Posting Mood/Hollywood Futurity

[Chuckles_the_Clown2]

One last topic for the day. I\'m usually not inclined to share track bias \"insights\", but I\'ve come to discuss them here a bit for a number of reasons. This one I want to discuss beforehand because I\'m not certain, its more theory than certainty. I\'ve also taken a \"contrarian\" position on the B.C. Classic and I need to go all the way out on the limb with it so I\'m not taking cheap shots at our host.

My feeling is wide was bad at Lone Star. Very bad. The Breeders Cup Juvenile is the other race that sheds some light on that. The horses that finished 1-2 ran wide. That fact on its face doesn\'t bode well for my contention. But, I want to look at it more closely. I rated Afleet Alex as a major wager. I think he ran a HUGE race under the circumstances. He got in trouble at the start and raced wide the whole way. I think he ran as wide or wider than Wilco. Wilco was racing wide near the end of the race and didn\'t rally until he was able to get a couple paths off the rail in the stretch. In my opinion, that was a good path and that was a \"factor\" in his resurgence. I think Sun King was a little too close to the rail from a bias perspective, but he saved all the ground.

What does all that mean? Well Wilco earned a 2.3 TFig. I think it was a \"healthy\" 2.3. He\'s the Breeders Cup Juvenile winner, so he\'s going to receive some play in the Hollywood Futurity. He\'s got DeClans Moon and Proud Accolade to deal with. If he\'s on form and the track was as biased as I believe on Breeders Cup Day. I think he\'ll win. The threat of course is Moon on his home track. I need to evaluate his figures and that will have to wait til closer to race time.

CtC

I will be very interesing to see if Declan can duplicate his sprint figures as he stretches out. I think this distance should be well within his range. You could sort of think he should run faster because he won so easy last time and was not wound up 100% according to his trainer. We may get our first clue about how he will fair next year if he fails to duplicate those recent figures. The best case scenario is that he wins the race in what appears to be impressive fashion but the race comes up slower than expected. Then he might get the Eclipse Award and head into 2005 as a very overrated Derby contender for us to bet against.