>I was watching the BG thinking, "how can this frontrunner get beat?" But then a little voice said, "its polytrack, anyone can get beat regardless of how slow the internal pace is"<

One thing that IMO a lot of modern riders do wrong with lone speeds is to slow the pace down so much, they allow all the other contenders to get into a striking position at the top of the stretch without being used at all.

I think it is smarter to slow down the pace as much as you can but to still keep open lengths between you and the next batch of horses. Once a horse is going slow and is very relaxed, I doubt there is much incremental benefit from slowing it down even further. However, there's a big difference between having 4 sharp horses within a length of you and having several lengths at the top of the stretch if you are fresh in either case.

IMO, Angel Cordero rode front runners properly. When Pat Day, Julie Krone and a lot of the other "chokers" came along and had great success, everyone started copying that style of backing the pace up as much as possible when they had the lone speed. They blow dozens of races that way.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/20/2007 09:01PM by fkach.