belmont busted card

[Thomas Roulston]

Originally Posted by Tom

Can't even get many MTO horse anymore.


The solution is obvious - find tracks that have full fields.
3-5 pays the same at Pen as it does at Belmont.

No one needs suffer bad race cards these days.

This lame "3% to be divided equally among the remaining finishers" business isn't helping: In a 12-horse field, that's 3/7ths of 1% each to 6th through 12th, which in the cheapest races doesn't even pay the losing jockey mount fee. The shares for worse than 5th need to be increased at the expense of 2nd, 3rd and 4th. After all, they just cut the win purse from 60% to 55%, didn't they? In the Breeders' Cup, the shares for 2nd, 3rd and 4th are 17%, 9% and 5% (with 55% to 1st, 3% to 5th, and 1% each to 6th, 7th and 8th. This adds up to 92%; the remaining 8% is taken up with nominator's awards, etc.).

So why run your horse when you're going to be barely able to pay the jockey after the horse runs a minus 18 BSF if such a thing existed?

Guess OP is not aware of these ramifications.

[Tom]

I think his point was they are carding too many turf races.

[jay68802]

Originally Posted by Tom

I think his point was they are carding too many races.

Slight change, but the same point.

[Thomas Roulston]

Of course they were "saving" the turf as much as possible during the week for all the big stakes races on the turf yesterday - and there needs to be "truth in labeling" when it comes to the reported condition of the turf course: Even a Grade 1 turf stakes run at 1 1/2 miles that went in 2:30 and change is not indicative of a "soft" course. I remember when the 1986 running of the Sword Dancer at Belmont was run in 2:37 - and when the 1979 Washington DC International went in even slower than that!

If I didn't know better, I would say that they are reporting the turf course to be softer than it actually is to somehow make themselves look better for taking most of the races off the turf.