Look, let's get this straight-- the responsible people who are convinced horses are being moved up (which list includes me, Deb, Chris, John T, and lots of others within the industry that I have talked to who are trying to deal with the problem), don't draw conclusions about one horse being helped, or about trainers because of one horse. If you work with accurate data that rates performance, and you analyze it by trainer, you are in position to draw those conclusions.

Example-- as I have posted here before (and as, by the way, Chris had noticed independently), in the spring of 2001, almost all Frankel's horses moved up about 3 points in the space of 1-2 starts. These were almost all older horses, many of them very solid turf horses, and the way Frankel trains they had established tops-- his horses come out running, and tend not to develop much through campaigns. The chance of any one of them improving that much in a given start was not good. The chance of a large group doing it all at the same time? You tell me. Literally, do the math-- if one of them is 25%, what's the chance of ten of them?

So anyway, later I heard that that spring was when Frankel hired Allday. You know, the guy that was Pat Byrne's vet when he won 15 straight starts at CD, had the two 2yo champs the same year, etc.

But yeah, we're all jumping to conclusions. Just like the conclusions I draw from my boyhood idol Hank Aaron being 185 pounds, and Sosa, McGuire, Bonds et. al. being whatever the hell they play at now.



TGJB