Bob,

I didn't call you dumb. If you took it that way, I apologize. What I said was that you saying that Real Quiet staggering home was proof that Kent gave the horse a dumb ride was dumb. And I stand by that. That statement, in the best case, is just wrong. Horses stagger home or bear in / bear out when either they are tired or injured. Real Quiet was tired. As I said in the original thread, it is certainly extremely debatable whether or not Kent gave Real Quiet a good ride. But when a horse of roughly equal talent beats his horse by a nostril after getting what many people consider one of the best all time rides in a big spot, it is just wrong to say it was a dumb ride.

As for your pace comments about the best way to run a race, it holds more water with turf races. We don't reverse split or even split dirt races in the U.S. . They do it from time to time on the turf, but not dirt. The reason I gave you the splits of other Belmonts was to show you that. The distribution of time early to late in this year's Belmont was much more even than in other Belmonts. As for not being able to make pace figures without other races at the same distance on the same day, the top figure makers adjust for this, in the same way TGJB or BEyer does this. And I repeat - this year's Belmont didn't have a fast pace. While you might find it interesting to try and point that Gettysburg and Seeking the Soul collapsing pointing to a fast pace, that just doesn't hold much water. Both were 55-1 and were rabbits. Destin, Governor Malibu and Stradivari all ran near the pace and ran fine. If you wanted to analyze the pace without using available data and prefer to look at results, your call. But there is a reason people buy pace figures. And even if I take your lead and try to analyze the pace via the results, the analysis would conclude the pace was fair. The top 5 finishers were a normal mix of pace pressers, mid pack horses and closers.

Moving on.

Jim