I Wanted It, You Got It. More Talkin' Derby

By: T.R. Slyder, TRSlyder@yahoo.com



This weekend featured one and a half meaninful Derby prep races- the Santa Anita Derby, and the Wood Memorial at Aqueduct. The Santa Anita Derby was the more ballyhooed of the two races because it pitted formidable foes against one another- ThePamplemousse and Pioneer of the Nile. Unfortunately for race fans, ThePamplemousse scratched before the race and is now off the Derby Trail, and is going to rest for 6 months. So that took a lot of the luster off the Santa Anita Derby, which was later won handily by Pioneer of the Nile, who is shaping up to be a major Derby contender, despite never having raced on dirt. The KY Derby is run on dirt, and Santa Anita runs over a synthetic surface. Most horses prefer one to the other and there is no way of predicting how any horse will take to a new surface.

One horse that ran fairly well on synthetic then ran freakishly on dirt was I Want Revenge, who won the Wood Memorial on Saturday. He ran so well in his last two starts (his only on dirt), that he is now considered to be the Derby favorite. Below is the video of his race in the Wood on Saturday. Getting off to a flat-footed start (it looked like the worse just wasn't paying attention or something), he appeared to have no shot to win it. After fighting on gamely, he found himself behind a wall of horses on the home stretch and managed to swing outside and still have energy left to pass the remaining horses. It's a very impressive race, visually.

Given that the Derby has 20 horses in it, the track is always crowded and adversity is the only certainty. So when a horse has a race like this, showing that he is able to overcome adversity and traffic problems, it bodes very well for his Derby chances.



While I think it was an awesome race for a very sound horse, I am not rushing to the betting window for I Want Revenge just yet. Formidable though he is, I haven't seen him beat any top-tier horses on Synthetic or Dirt. Had he raced against Quality Road or Friesan Fire in the Wood, I think we'd be talking about an impressive last-to-second place finish for I Want Revenge.

The other race I mentioned was the ThePamplemousse-less Santa Anita Derby. That is four wins in a row for Pioneer of the Nile, two of them were over I Want Revenge, albeit over synthetic and in December and February. If Pioneer of the Nile puts in a solid workout at Churchill Downs the week of the Derby, he will be a major, major contender.

The knock on him is that, although he wins, he doesn't do so in eye-popping time. Below is his victory in Saturday's Santa Anita Derby.





That win looked a lot like all of his others- nothing fancy. You don't drop your jaw and look at the person standing next to you. Just a very workmanlike win. Every time it looked like a foe was gaining on him he just kicked them away and sped off. Much like Milton Berle, he pulls out just enough to win.

As legitimate of a contender as Pioneer of the Nile is, I just can't feel confident in betting on him until I know how he'll react to the dirt. Last year was Santa Anita's first year using the synthetic surface, so most of the west coast horses coming to the Derby were racing on dirt for the first time, and no one knew how their synthetic races would translate to dirt. Well, they didn't translate very well. It could just be that the dirt horses were better horses than the west coast, synthetic-raced horses, but it wasn't pretty. I lost money betting on synthetic-specialist Colonel John, and vowed to never bet on a Derby horse that had never raced on dirt. Winning the Derby requires an outstanding horse, and getting a few breaks during the race- everything has to go right. Racing a horse over a new surface diminishes the odds of everything going right, in my opinion.

So after this weekend's racing, the Derby stage is pretty well set. Next week there are two prep races, but they are more glorified prep races.What they really are is a last-second cash-grab for horses who don't yet have the requisite earnings to enter the Derby. Racing next weekend will give a horse only three weeks of rest before the Derby. For most horses, having only three weeks to lead up to a race is too short of an interval to produce their highest quality racing. So the top tier horses already won their prep races and have earned some time off, the horses running next weekend probably lost to the aforementioned horses and need to scare up some cash in order to be eligible.