What an intriguing and fascinating handicapping race. You essentially have three match races in play. The
vs
, then the
vs
and finally the
vs the
. Merit is scratched leaving the field with four solid horses and four hopelessly overmatched donkeys.
Will Speak Easy and Victory Avenue move forward off of their career debuts while stretching out? That was an amazing time they ran, earning a 103 and 100 Brisnet. What makes them even more impressive is that the 4th and 6th place horses ran 1-2 last Saturday in a 1 1/8 race that went in a very good 151 flat. Both improved off that race and if these two improve off their debut they could be hard to beat. Victory Avenue is out of Arrogate and will like the two turns and Speak Easy has Pletcher. Shocked that Victory Avenue went off the favorite in an 11 horse field, someone knew he was going to run big.
Dornoch and Locked clearly have the experience and class on their side and it isn't close. The big question mark is will they run back to their best races? The trainer of Dornoch doesn't have him at the top of his game and said "he will be a lot stronger next race." What is also concerning is that the past seven Remsen's have produced zero next out winners and six of them were 2-1 or less. So it isn't a key race. Will Pletcher have Locked fully cranked? He didn't with Fierceness and it is also troublesome that he was first going to run in the Sam F Davis, possibly indicating he isn't going to fire his best race with that being only a 20 pointer. Dornoch lost both races he didn't get the lead and he isn't getting it today as Speak Easy will from the rail.
So are the two pairs going to get split. Is it going to be the
first and second and
third and fourth or vice versa. I can see what is coming as it seems to happen 99 out of a 100 races. One of these four is going to run a subpar race and finish 5th and one of the donkeys is going to straggle up to round out the super. It never fails. The problem is the other four are just awful, I dislike the
the most, hard to see him crashing the super, so it would be one of the other three. So which one of these four would be most likely to run out of the super. My guess is it will be Dornoch then Victory Avenue. I think Speak Easy and Locked are the two keys for the win and trifecta. Great race!
