I'm going to go out on a limb & guess that the 15 or so articles I counted(but didn't read) fall into 2 basic categories. One is the H. Luro "Don't squeeze the lemon dry" school. The other believes the A. Jerkins' observation that "More races are won by horses working fast than horses working slow."

I hope someone corrects me if I'm wrong, but I doubt that any article raises the more fundamental question of what role such a wk should play in your handicapping when a horse, like FC, has already been to the post 8 times. What I think I learned before I started focusing on 1sters & lightly raced horses is that you're much better off putting your trust in the nos. & pattern than in a fst work, unless the work is a "failure", which is true for fast wks much more often than one might ever imagine. An exception might be 1st time bl, the theory being that time of the work was because the horse probably worked in bl. The same theory does not apply to 1stL if the wk was within 5 days of the race, & there is also a school of thought that a fast wk for a horse taking a suspicious drop is a neg, the assumption being that the work is an attempt to entice others to clm an unsound horse.

What about FC's time? One thing you hear over & over again from clkers is that how the horse accomplished & came out of the wk is much more important than the time. Based on what I've seen & heard, FC accomplished the wk easily & has been doing very well since, so from this stdpt one would view the wk as a positive, keeping in mind that FC is a horse that has to be jogged & galloped clockwise because he is impossible to control when he sees the finish line.

I think I've mentioned before that every book on training & every trainer says that the key to wks is designing a progam which fits the individual horse. FC has a history of working fst & in fact the 6/3 wk is only 3 ticks faster than his wk before the Derby. Another plus, as I see it, for an improving horse at his home track.

I'm still wondering if one can't make a case for 10MW, but this is one of those rare occasions when I agree with what seems to be the consensus view, that EM was probably the better horse going into the Derby, but that FC has improved so much since then that that may no longer be the case. The training job on EM reminds me a lot of Point Given. Baffert acknowledged after the fact that he didn't have PG at full throttle for the 1st leg because he was looking at a bigger prize, one which he had been nosed out of more than once. In this case, it seems to have been overconfidence that EM was much the best. EM has been trained much more aggressively this time around, & while I would like to see Frankel lose because of the way he's acted, I feel pretty safe in saying that EM doesn't know that his trainer has been making a complete fool of himself.