Hi Mike, good to be back after a long illness, though not 100% yet.

While generally, slow surfaces tend to produce slow fractions, good horses can be forced to run fast early fractions on these tracks if the riders stupidly spend a horses energy reserves early. They will then come up empty in the stretch, as we saw. Nyquist and Uncle Leo got the double whammy of going fast on a slow track
early.
Note, the final time of the winner (EX) who stayed out of the early pace duel was also very poor, proving the track was slow in addition to the fast early pace.