In a prior post (see above for complete post), I made some observations about the patterns of the fastest horses heading into the Derby noting how "ugly" most of them looked. I thought it might be worth going back to that post and evaluating how the horses with the various patterns fared and see what conclusions, if any, we can draw.

- A 6pt jump to a near-zero level immediately prior to the Derby (1 big effort)?

The horses that fit this pattern were Sir Cherokee, Ten Most Wanted and Indian Express. Sir Cherokee was injured training up to the Derby. You might infer that injury resulted from the stress of the big effort. Ten Most Wanted had a very wide trip but never really made any sort of a move and did not have any apparent excuse for his poor finish so, despite the rave morning reviews, maybe he was feeling the stress of the big effort. Indian Express broke poorly and had a rough trip but a poor break often signals a problem and maybe the big effort also took its toll. It's hard to tell with this one. So the big jump pattern just prior to the Derby did not fare to well again this year. Looking back at past Derbies, you see very similar results for all such horses with the big expection of Charismatic who was of course trained by Lukas.

- A 6 pt jump to a near-zero level followed by a pair-up prior to the Derby (2 big efforts)?

The horses that fit this pattern were Peace Rules and Empire Maker. A complicating factor is that both are trained by Bobby Frankel. Both horses probably ran back to their tops or maybe even improved. Note that War Emblem had the same pattern last year. Of course, he was trained by Baffert. If nothing else, we might conclude that a pair-up of even extremely ugly tops for these two trainers certainly does not appear to be a big negative.

- Two consecutive 3 pt jumps to a near-zero level prior to the Derby (1 big effort and 1 pretty big effort)?

The horse that fit this pattern was Brancusi. He flashed speed and then faded badly and came out of the race with a quarter crack. It looks like he may indeed have reacted from those two efforts. So maybe two tightly spaced 3 pt jumps is really not any stronger than 1 big 6 pt jump.

- A 5pt jump followed by a pair-up followed by another 1.5pt move to a near-zero level all in a 6-week span (3 big efforts)?

Buddy Gil fit this pattern. He ran an OK race but came out with an injury so it looks like all those big figures may have finally taken their toll.

- The other two fastest horses include the fastest (if you include sprint tops when evaluating a 1, 1/4M race) that you could argue has one of the weakest patterns heading into the Derby.

The horse I was referring to there was Kafwain. He also was injured while training up to the Derby indicating that indeed he was tailing off after all those big effors including the monster figure in the San Vicente.

- and one other who is the only fast horse heading into the Derby off what appears to be a strong line (the only concern is that fast race as a 2yo). Of course, in this case I was referring to the eventual Derby winner, Funny Cide who indeed did run a big race off that strong line.

- For any of the other slower entrants to win, they would have to jump and all 9 of the faster horses would have to regress, which seems unlikely but not impossible.

This included the rest of the field. Only one of them ran a competitive race: Atswhatimtalkingabout and I think most would have rated his line the strongest of the rest and indeed he probably did run a new top.

So what can we conclude from all of this? Not much given the very small sample. You might argue that you should avoid a horse coming into the Derby off an ugly top or pair-up of an ugly top unless it is trained by Frankel, Baffert or Lukas but I assume that most of you probably figured that out a while ago.

You can also probably conclude that if after you narrow down the field to those horses fast enough to win (in this case 7 of the above actually made it to the starting gate), you find that only one of them has a strong pattern and on top of that the horse is likely to save ground while several of the other contenders are likely to lose ground and that the horse also has longer odds than all but 1 of the other 6 contenders then he might be a pretty good value play...

On to the Preakness.

Cheers

Chris