GP Track Speed and Bridgejumpers

[miff]

\"I have a feeling that race was not as strong as it looks\"

Cart,


...or maybe as fast as Beyer has it.Rags has it 4 lengths slower than Beyer,about a 107 Beyer.Have not seen TG yet but if they agree with Beyer, the fig is app neg -5, if with Rags,app neg -2 1/2.


Mike

[Ohlo]

I\'m not dismissing any distrust for Wolfson, but I can\'t come up with any suspensions he\'s had recently (last five or six years). Maybe I\'m mistaken.
The stuff about Walder is slander if you can\'t back it up with proof.

[Silver Charm]

The story about Walder being thrown off the grounds at Monmouth was in the DRF. Maybe they also made it up? I doubt it.

Probably occurred for similar actions to what I will admit was third party hearsay. But I trust my source. How about yours regarding Wolfson has suddenly found religion and is now running his horses clean since he has no recent positives.

[TGJB]

Miff-- Ragozin had the horse the equivalent of one point worse than we did, I gave him a neg 4.

Us \"Kool-Aid drinkers\" who think drugs are being used don\'t pay any attention to that article at all. You think Dutrow was going to say yeah, I gave him something? We\'ll see what happens when they start freezing blood and publsihing TCO2 results.

[Rick B.]

Silver Charm Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> How about yours regarding Wolfson has
> suddenly found religion and is now running his
> horses clean since he has no recent positives.

I don\'t know if Wolfson is clean or not, but I hate this kind of \"So...have you stopped beating your wife?\" type of inquiry.

How can you expect an honest answer to what is really an insinuation dressed up as a question?

[Ohlo]

Not finding anything in DRF archives about him getting thrown out of Monmouth. He ran 19 horses there last summer and others at the Meadowlands. He did spend a summer at Arlington in 2007 but that doesn\'t mean he was banned, unless you can show me otherwise.
Regarding Wolfson, my experience is that you won\'t find citations of a trainer being clean. Same reason the newspaper doesn\'t run a list of people who DON\'T drive under the influence.
If you\'re going to say a guy\'s dirty (or a vandal), you better have something to back it up.

[miff]

If the amount of illegal stuff that you think was being used, the game would have collapsed by now.No question there is a small percentage of guys cheating,not nearly as much as the Kool Aid drinkers believe though.There are some talented fast horses and some good work by trainers to help horses run fast, without illegal stuff.Cornell testing upstate NY has the most sophisticated testing equipment in the country and have detected 2 class 1 positives in two years.How come, if the cheating is at the level you always talk about?

In the case of Phil,no one close bet a quarter and were only hopeful of a decent performance.My friend manages that stable and remarked that the horse did not look the same,appearance wise,from 6 weeks prior, he looked physically better.

TCO2 results, which you speak of often, are played out, minutia at best. Thats not confirmed to be a move up item in ALL quarters with it\'s move up capability questioned by informed testers/vets in NY.Freezing stuff will also mean nothing unless the find the illegal drug, perfect a test to detect it,and then go back. Too expensive, doubt it will happen on a meaningful level.

Mike

[TGJB]

1-- How do you define collapse, and why would drugs cause it?

2-- I sat with probably the top pro horseplayer at Del Mar last summer, and we came up with a list of about 30 names nation wide. The NY circuit and sattelite tracks are just part of the picture. Unrelated (of course), Cole Norman just got out of jail.

3-- You stated one of the reasons for the lack of positives yourself-- they don\'t have tests yet, which is why freezing is important. Yes, they have to have protocols for going back and testing.

4-- There are other reasons for the lack of positives. On TCO2, the only serious investigation found, a) some tracks aren\'t testing, b) some tracks are deliberately testing AFTER the race to get lower readings, c) some tracks aren\'t doing anything or making it public when they do get a reading over the limit, d) no tracks are publishing the test results-- yet. Also, as I have gone into here before, the sanction levels are higher than a horse can produce on his own-- we are allowing horses to be moved up, legally.

