June, 2023 | Horse Racing Free Tips

Letter to the Editor: Fred Pope

There are a lot of opinions about the Triple Crown. Most of them center on the Preakness and the spacing of the three races. In my opinion, the Preakness is the victim of the Kentucky Derby's success, or as T.D. Thornton said so well in his article June 12:

“Underscoring how the Derby itself is devolving into a be-all/end-all, one-shot endeavor at the expense of the Triple Crown race that follows it, for the first time in 75 years, Mage was the only horse out of the Derby to enter the Preakness.”

The Preakness is a very popular event in Baltimore, it just isn't popular on national television because it hasn't been a good, competitive, highest-level race. Here's why that needs to change and how it can be improved for next year.

The 20-horse field for the Kentucky Derby offers bettors and fans Roman chariot race excitement. The horses get banged-up cut-up, and many put on the shelf for a while. Any extra betting handle coming from the cavalry charge of 20 horses to the first turn is not worth the risk to riders, horses and the sport, especially right now. Many in the industry hold their breath for two minutes.

For safety reasons, Churchill Downs (CD) needs to limit the Derby to a maximum 14 starters, like the Breeders' Cup. If they do that, good things will happen. The immediate result is CD is seen as making a positive safety move, but the magic for the Preakness, is that potentially six horses move to the second Classic with fresh horses and perhaps a full field for bettors and fans. NBC gets to promote a much better product and the Triple Crown improves.

CD may not like it, but the rest of the industry should. If CD does not make this change on its own, then there are two strategies to make it happen. First, the TOBA Graded Stakes Committee rules the maximum starters in a Grade 1 race is 14, same as the Breeders' Cup, which is a very common sense move. Second, HISA rules the same for safety reasons.

This idea is one way the industry can help the Preakness, the Triple Crown and the sport without controversy. But it's an incremental strategy that does not get to the core reason we have the Triple Crown.

Around the Thoroughbred world, breeders and owners each year seek to “prove the breed” through a series of 3-year-old Classic races for colts and fillies. All the other racing countries start in a common sense way with a shorter race first, usually at one mile, then move to 1 1/2 miles, then the final leg is somewhere longer. Not us. We start at 1 1/4 miles, then backslide to 1 3/16, then jump to 1 1/2 miles. It doesn't make sense, thus it doesn't work in an increasingly competitive sports world.

1/ST Racing, owners of the Preakness S., should do something in their own best interest to improve the Triple Crown. They should move the shorter distance Preakness to become the first Classic, perhaps two to three weeks prior to the Kentucky Derby, which is locked into the first Saturday in May. They do not need Churchill Downs permission.

1/ST Racing also owns two of the major Classic prep races, the Florida Derby and the Santa Anita Derby, both at 1 1/8 miles, which they can adjust dates and leverage toward the Preakness. What about all the other Classic prep races? They will need to adjust, which they have done from time to time. Remember, the objective is three Classic races to “prove the breed.”

With the shorter Preakness moved out of the way, the Derby horses would then have five weeks to rest up and prepare for the Belmont, which is what many trainers are doing now by skipping the Preakness. This extra time for all horses will make the Belmont a much better competition.

Moving the date of the Preakness would require the Maryland Racing Commission, City of Baltimore and 1/ST Racing to continue to collaborate on how to make Maryland racing a more successful venture with a future. To that end, the uncertainty of Pimlico and Laurel should lead to some bold thinking about how Baltimore can have a true racing success story. It's going to cost a lot of money to find any facility solution, even a bad one, why not go big on a proven racing model?

Baltimore Harbor has been the focus of major urban renewal to bring tourism downtown. It's been a struggle to find a dynamic focal point. There is great opportunity to bring Baltimore harbor a Hong Kong-style, urban race track. A sports and residential complex on the harbor, right downtown. It can be a multi-purpose facility without training stalls, where horses are shipped in on race days/nights from the training centers at Laurel and Fair Hill. Happy Valley is a multi-purpose sports complex on less than 100 acres in Hong Kong. This could be the most stunning racing facility in America, a true tourism draw for Baltimore.

It's a lot easier to address the minor problems of three races in the Triple Crown than it is to tackle the structural problems of the sport in America. TDN does a good job of allowing readers to offer ideas, maybe some of them will click.

The post Letter to the Editor: Fred Pope appeared first on TDN | Thoroughbred Daily News | Horse Racing News, Results and Video | Thoroughbred Breeding and Auctions.

