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Maybe he'll pull a 180 once his gate issues are behind him and show speed; he certainly recovered better than the other 2 horses that broke poorly. In that respect maybe it was a blessing he missed out on mixing it up up front.
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I have no opinion on this horse because I haven't reviewed the day yet, but it's kind of ironic.
Some horses with speed are equally comfortable sitting off horses and finishing strongly. It just usually makes more sense to use their speed to get good position. However, on some surfaces on some days or with some race setups, breaking slowly, settling, and finishing fast late winds up being better than using the horse's speed as you typically would or even worse rushing up (even if you'd rather get out of the gate well).
I thought a high profile example of that was Arrogate in the Dubai World Cup. As great as he was at that time, a REAL LOT of horses made very deep closes well out on the track that day to win or finish close. People were over the top on that trip because of the bad start and ground loss, but he probably wasn't particularly disadvantaged that day on that surface against Gun Runner who was close up and never really liked an off track to begin with.
