- Joined
- Feb 25, 2016
- Messages
- 3,124
- Reaction score
- 100
Most people still make the mistake of handicapping the Belmont like it's any other race, T, and use conventional tools like the BSF or what have you. Things that don't matter much if even at all. Here's the truth. The Belmont is going to be a slowly ran race regardless and if the guys gave out accurate or true BSF for the recent runnings of the race then we'd see most winners run it with something in the 80's or even the 70's on occasion. If I'm remembering right, Creator's true BSF in winning the Belmont last year was something like a 76 or thereabouts. But they bump it way up year after year to help everyone save face just because it's a classic race at the G1 level. It doesn't matter how fast a horse ran in a previous race at a much shorter distance because nobody is going to run fast in the Belmont. All that matters is how far a horse can run on that particular day at the track, and with that you take into account the horse's pedigree, running style, visual impression, condition (coming in fresh or could the horse be fatigued from recent racing?), and things like that. We've seen a lot of comparitively prettty slow animals run really well in the Belmont over the last decade or so (Commissioner, Lani, Ruler On Ice, Atigun, Da'Tara, Incognito, Drosselmeyer, etc) and a few of those even won the race. They didn't do it by suddenly getting faster. They were able to finish well because they were able to stay on better than most if not all of the horses they were competing against. Ruler On Ice and Da'Tara combined to go 1 for 22 in their traditional distance races after they posted Belmont wins with just 1 little allowance win to their credit. They weren't much good going into the Belmont either. But for one race in their career they were able to run further than everyone else in their respective fields and were able to nab a classic G1 win to their credit.
Great stuff as always Shark. Thanks!