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Originally Posted by PaceAdvantage
What amazed me most about Scott Lake winning #5,000 was the graphic they put up on TVG...Jack Van Berg is #2 on the list of wins all-time, behind Dale Baird. Interesting in that Jack Van Berg was the Dale Baird of now defunct Ak-Sar-Ben (or was Dale Baird the Jack Van Berg of Mountaineer)? You be the judge... 
Anyway, I was amazed because poor Jack basically fell off the face of the Earth once the 80s were over...and yet he is still #2.... |
I don't know about "fell off the face of the earth." Though he certainly doesn't start as many horses. He's still quite active in Southern California, averaging around 200 starts/year.
One thing about Dale holding the record, many of those horses were personally owned and trained by him. To boot, he earned that record nearly exclusively with cheap claimers.
Not too cheapen Steve Asmussen's achievements, but he essentially is a paper trainer in many cases. He has strings of horses all over the country (and Canada), running under many different assistants, at many different tracks. It's a lot easier to break records when you have over 1000 starts a year, but are they really his starts or his assistants?
