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Originally Posted by Vinnie
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Check out Rayya's work on the same tab with Abel Tasman, 6f in 1:12, fresh out of quarantine, and after a 20-30 hour flight.
https://www.bloodhorse.com/horse-rac...derby-and-oaks
Baffert usually works his horses fast, which this is not, and I cannot recall a single Baffert front running speed of the speed horse he has ever tried to teach rate behind horses as he is doing with Justify, esp out of the blue to a horse who has only raced 3 times in his life on the eve of the biggest race in his life.
Justify's 6f are getting slower, and his being tired carries no weight: Rayya just ran 1 3/16, twice in a row, carrying more weight than Justify ever has. I supposed now SA has lost 4 seconds, and Rayya gets some sort of hocus pocus to make her work slower and less impressive than his, when she just knocked the socks off of everyone watching. Justify dwarfs Rayya, his stride alone should have made his work faster.
He may win. He may make Secretariat look like a tin can. But he is running like a horse who is afraid of 6f. Two 1:09s in a row can do that to you, especially if given the 3 second conversion, he really ran two 1:06s.
The derby looks like it will be a merry-go-round race of basically equally fast horses, whose position going into the back stretch will be determinitive of their position in the home stretch, in which case who crosses the line first is the one furthest to the front, who hits the wall last. It seems unproductive to try to teach your horse to lose position in that scenario.
