From SI cover story this week:

https://www.si.com/horse-racing/2022/05/04/kentucky-derby-bob-baffert-medina-spirit-controversy-horses-daily-cover

The powerful chestnut colt might be the most unseasoned Derby runner ever, running just two career races and somewhat ominously landing on the Santa Anita "vet's list" after winning his debut in early March. That means veterinarians had a physical concern about Taiba, who is owned by the owner of Medina Spirit, Amr Zedan. Taiba was listed as "unsound," indicating a likely leg issue. According to Santa Anita blogger Jeff Siegel, who was there, jockey John Velazquez eased the horse up quickly after the race and walked him slowly back to the winner's circle. At the time, Baffert told Siegel, "Johnny thought he felt something funny behind, so he pulled him up. By the time he got back to the winner's circle, the colt was fine. I don't know if he was put on the vet's list, but it was nothing."

Once on the vet's list in California, Taiba had to wait seven days before recording any timed workout and 15 days before an official workout (which is different from any timed work, per the California Horse Racing Board's Mike Marten). Taiba also had to pass pre- and post-work vet examinations, meet a minimum time standard and submit to post-work sample testing.

Taiba returned to the work tab March 18 and recorded three official workouts before surprisingly entering the Santa Anita Derby off one career start, then more surprisingly winning it by passing Messier in the stretch and pulling away. That punched his ticket to Louisville, but Yakteen has worked him only once since that race, 19 days later and nine days before the Derby.

Baffert customarily works his horses hard and has them dead fit for big races. Yakteen has taken a different approach, putting a lightly raced and lightly conditioned colt into a 20-horse alley fight. It's a bold deviation. "I wanted to make sure I was bringing a horse to Kentucky with a full tank," he says. "It would do me no good to take a horse that I misread to Churchill and have him underperform because I over-trained him."

He did add an easy 3/8 work this week but no signs of unsoudness or dealing with
any known issues for what it\'s worth.

Sets up for Royal Charlotte who gets weight from several and ready to pop a new top, will need it to win.

Corrected, it was the Breeders Futurity. Further to the distance question, the ranking method they utilized had him at the top rung being inbred to Northern Dancer: 5S X 5S X 5D X 5D and sired by Tiznow. They were pleasantly surprised at his run off not expecting that precocious of a 2 year old.

Dale was on Steve\'s show today, the last half hour. Radio gold as stated and well worth a listen for a good chuckle. Someone should \"ghost\" write a book packed with all those gems, most everyone else is too PC/corporate in this era.
He explains the Ellis race and talks about the horse in full detail. He also noted that the last horse to break it\'s maiden at 2 on the dirt at Saratoga then go on to win the Derby was...... a female (Winning Colors). Big Brown did but on the turf without the fanfare of these 2 year old MSW packed with juicy pedigrees.
Most wealthy owners want to see their horses run there win or lose, it\'s the price of admission to the club.  His owners weren\'t in that group and they are plotting either the Hopeful for Grade 1 now or Dale\'s preference of the Kentucky Jockey Club as a prep into the Breeders Cup limited the number of starts for a horse that they think will get the classic distances.

It looks like only one was a Baffert trainee (Mor Spirit).
He has two that \"qualify\" this year, both appear to moving forward and at better odds due to their recent loses.  Very few names on that list stood out as horses I really expected to run well.

As a side note, Lucky Dan placed in the 3rd race at Riverside Park that day:

The Riverside Park Jockey Club operated from 1928 to 1937 and was popularly called “Pendergast Track” after its patron, big city boss Tom Pendergast (although Pendergast was not officially on its organization papers). The horse racing track was on the site of a former dog racing track.[7] The track operated under a questionable legal basis. The site was supplanted by an automobile race track, which closed in the 1990s.

There is certainly no honor among thieves!

He was definitely sent.  Ortiz was low on his back and pumping his arms from the get go, unfortunately Mendelsshon went with him. O\'Brien wants to keep sharpening his speed and liked the race as a set up for the Breeder\'s Cup. Me thinks it was a bad decision either by jock or trainer.  Jockey Irad Ortiz Jr., on Diversify, said: \"The track was fast and I had to go harder than usual because Mendelssohn was very quick out of there, and I needed to make the lead. I had to use a lot to make the lead. We just went a little fast.\"  A little is an understatement...

Diversify         22.72,:45.64,1:09.13,1:33.89
Imperial Hint     22.09,:44.37,1:08.27

Diversify\'s owner is on the conservative side saying in the past that the Breeder\'s Cup wasn\'t that high on his list preferring to win a race like the JCGC which they did last year and then skipped the BC.  I would be surprised if they go at this point.