Source of original post

The X-Ray Files: Tom McCrocklin

The TDN sat down with 2-year-old consignor Tom McCrocklin for this first offering in a new series presented in cooperation with the Consignors and Breeders Association (CBA). Through conversations with buyers and sellers, the series looks to contribute to the discussion on radiograph findings and their impact on racetrack success.

Tom McCrocklin, who was represented this spring by graduates in both the GI Kentucky Derby and the GI Kentucky Oaks, as well as by a pair of million-dollar juveniles in the sales ring, admitted his approach to vet work varies greatly whether he is shopping for a racehorse prospect or for a potential pinhook prospect.

“It's a very clear distinction when I buy a racehorse for myself or I buy a prospective pinhook horse,” the Ocala horseman said. “With the racehorses, I have a pretty good feel of what I can and cannot live with anymore. I feel like I've got my brain wrapped around what young horses can live with and move on with and be racehorses. And then I have the other category of pinhook horses where I know I will have to make buyers and buyers' vets on the other end happy. Then it doesn't matter what I think and what I feel like I know. It matters what they think and what they want.”

McCrocklin said veterinarian scrutiny of the horses in his 2-year-old consignments has only become more stringent in recent years.

“The diagnostics done on the sales grounds pre-purchase are off the charts,” he said. “I will give you a perfect example. The genie is out of the bottle now with ultra-sounding and ultra-sounding so many structures. These vets are all on a kick now where they want to ultrasound eight suspensory branches and four tendons and four proximal suspensories, which is a lot of soft tissue structure. The long and the short of it is this, in this age group, 2-year-olds in training, under pressure, breezing, very few are going to have pristine ultrasounds. They are almost all going to have some commentary; all ranges of everything from swelling to fiber disruption to actual tears. And they are learning as they go–just like me as a consignor–that we are going to get to where we can't sell many horses if the vets are going to expect perfection.”

McCrocklin purchased Kingsbarns (Uncle Mo) for $250,000 at the 2021 Fasig-Tipton Saratoga sale and sold the future GII Louisiana Derby winner and Kentucky Derby runner for $800,000 at the 2022 Fasig-Tipton Gulfstream sale. And he is co-owner of GIII Gazelle S. winner and Kentucky Oaks runner Promiseher America (American Pharoah). He said the proof of the vet report lies in the performance of horses like those on the racetrack.

“I compare the ultrasounds to their race records,” McCrocklin said. “I personally had a filly in the Oaks this year and I personally sold a horse that ran in the Derby this year and they both had soft tissue pathology at the 2-year-olds in training sale. They were both given 30-60 days after the sale and they both wound up being fine. A lot of very good, sound racehorses have significant radiographic and ultrasound pathology. They have it at the 2-year-old sale and they have it throughout their racing careers and a lot of them are very sound horses.”

He continued, “I had this conversation with Bob Baffert. 'I tell you what, you pick the 10 soundest horses in your barn–not the 10 best, but the 10 horses that you perceive to be the soundest ones. And you go through those 10 horses and you X-ray everything and you ultrasound everything and do everything these guys are doing at the 2-year-old sales and it will blow your mind what those horses have on radiographs and ultrasounds. You will not believe what you find. And the first thing you are going to say to me is the same thing I am going to say to you at my consignment. I don't know what to tell you, I've been training this horse for six months and he's never had a bad day and he's never had a gram of bute, he's never taken a bad step, he's never worn a bandage. And here you come with all of your machines and when you are done, I want to start crying.'”

Once McCrocklin buys a yearling in the fall, he will spend the rest of the year and early spring working with the youngster. That experience gives him a unique perspective on both the horse's potential and his limitations.

“So many of these horses on all ends are being bought by agents,” he said. “These guys are really bright and they are good horse buyers. I am in no way criticizing them for the decisions they make, but one distinction between us is that I am in my horse laboratory every day in my barn. I put my hands on horses and I am training horses and I am putting young horses under significant pressure to buy them in September or October and make a 2-year-old in training sale in March. They show up in September, October and August and they are on the buying end. And they come back in March, April, June and they are on the buying end again. What gets lost along the way is everything that happens on a daily basis in the six to eight months in between. And there is a significant amount of knowledge and education that comes with that process.”

