me off that impression as I stood in section U of the third-floor grandstand at Belmont Park, between the eighth pole and sixteenth pole of Big Sandy minutes before the race.
Da’ Tara won the Belmont Stakes – and that will not be undone, nor should it. But for this handicapper, I’m so much more inclined to stick to playing races on the grass after a day of front-running, stamina-finding, merry-go-round results at Belmont. If you told me that on back-to-back days, two horses, one of whom appeared a nervous, sweaty wreck, would run nearly identical splits of :24, :48, 1:12 for the first six furlongs of twelve furlongs races and still stay, I’d have said you were crazy.
It is.
Contact Pat Cummings at pcummings@racingdispatch.com
5 Comments
Add this link to...
Tell a friend
Bury
I didn’t need to ask him why he felt that way. It was obvious.
This horse was a mess. The dark bay son of Tiznow is far from imposing, a rather diminutive horse, made even less attractive by a slathering of white equine perspiration. As if you’d taken a paint brush dipped in some glossy Sherwin-Williams white paint, and flung your wrists in the direction of the eventual Belmont Stakes winner.
He hobbled around like a rocking-chair horse, tossed his head about, and jockey Alan Garcia didn’t seem to care. As a bettor, I always fear the jockey whip sweat scrape. You know what I mean. The horse you bet on is a lathered mess and his rider, noticing the unattractive white streaks, scrapes the sweat with his whip, then typically wipes the excretion from the whip from the bottom of their boot.
Garcia didn’t even do that.
Just about every element of visual handicapping I’ve ever done – looking to see who seemed to be taking the heat and the crowd in stride – told me that if I was standing there with a ticket on Da’ Tara, that I should go try to cancel it right then and there.
Of course, I didn’t have a ticket on Da’ Tara. A maiden winner over a sloppy sealed track at Gulfstream in early January did not instill confidence, nor the fact that he had just run his lifetime best Beyer Speed Figure in the lackluster Barbaro Stakes at Pimlico. In that effort, he got away with a opening quarter in :24.3 on the lead and couldn’t last the 8.5 furlongs, headed by Roman Emperor in the shadow of the wire. A bounce felt imminent, and no one would have talked me off that impression as I stood in section U of the third-floor grandstand at Belmont Park, between the eighth pole and sixteenth pole of Big Sandy minutes before the race.
Da’ Tara won the Belmont Stakes – and that will not be undone, nor should it. But for this handicapper, I’m so much more inclined to stick to playing races on the grass after a day of front-running, stamina-finding, merry-go-round results at Belmont. If you told me that on back-to-back days, two horses, one of whom appeared a nervous, sweaty wreck, would run nearly identical splits of :24, :48, 1:12 for the first six furlongs of twelve furlongs races and still stay, I’d have said you were crazy.
It is.
Contact Pat Cummings at pcummings@racingdispatch.com
5 Comments
Add this link to...
Tell a friend
Bury
Comments
Pat,
I hope you and Nick T. haven't drunk the Kool-Aid of explaining every incomprehensible result by labeling it track bias. Here are some facts.
1) There were 5 wire winners from 9 dirt races. Three of them were favorites. A fourth, Megapixel, was 5 cents away from being favored in the finale. Da' Tara was the only thing resembling a non-favorite who wired. Practically every racing book on track bias says it really occurs only when favorites do not win.
2) If there was a true track bias, why did the heavily-bet Mobo and favored Hawkwood stop like they'd been shot in their races? How did closers occupy 5 of the top 7 positions in race 5, and stalkers the other 2?
3) The Klein Track Bias rating for Saturday was 225. It would have been 211 if you could have counted Benny the Bull's race in the equation. Since he was less than 60 cents to the dollar, that race was out. 211-225 is speed-favoring, bordering on speed biased, using New York conditions. When you factor in the short-priced horses winning, it is premature to call it track bias until these horses race back.
As for the physical appearance of Da'Tara, you really need to know how he normally looks on race day to make any definitive comment. Gasper Moschera trained a horse named Fabersham, who I loved because of his grit and winning attitude. The first time I saw the horse live at Saratoga, I canceled the bet I was going to make on him because in person he looked like how you describe Da'Tara. He was sweating, looked ratty and thin, and had his tongue hanging over the bit. And he went on to win decisively, costing me plenty. When I mentioned this to a downstate friend, the late Stewie Beef, who went to Aqueduct and Belmont all the time, he told me that was how Fabersham normally looked.
Once Big Brown turned out to be a no-show, the Belmont became a chaos race just as surely as any maiden claimer in February. And that is exactly why we got the result we did, not track bias.
A couple thoughts...
1. Agree wholeheartedly on the appearance in the Belmont versus the appearance normally. I don't know what he normally looks like, but the traditional sweaty nervous mess he appeared to be would have been disconcerting to his backers and made the non-normal Da; Tara observer squeamish about his chances.
2. Your definition of speed biased may be my definition of speed favoring. The two races that fell apart were the state-bred allowance (race 5) and the True North. Race 5 is relatively inexplainable in the grand scheme of things in that a 20-1 shot closed from midpack and a bomber who was absolutely FLYING, Prince Dubai, shot out of a cannon from WAY back to finish third.
As I said, Benny The Bull ran against what was clearly speed-favoring into a horse who notoriously backs up at the end, Man of Danger, against lesser company. Here, a legitimate G1 sprinter barely got up to win by a neck.
Our seats were great for watching horses trying to close from the back, and you could easily tell - it just wasn't really happening. Race after race, horses towards the back of the field were spinning their wheels - running hard, but hardly closing.
If that's the way it is, so be it. It might not be bias, but I do think the track aided Da' Tara to find more when the first mile splits went 23.4, 24.2, 24.3, 25
Unless you see a certain horse on a daily basis, gauging their appearance is rather futile. For example, when I play golf, I sweat like a pig in this Louisiana heat. But, does that mean I'll play any less effectively? No, it's just that I'm a sweater. My golf partner is not. It's all relative.
Don't get me wrong, not that this should have landed us on Da' Tara, but visual handicapping to me is over-rated unless you do it on a daily basis.
Come to think of it, visual handicapping is probably better on the positive end, versus the negative. Red Rocks is an example of both sides of the coin from the '06 BC and '07 Dubai whatever it's called.
Ironically, I just had two conversations regarding handicapping and the Belmont. I think we as handicappers need to identify certain scenarios and situations where randomness is going to play a larger factor.
A five horse field, with a legit favorite who is lone speed, randomness is unlikely. In a full field in the Triple Crown, going 12 furlongs, in the scorching heat, with a legitimate favorite who also has question marks, and a lone speed horse on paper, well, randomness is likely to play a larger role... more on this later!!
Nick,
Mobo and Hawkwood stopping had a lot more to do with those particular horses in my opinion. Mobo was looking to duplicate two questionably big figure wins at Delaware and also negotiating two furlongs more than he had before.
Hawkwood stopped on a dime once before and his only win came when he waltzed through a slow opening quarter.
Man of Danger hanging around until the final yards, Sixthirteen magically finding another gear on the rail and a horse like True Quality hanging around for a share went a long way towards the thought that this might not have been a "biased" track but one that was very kind to speed.