Re: This is What Man O'War Looked Liked (801 Views)
Posted by:
Wamsutta (IP Logged)
Date: April 02, 2017 11:51AM
IMO, no. The horse has proven he can run to huge figures, so the 9 point jump doesn't retrospectively seem outlandish based on prepping well into a race that better suited his physical make-up after having had a hard time coming healthily to hand. Had the horse then been consistently campaigned at ~4-5 week intervals, it would be more eye-brow raising not to have had a reaction. But the intervals between his runs since the Travers have been 10, 12, and 8 weeks. If the basis of the bounce / reaction is physical – the horse is run back too soon after not having had time to recover following a taxing effort – the way to alleviate that would be to allow him time to recover between races. You could argue that it might still take a high caliber physical specimen to not react even to that, but it would be hard to argue that Arrogate isn't that specimen.