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Marcus Vitali
Upon reading this thread, I looked into my Training Practices Research Database currently containing 6,870 winners by trainer to see if I could detect anything unusual about Marcus Vitali’s training practices leading up to his horses’ victories.
Here’s some data to ponder for winners which had at least one workout preceding the wins and had at least one race within 90 days prior to the win.
Out of the 6,870 winners, 4,092 (60%) had at least one workout prior to the win (and at least one prior race within 90 days.)
Out of the 4,092 winners, 530 (13%) had that last workout at 3F.
Out of the 530 winners, 5 trainers accounted for 10 or more of those winners, as shown below:
David Jacobson – 57 (10.7%)
Marcus Vitali – 31 (5.8%)
Gerald Bennett – 21 (4%)
Jason Servis – 20 (3.8%)
Steve Assmussen – 10 (2%)
Looking more closely at Marcus Vitali:
Out of 21 wins at GP for Vitali with at least one workout prior to the win, 76.2% of those workouts were at 3F.
Out of 904 total # winners at GP for all trainers with at least one workout prior to the win, 11% were at 3F.
Out of 17 wins at MTH for Vitali with at least one workout prior to the win, 70.6% of those workouts were at 3F.
Out of 370 total # winners at MTH for all trainers with at least one workout prior to the win, 17.8% were at 3F.
Granted that there has been a time-honored training tradition of giving a horse a 3F “blowout” workout prior to a race, that tradition now seem to apply only to certain kinds of horses, such as 1st-time starters and higher class horses.
Similar to most research, more questions are raised than answered as the research proceeds. My 1st one after observing this data was – are the training practices of these 5 “outliers” trainers simply superior to the other trainers in my research database, or are there other invisible factors in play compelling them to give the 3F workouts at a rate so much higher than their peers?
More research is needed with a larger sample. Since I am self-funding this research, I have limitations to how much personal $ and time I can commit to the project.
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