On Aug. 4 at Saratoga,there were 3 6f dirt sprints, a NYBred 40k maiden claimer, and open 50k and 20k claimers, all for colts. The 2nd,3rd, and 4th place maiden claimers went 1:11 3/5. The winner of the open 50, 2 races later, also went 1:11 3/5 and the runner-up in the finale went 1:11 2/5. (That runner-up is entered Thursday with a Beyer of 86. The 4th place maiden was entered Monday and has received a Beyer of 65!). How do you work this problem out? I\'ve never seen maiden claimers come close to the times of the winner of an open 50k claimer, and here 4 of them were within hundredths of seconds of one.
That day was a perfect example of why the idea of using one variant for a whole day is ridiculous. Even when the track is listed as fast for all the dirt races.
First of all, we don\'t use pars, we make figures using the past figure histories of the horses. It doesn\'t matter what type of races they ran in.
On that day, the first 6f race was the second race. Following that race, the track was sealed because there was rain in the area, and there were showers during the third race. Before the next 6f race (5th) the track was broken open again (harrowed), and right after the race re-sealed. It was harrowed again before the final 6f race (9th).
The second of those races was run 1 1/2 hours after the first one, the final one 2 hours later, and a lot of things happened to the track during the intervals. There is no basis for an ASSUMPTION the track stayed the same speed. So I did them as completely separate events, at very different variants. I have the first one listed for review, when the horses have come back and run.
For more on this see \"Changing Track Speeds\" in the Archive section of this site.
Difficult to draw any conclusion from this set of 3 races since the first one, r2, was won by a Cannizzo, the second, r5, by Jacobsen (his entry finished 1-3, both run today), and the third by RR. Regardless of the condition of the dirt, there was \"magic\" in the air.
Magic pretty weak at SPA,Jacobson winning at 10%, Rudy 15%, Canizzo 26% at Spa from 11 starters
the magic is notoriously absent from the spa, attracts too much attention . bad for biz.
Miff I think you would find that 15% is a big improvement over past years at the Spa for RudyRod if I\'m not mistaken.
Bee,
Most claiming trainers are rather harmless at the Spa, for some time. The competition is much tougher and the same old downstate over raced cheaper level claimers do not fare very well.
Fast forward to this winter and most likely Jacobson and Rudy will dominate over the same Little Sisters Of The Poor maiden claiming NY bred slugs.
Mike