Sunday, September 9, 2012

A 2 1/8th mile race, but you wouldn't have guessed it from the pedigrees

Presque Isle ran a 2 1/8th mile starter as their final race of the night Saturday, and the sires of the horses were not exactly renowned for stamina. The eight-horse field included a Gilded Time (ran 4th), an Indian Charlie (ran 8th), a Smoke Glacken (ran 7th), and a Mr. Greeley (ran 2nd). Two of those sires placed in Breeders' Cup Sprints as race horses, and another was Sprint Champion. Despite frequent noise to the contrary, if you note the sires in a Kentucky Derby and especially in a Belmont Stakes, they were typically much better stayers as race horses, and better producers of stayers, than the sires in this field. A part of me thinks that horse people get intimidated by sprint and middle-distance pedigrees and don't stretch out good horses who could handle a distance of ground. And then part of me thinks that the guidelines about stamina in pedigrees apply much better in high-quality racing than in "cheap" racing. Still, you would think that the horses in a starter race are not only blessed with less stamina than Triple Crown kinds of horses, but also slower, and that with the additional strike of limited stamina against them, they could not hope to win these kinds of races, if they were truly limited in stamina.

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