A collective no show: huge gap between 3rd and 4th in GP MCL

Talk about doing double takes: the gap between 3rd-place finisher Paige's Image and 4th-place Run Wilko Run in a $12,500 3-year-old maiden claimer on Thursday was 32 3/4 lengths. There were nine horses in the race, and no serious mishaps or accidents bringing about the margin, although there did seem to be some nasty coming together of horses at the start. You might see a margin like this between horses at the back of a race sometimes. Since Secretariat's 31-length win in the Belmont is so etched in our minds, we know we seldom see anything that surpasses it at the front of the race. But the truth is that seeing a 30+ length gap in the middle of a race is stranger still than seeing a 30+-length winner. Horses in the middle of a race should be typical of the race, represent the race. Those aren't the horses that had horrible days, or the ones that showed unforeseen improvement, or were snuck into the race with unestablished credentials for an easy win.

How then did this come about? First, the time of the race was almost exactly what I expected from a 12.5k maiden claimer. The first three horses, by the way, were separated by a total of only a length and a half. It wasn't that those three ran so fast; it was that horses 4-9 did nothing at all.

I don't know if a mile can be called a long race, but long races with cheap horses perhaps bring about some of the most spread-out races. This may be particularly true when the cheap horses are young. The theory would go that they just aren't equipped to run the distance. Cheap speed isn't going to work over a distance of ground. There's no such thing as cheap stamina. It is true that of the last six in here, they had made a total of one start at a mile or more, and that resulted in just a 16 Beyer for Run Wilko Run. There were three first-time starters among the bottom six: one was a North Carolina-bred, one a Oklahoma bred, and one a Bluegrass Cat out of a Street Cry mare. Besides Run Wilko Run and the first-time starters, Terubcheh was coming off a 14 Beyer in a 6f race, and El Panteonero a 0 Beyer in a 7f race. I estimate that the 4th-place finisher ran a -4 Beyer in here. The point is that there was a lack of established form in routes: when you go from the chart to the past performances, you're not confronted with inconsistency.

Watching the replay and knowing what was going to happen, I could see the two groups establishing themselves midway on the turn. The first and second-place finishers were prominent from the start; another horse was up there with them, and when he stopped, and the eventual 3rd-place finisher was let loose with his rally, the groups took shape. Larry Collmus expressed it as the "others are gone." Give him credit for seeing what was going on; in the stretch he said it was "about 30 lengths to the rest of them."