When Smith went right handed with 100 years to go this guy got the message. Finish this thing off. WOW!!!!
Much the best.
To me, very reminiscent of yesterday. The favorite got a relatively soft lead on the lead, uncontested. With the eventual winner having a somewhat rougher trip. (Beholder had a rougher trip than arrogate)
I was even more shocked today to see the favorite get best. And this one wasn\'t close. Watching chrome gallop up front while arrogate was in 4th or 5th, I would never have expected chrome to get best.
I don\'t know. Arrogate a freak for sure. Perhaps chrome a really really good horse, but not a great one. Beating up Dortmund doesn\'t look as good. Shared belief and arrogate both ran away from chrome.
Good race though.
Jim
Right. And if a handicapper picks 10 winners and the 11\'th loses then he\'s not a great handicapper.
I get it!
Stupid analogy Boscar.
Great and good aren\'t synonyms.
Lots of good horses, less very good and just a few great.
Not sure Chrome is great, not that it matters. The two best horses he faced, Arrogate and Shared Belief, both beat him pretty handily.
I said he \"might not be\".
He has won a lot of money and campaigned for multiple years, by game connections. (kudos to them).
Too early to call Arrogate great, but assuming today\'s win gets the figure I think it will, been awhile since a 3 year old ran two races as impressively back to back as Arrogate just did. (Yes, I know AP won the triple crown and was a helluva horse, but I think Arrogate just ran two races in a row faster than AP ever ran, and that is saying something)
Jimbo-- make the points without the insults.
The question will have to remain unanswered as CC is in the best form of his life and his racing life has come to an end. What might have been. Will be interesting to see what his stud fee will be.
Jerry,
Am on a road trip this weekend and missed a lot of TV banter.
It was my impression that Chrome was going to be pointed to the Pegasus.
I could very well have misunderstood.
Per comments above,
For us AARP handicappers, it is easy to cite the great ones of yesteryear. Dr. Fager, Damascus, Riva Ridge, Big Red, Forego, Slew, Affirmed, Alydar, The Bid, John Henry, All Along, Personal Ensign, and so on and so on.
The \"Greatness\" argument can be defined in many different ways. Competition, Performance Figs, etc. Fans debate these things in all sports all the time.
(I.E.) Greatest Baseball Team of All Time: 27 yankees, 51 Yankees, 60 Yankees, 1999 yankees or the 2016 CUBS!!! LOL.
Point is, the 2016 Breeders Cup gave us something rather rare. FOUR \'great\' horses ( imho) running against each other in 2 epic races. Songbird erased all doubts and Beholder (what can you say about her). Chrome and Arrogate...well ran away from that field and most others all year long. . No idea as to the TG# as I was only checking results most of the day on my phone. (Capital OTB not carried in my Clifton Park NY hotel room and they did not cover Santa Anita races live or on delay.(when I finally found a place to watch). 10 minutes from Saratoga on BC day and no TVG or any coverage. GEEZ! Definitely an Off the Board decision by my lovely wife to visit my daughter at College this weekend) LOL.
For this lifelong racing fan, it doesn\'t get better than the 2016 BC.
Bob
From what Juddmonte have said, it appears they have every intention of racing him at 4.
I guess that means he paired up his 122 from the Travers. Lol. Maybe the best thing for him and all of us fans is the season is over. Start thinking about next year\'s campaign and let the track bidding begin. Get your Whitney tickets now!!
Too bad for California Chrome. I mean seriously has a horse ever run a 119 Beyer and LOST....
Not since they have been published in DRF. Byk on Capital OTB show this morning mentioned asking Andy to go back in the archives to check but some think Sunday Silence / Easy Goer ran some co 120\'s in the same heat?
For technical reasons, you can\'t correlate Beyers from different generations. Same with Timeform.
Arrogate is also finishing fast against the clock at the end of both ten furlong races.
Travers last quarter in 23.84
Classic in 24.14
Horse is some kind of super freak and what else can you say about Baffert.
Huh?????
I\'m not that old but I can\'t recall a horse stretching out his stride like that at the end of a 10F race. You could see Chrome shortening up - he was at his limit while Arrogate was just warming up.
If this horse gets the right pace and the right track, I think Bid\'s record could be in jeopardy.
Skip Away may have gotten close enough to Formal Gold once or twice to achieve a 120.
Formal Gold ran three races in a row all above 124 in the second half of 1997. He lost the Whitney by a nose to Will\'s Way in one of those races.
Silver,
TGJB kept it simple. But basically the way Beyer calculates his figures now as compared to before about a decade ago (guessing on timeline here) is comparing apples to oranges.
Before Beyer bought into Jerry\'s methodology that involves basing the figures a bit more on the individual horses\' previous races as opposed to only making a variant and not wavering too often even when it clearly didn\'t fit resulted in very, very inaccurate Beyer figures very, very often. I think Beyer did believe in split variants even then but he didn\'t adjust his numbers to fit the previous races of horses in the race. As such, the numbers of those horses from a generation ago were probably made negligently by today\'s standards and Beyer would likely say the same. He didn\'t have the speed figure methodology as perfected as today even though there is a certain human element that it is never a \"perfect\" process per se. While I may have made some verbage errors here and mis-statements that could be cleaned up by Jerry, this is the basic idea he was trying to make.
My apologies for butchering the explanation as it is even more technical than that but thought I\'d give it a shot since no one else did.
The basic idea is that if you use pars (as Beyer and Ragozin did for a very long time and may still), you can\'t compare horses from different generations. If you start out by saying a winning 10 claimer will average 7 (or 80 or whatever), and use pars to bring horses to that average, at the end of the year (or decade) they will average 7. And your other claiming levels will do the same.
That means two things. The first is, you won\'t be able to tell if as a group race horses are getting better (or worse, theoretically), which makes your figures useless for generational comparisons. The second is, horses will receive huge figures if they are far superior to the others in THEIR generation.
Andy and I started to get into this at the 2004 DRF Expo, but didn\'t get to finish it. He was saying that Secretariat etc. were obviously better than the horses today, but he was basing that on dominance of their peers, without knowing it.
A Zillion racing surface changes over the years all across the country too! Baffert on Byk this AM talking about how much deeper than normal SA surface was for this cup?