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming..... several observations on the whole sorted lame affair.

Baffert is historically known for not arriving to the barn at the crack of dawn.
As the post race presser wrapped up a few journalists came up and asked what time they should show up on Sunday, 8 am was the response.  Most likely he gave instructions to not take the horse out until he arrived. He gets there just before and takes the horse out of his stall for the first time, gives him a few circuits inside the barn then steps outside to show him off.

Let me regress back to a similar Sunday morning in 1987, the setting - Monmouth Park backstretch barn number 1. I was a young groom of the first Crafty Prospector 2yr old run and trained by her breeder that had just broken her maiden at 4 to 1 first asking the day before.  Full of joy and cash (what is the statue of limitations on red boarding?) I was out on the town with our exercise rider until early morning.  Seeing that Sunday was normally a walk the shredrow day for our barn we hoped to arrive before the trainer showed up.  Lo and behold when we pulled up, they had the filly already out of the stall bandages off and jogging on the concrete to see how she came out of the race.  In our case fine and luckily the tardiness was overlooked.

So Baffert was more than embarrassed, caught unawares and scrambling for the right words for which there were none except scratches?

One trick of the trade that our exercise rider learned (a former one-eyed jocky from Belize I kid you not and a top-notch horseman) was to cut a circular section of a beer can and place it over a pad on a horses\' heel before applying the rundown bandages.  He used it on those prone to running down (burning heels) even through the standard gauze wrap or for off tracks which often burned through like a warm knife cutting butter. He just said never tell the trainer who wouldn\'t approve of such gypsy methods but it worked like a charm.  A suggested change of equipment for Justify:  \"beer cans on\", even a 5 time Derby winning trainer can improve his craft!

http://www.belizeanjourneys.com/features/horse_race/newsletter.html
check out the slideshow at the bottom

Besides the general idea of letting this large horse continue to grow into his frame, Elliot Walden in the post race presser revealed this nugget.

They had been wanting to get some horses to Baffert, once they sent Justify to him  in 2017 he resided at the Los Al training center and Walden was nervous that he wouldn\'t get the personal attention at the B stable.  He kept asking Baffert when the horse was moving to Santa Anita which didn\'t happen until very late.  Once he worked there the first time Baffert really knew what he had but it was too late to unwind that loss of time.  Not having trained a lot for Winstar you could see him lower on the pecking order than some of his lifelong big money clients, I mean you have to careful who you put in the B barn. How many trainers can \"hide\" a $500,000 Keeneland yearling....So he was deep on the bench so to speak but once the coach put him in it was Katy Bar the Door.  On another note, Baffert gave thanks to Rick Hammerle who wrote up Justify\'s NW1 allowance race just for him and got it fill and run with a short field at Baffert\'s request.  Any later and the timing wouldn\'t have been good to make either the Arkansas or Santa Anita Derbies. As the old saying goes, \"Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan.\" I think the next time Winstar sends him more horses they will get a closer look!

Take that 25 seconds with a grain of salt, Meydan must have a very short run up to the timer similar to Gulstream Park 1 mile races where the 2nd quarter is always faster than the 1st.  
For comparison, later that night Thunder Snow led in 25.73  (http://www.dubairacingclub.com/race/racing-info/trakus-chart). West Coast, who is not slow ran 25.88.  

Medelsshon does have natural speed and has been forwardly placed on all surfaces, he ran 23 and 47 on the Delmar turf no more than 1.5 lengths back. He will be in the first quarter of the field and looking to stay out of trouble. Only an inside draw will force a more aggressive approach. In Meydan, Moore hustled him out of gate to take advantage of the speed/rail bias. For more on that see this lengthy youtube video which details the extent of bias. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O48Tx5f4HpA courtesy of Phillip Walton Vosburgh

FWIT Andy Sterling thought it more a rail bias but nonetheless it did impact the performance and final figure.  If you deduct for said bias then he still has a co-top? Would this lessen the likely bounce forthcoming?  Or is a super effort still too hard to pair up or have only a slight regression no matter how it was earned?  He will have 5 weeks to recover but an international flight and quarantine will cut into that recovery time. He is a May 17 foal, so a young 3 yr old is up against it on several counts. Being fastest going, you have to decide what do with him before you move on to the rest.

Exactly, stable rider just like the old days.  If he told him to hold the horse he would, extremely loyal family style operation.  O\'Neill made a bad tactical call, won the battle but lost the war.  He is not worried about getting fired either and they all feel bad for the horse himself they hold in high regard. I thought he would let any speed go by and get outside, normally the case when you feel you are have the best horse, giving up ground loss for a more comfortable position. That is what worked in the Derby, the race was won by the first turn just as it was lost by the first turn Saturday.