Asked for specific examples of issues with yearlings that will knock them out of his pinhooking portfolio, but not necessarily his racing stable, McCrocklin said, “Subcondylar cysts in cannon bones–basically a hole in the cannon bone that you are never going to be able to sell as a 2-year-old–subcondylar cysts in a stifle, which would basically be a femur. I can live with those horses because I've trained so many of them that they are fine. But you take that horse to a 2-year-old sale and you are dead, you're absolutely dead. So I can't buy them anymore.”

McCrocklin's biggest vexation, he said, was the variance of opinions on throats.

“When we're looking in a horse's throat with a scope, everyone has a different opinion,” McCrocklin said. “Some people like this, some people like that. On these real popular horses, you can have 10 to 20 scopes and I can have 10 guys come in and say, perfect, perfect, perfect and then the 11th vet comes in, a really reputable vet, and says this horse flunks miserably. It is not black and white, it's far from it.

“But here's what I can tell you, again, as a horse trainer, not as a buyer, not as a seller, I have a lot of horses that scope fine and they can't breathe and I have horses that scope like shit and they breeze great, never made a noise, they get their air, they don't make noise when they are breezing. Again it's very mysterious because we keep those vet books at our consignment and it says Grade I, everybody loves it, and I'm thinking I've been training this horse for eight months, this horse can't breathe. The only way to identify those horses that scope great at the barn, but can't breathe is what we call a dynamic scope where we put it on them and we actually view what's happening in their throat while they gallop and or breeze. And we see a lot of crazy things happen in these throats that are good at rest and the horse can't tolerate training. And then we have horses that can't fully abduct, they can't open their arytenoids all the way to clear their airway, but they've never made a noise and they don't have exercise intolerance. And they breeze great.”

McCrocklin's advice to shoppers is to find a vet who knows what's a deal-breaker and what might not hinder a horse's performance on the track.

“The big-picture message is that there are definitely not parallel lines between racing performance and vet work,” he said. “There is a lot of gray in there. What I tell people is get yourself a very experienced–not just a good vet–but an experienced vet that has a body of work and says, 'Look, I've seen a lot of these horses and they can live with this,' and he also has a body of work and he says, 'Look, I've had a lot of these and none of them make it.'”

The post The X-Ray Files: Tom McCrocklin appeared first on TDN | Thoroughbred Daily News | Horse Racing News, Results and Video | Thoroughbred Breeding and Auctions.

Source of original post

Your Questions About Racetrack Surfaces, Answered

Ahead of this week's Track Superintendent Field Day at Horseshoe Indianapolis, we asked our Patreon subscribers what they want to know about track maintenance. We brought your questions to Michael DePew, soil science consultant who led off the presentations Monday with an overview of how particle size and chemical properties impact track maintenance.

Here's what we learned:

–Do track superintendents monitor race days for track bias and adjust maintenance to make the surface play “fair”?

Probably not in the way you're thinking of. DePew said track maintenance crews will keep an eye on lane bias. For example, in Quarter Horse races, wherein the field mostly remains spread across the width of the racetrack, they will be watching to see if there's a lane that's deeper or dryer than the others.

When it comes to monitoring for early speed bias versus closers, DePew said that's beyond his purview.

–What does harrowing accomplish on a dirt track?

It's creating a cushion — the fluffy part that sits on the top of a track surface. When a horse's hoof hits the cushion, it compacts under the weight of the horse and softens the impact of the horse's leg to the ground. This cushion needs to be compactable in order to take that impact, but it also needs to be supportive enough when compacted to give the horse something to push off from when they go to take the next step.

The amount of moisture in a surface can impact this, too. DePew said that an ideally-composed dirt surface can handle a wide range of moisture amounts. Dirt surfaces that are less ideal in their mixing will have a more narrow range of moisture (from water trucks or from rainfall) that they can tolerate before they develop problems with cushion or slide.

-Which do track superintendents prefer for a dirt surface – irrigation or natural rainfall?

Perhaps surprisingly, DePew said he'd rather rely on his water trucks because he can control the amount, timing and volume of the water going onto the surface. The water quality of rainfall is definitely better for the track than what's coming from a lake or from ground water, but Mother Nature doesn't apply it evenly. For one thing, DePew said the larger tracks he's been to may be subject to cloudbursts where one part of the track gets rain and another doesn't.

For another, rainfall rates can be highly variable. Multiple, light rain events in a day soak in better than rainfall that's punctuated by heavier and lighter periods, as this changes the way the moisture moves through or over the top.

Support our journalism

If you appreciate our work, you can support us by subscribing to our Patreon stream. Learn more.

–What about turf surfaces?

