Saddle,

When you look at the "solid figs" from year-to-year, I'm assuming that the horse is not breaking through his/her top. So it ran a 10 top as a 2yo and a 10 top as a 3yo? Here are some questions/issues...

Is the horse reacting to top efforts? How much? Is the horse reacting LESS to top efforts as a 3yo than it was as a 2yo? This may signal some progress to come... Is he reacting MORE to the top efforts? May be a bad sign.

I will tolerate some bouncing around as a 2yo. The older the horse gets, the less extreme reactions to tops I want to see. The more they react to tops the longer it's going to take them to get back to the top and the more unlikely they are to move on to a new top. For me it's much harder to guage the 2-3yo jump than it is to guess the 3-4yo jump. Ten point jumps off breaks aren't uncommon for first out 3yos. You don't see as many of those with first out 4yos.

I like to see 4yos that come back a point better than their 3yo top. With 3yos, I like to see them come back to their 2yo top right away. If they do that, I'm willing to make some allowances in the time it takes for them to move up, provided they don't bounce to the moon in the meantime.

I think a long layoff, frequent layoffs or infrequent starts mean improvement is less likely. Improving, healthy horses run on a regular basis, like every three or four weeks, and they should be able to run for a couple of months without falling apart. If a 2-3yo is not running on a regular basis there is usually something up. A guy is not going to keep a top quality horse on the shelf for nothing! If you look at a 4yo and hasn't broken through his 3yo top and he's the type of horse that runs two races every six months or so, he probably is not going to run a new top.

There are a few exceptions to this, most notably at the very top of the scale, where you have very fast horses that can crank it up every once in awhile, but in your everyday run of the mill race card, I would give the steady eddie type more of a chance to improve than the horse that has shown flashes of brilliance and spent a lot of time doing nothing.

Also, there are quite a few turf horses that will throw you for a loop at 5 or so. I think routers are more likely to be late bloomers than sprinters.

I'll tell you one expensive lesson I've learned - there are VERY FEW trainers who you can really count on to have a horse ready to win off a 90+ day layoff, especially going two turns. I think most layoffs come out of necessity (there's something wrong or the horse needs a rest) as opposed to design (the guy is going to crank the horse and win off a layoff). By the time the horse is 4yo, you should have a good read on his "layoff pattern" and be able to see if something may be wrong.

Good luck!

HP