80K wager just placed on Stradivari at Laurel confirmed, now at 3/5 odds
Nyqvist was 4/5 moved up to 5/2 and Exaggerator to 9/2.
Talk was that Stradivari would be over bet have already come true.
Most of the money is not in the pools yet so odds should settle back closer to where they were prior.

Early odds in per TVG, pool size must be small at this point:

Nyquist  7/5
Exaggerator 3/2

Likelihood of wet track and amount of speed in race must be influences.

From the other side of the pond whose author makes many salient points:
https://www.thoroughbredracing.com/articles/five-hot-takes-kentucky-derby

5. That joke isn't funny anymore

The kind of analytical slant that now is heavily featured on television in many sports is not everyone's cup of tea. Fair play. Nobody, however technically minded, should have a problem with this as a choice. It's a lifestyle choice for many to prefer 'feel' over measurement, instinct over studied appraisal.

However, the comments of trainer Dale Romans that "speed figures have become one of the biggest jokes in racing" is typical of the kind of rant made by racing's traditional reserve.

Speed figures are nothing more than one staple measure of performance. They are not a threat to a different view of the world. The race is to the swift, and figures merely convert running times over different distances and on different surfaces onto a familiar scale that should prevent a lot of subjective waffling and nonsense.

Horses often break track records largely because the track is superfast, rather than the horse. Speed figures are there to stop us making a kindergarten error in confusing the two.

Okay, I agree that figures that take ground-loss, weight and even pace into account lose this advantage, and often lead us to descend into an exercise in playing with numbers. But, there is an appetite for them commercially because they have value to the horseplayer.

Speed figures merely put race times in their proper context. That's all. They are not a panacea for all handicapping woes, but neither are they "a joke".

Why does this running battle have to be waged? If a horse has run slow, it doesn't make it a slow horse, only a slow performance. Speed figures don't pretend to capture everything about a racehorse. They contain inevitable measurement error; they vary between operators according to that operator's interpretation of the speed of the track; they are a knowingly one-dimensional abstraction of merit. Surely we can be grown-up about this.

You could teach school children to make speed figures without ever once straying from mainstream academic principles.

After one lesson, they would get it well enough to see the error of traditional thinking about time. After a few more lessons, they would start to learn about classical physics, biology, entropy, statistical inference, randomness, chaos, and many other things besides that are sparked by curiosity about the wonder of the equine athlete.

Speed figures offer a way into the sport for many people mathematically inclined, not privileged to own or train horses or who don't care to speak the code of racing's insiders or who trust all their received wisdom. They are for people who want to learn additional awe for great horses via computation, not via visuals, instinct and emotion, which certainly have merit but can be flawed.

They are definitely not "a joke", Mr Romans.

One last poke:

Nyquist cannot get the Preakness distance because Uncle Mo never won at that distance and furthermore it is not the exact distance that he just proved his naysayers wrong. On a breeding note, Uncle Mo (first crop) had a better chance to produce a Derby winner than leading sire Tapit (8 crops of racing age), both had multiple starters this year. Seems the pattern is if you are throwing a precocious offspring the chances diminish with each passing crop.  What this has to do with the Preakness I don\'t know but half the posts on here don\'t either!

In the past 20 years five sires (now 6 out of 21) saw runners from their first crop win the Derby: Unbridled with Grindstone in 1996, Maria\'s Mon with Monarchos   in 2001, Distorted Humor  , with Funny Cide in 2003, Street Cry with Street Sense   in 2007, and Birdstone   with Mine That Bird in 2009.

In the year after their first-crop Derby winner, the stud fees for those five horses more than doubled, going up, on average, 166%. In the year of their first-crop Derby winner, public auction yearling prices for those five stallions jumped, on average, 83% when compared with their yearling prices the previous year.

It is also the fourth time in the last decade that a sire has had an American classic winner in his first crop. Those sires are Street Cry, Medaglia d\' Oro, Curlin, and now Uncle Mo. They produced first crop winners in the Kentucky Derby--Street Sense and Nyquist; Belmont Stakes--Palace Malice; and Kentucky Oaks and Preakness--Rachel Alexandra.

Per jock:

\"The hard rain [before the race] made it 45 and change but it was really like 46 and change,\" said Mike Smith, Danzing Candy\'s jockey. \"The track was very, very, very quick.\"

http://www.latimes.com/sports/la-sp-preakness-story-lines-20160517-story.html