DePew said turf irrigation systems aren't always perfectly even; maintenance crews have to be aware of where there may be dry spots where irrigation doesn't reach. In this situation, areas that remain dry most of the time react differently to water when they do finally get it. They tend to have heavy rain run off the top quickly, rather than soaking through, compared to regularly-irrigated areas.

Turf tracks, predictably, often need more water than dirt tracks because of the demand of the root systems underneath. DePew recalled a day earlier this summer when the dirt track at Horseshoe Indianapolis got enough sudden rain that the top portion of it looked muddy, although the base underneath was stable. The turf track actually needed more moisture after that brief rainy period though so DePew was faced with the prospect of running the irrigation system after the day's races even though it had been stormy earlier.

–What's the difference between “wet fast” and “sloppy” dirt tracks?

A lot of it is in the eye of the beholder. DePew leaves that designation to the racetrack for official purposes, but said that a very firm pad just under the harrow depth will make the track faster even when the cushion is wet. In fact, some tracks play faster when wet than dry because the water mixes with the cushion and makes it “splat” when the hoof hits, leaving the hoof to reach the pad more easily. Arguably, he said, that harder, firmer surface could be higher impact to the horse.

The post Your Questions About Racetrack Surfaces, Answered appeared first on Horse Racing News | Paulick Report.

Source of original post

‘We’re Looking Forward To It’: Hong Kong’s Champion Sprinter Wellington Headed To Royal Ascot

Richard Gibson has declared “it's all systems go” for Wellington to embark on a Royal Ascot tilt next week after Hong Kong's reigning Champion Sprinter cruised through a 1000m (five furlong) turf trial (breeze) at Sha Tin on Tuesday morning (June 13).

Preparing for the G1 Queen Elizabeth II Jubilee Stakes (1200m) on 24 June, Wellington finished half a length behind Beauty Charge in third place while clocking 57.94s under Alexis Badel, who kept the four-time Group 1 winner under restraint throughout the hit-out.

The performance delighted Gibson, who hopes Wellington can become Hong Kong's first Royal Ascot winner since Danny Shum-trained Little Bridge won the G1 King's Stand Stakes (1006m) in 2012. David Oughton-trained Cape Of Good Hope was Hong Kong's first victor at the Royal meeting with success in the G1 Golden Jubilee Stakes (1200m) at York in 2005.

“There's no greater judge than Alexis to base his (Wellington's) form and condition on and we're really satisfied with the trial,” Gibson said.

Explaining the understated nature of the trial, Gibson said: “It's hot and we've got to travel in a few days. He did everything perfectly today. He's on the plane on Saturday and we're looking forward to it. It was a good boost to see him work so well this morning.”

Gibson will return to Royal Ascot hoping Wellington can go one better than his former stable star Gold-Fun, who ran second in 2016 when beaten a neck by Twilight Son in the G1 Diamond Jubilee Stakes (1200m).

Acclaimed as Hong Kong's Champion Sprinter for the past two seasons, Wellington added another Group 1 title to his imposing portfolio of achievements with victory last December in the 2022 G1 LONGINES Hong Kong Sprint (1200m) under Ryan Moore, who reunites with the All Too Hard gelding at Royal Ascot next week.

Since winning the LONGINES Hong Kong Sprint, Wellington has posted four successive placings – including three at G1 level – behind the world's top-rated sprinter Lucky Sweynesse to underscore his consistency and quality.

Gibson's focus turns to Happy Valley on Wednesday night (14 June) when One For All chases a fourth consecutive win at Happy Valley in the second section of the Class 4 Wong Nai Chung Gap Handicap (1200m) under Luke Ferraris from barrier eight.

“There's no doubt about it, he's got his chance again on Wednesday. We would have preferred an apprentice on board, but Luke's won with him and he likes that slightly wider draw, so I'm sure he'll be there in the reckoning,” Gibson said.

“He's always shown a lot of class, he just had a slow start. He'll be winning more races next season.”

To carry 135lb tomorrow night, One For All has struck a rich vein of form at the city circuit, stringing together a trio of 1200m wins to rise from 42 in the handicap to 60.

Wednesday's (14 June) nine-race fixture kicks with the Class 5 Mount Nicholson Handicap (1650m) at 6.45pm.

The post ‘We’re Looking Forward To It’: Hong Kong’s Champion Sprinter Wellington Headed To Royal Ascot appeared first on Horse Racing News | Paulick Report.

Source of original post