>What other explanation could there be?<

Let me play Devil's advocate.

There are 2 possible explanations.

1. He was juiced for this race, but not for any of the other recent ones.

2. He was a better horse than 25K claimers early in his career. As a 3YO in late summer he earned a Beyer figure of 81 with an inferior trainer. Just with normal improvement into his 4YO campaign one might expect that he could run a figure close to 90 at this point in his career. However, instead of developing like the typical 3YO he went backwards for awhile. That was probably due to physical problems. He was given close to 2 months off and came back with a pretty sharp win against weaker. He was then rolled right back in 3 days. Contrary to popular opinion, I have years of stats that suggest that wheeling horses back on 5 days or less rest off a sharp win often indicates the horse is ready for a peak effort and is doing especially well physically (this covers many trainers and multiple decades). Doing so well these days off that freshening, he not only was able to fire a figure close to the 90 we would have expected with normal improvement, a superior trainer like Dutrow got an even better peak out of him.



Post Edited (03-03-05 12:39)