If you want to find out more about this, read the Jockey Club Committee\'s report  and recommendations on TCO2. And that\'s just one drug.

Finally, I have reason to believe there will be significant movement on freezing this year.

[miff]

1.Players, owners, trainers would abandon the game if the game was anywhere near as illegally drug infested as you claim. People fail to note the numerous legal drugs being used along with modern nutrition,excellent vets, joint tapping,massaging, blue boots, oxygen chambers etc, etc, etc.They had carte blanche on steroids until recently.There is lots of griping, little in the way of meaningful positives.

2.If you have 30 guys out of all the trainers, that really ain\'t much  on the whole and that\'s only your opinion.There is doubt in my mind that 30(as you said) trainers have the magic bullet and that such powerful illegal stuff could be that widely available in racing and no one on any backstretch in this country except for the crooks know about it.For example,you have named Pletcher as a move up trainer in the past. What science did you use? It certainly could not be his \"rap sheet\"

Many of us lived Oscar Barrera up close and personal, there ain\'t no modern Oscar\'s,not even close.

3.I am told in NY that the freezing, storing,warehousing is too expensive and at best they may freeze random samples(a small number)

4.Why you are stuck on this is beyond me. It makes no sense in the present environment for venues to \"cover up\" or not be vigilant re milkshakes.Why? What do they(racetracks) have to gain by overlooking this??? Why not overlook steroids, and the class 1 stuff too.

You ignored my comments that some informed people feel that shakes do not have scientific proof to confirm that they move a horse up.There is data to suggest shakes may \"decrease\" a horses performance. No irrefutable science here.

One theory out of Cornell zeros in on masking agents(it\'s being studied)The theory being that there are known illegal drugs in a horse\'s system that do NOT pass and are present at testing but not detected(i.e Masked)It\'s a theory.

I feel a few guys are doing things but nowhere to the extent that every time a horse runs a hole in wind,it\'s illegal drugs.


Mike

[Boscar Obarra]

Since my third cousin twice removed name was mentioned ,Oscar Barrera , I have to ask.


\" Many of us lived Oscar Barrera up close and personal, there ain\'t no modern Oscar\'s,not even close. \"

 Who says?  What measuring stick are you using? You mean Oscar was better?  Don\'t think so.

 Oscar worked in a different age where blatant cheating  at the highest levels  was not possible.  I said blatant. I\'m sure there was always cheating by some.

 So he stuck to the cheap stuff so as not to anger the men with hats.

 But today, well, do I have to say it.

 Maybe Jerry wants to opine on  the amount of move up OB was getting vs RD and the others.

[Silver Charm]

Who said 30 was the \"Real Number\".

Look what the Steroid era did to baseball and their record books. In horse racing we are talking about the fans pocket books.

When the truth came out in baseball there were plenty of people surprised at some of the names on the list.

Each and every day more and more facilitators come forward and say, \"I gave him the stuff\".

[high roller]

miff, have you or anyone noticed that the so-called move-up trainers all use the rag sheets? maybe that\'s were the juice comes from?

when ro parra buys a horse and wins a stakes race thats all hay & oats, LOL!

[miff]

Box,

Your memory can\'t be too good. Oscar took cripples, horse vanned off, ran them back 4 days later and they whistled and went on win streaks. No one close to his consistent legendary feats.



Mike

[TGJB]

1-- Owners leave the game if they can\'t compete, whether because of illegal drugs or not. And they are leaving.

2-- Those 30 guys represent about 2,000 horses at any given time. They also infest a very significant percentage of the races run.

3 and 4-- Wrong. I know a whole lot more about this than you do. Read the Jockey Club report, or Rick Arthur\'s study on TCO2 correlated with finish position (and trainer), which was posted here. The JC put serious resources into this, and talked to all the real experts, not your buddies, who rely on anecdotal evidence at best. On freezing, I\'m way ahead of you and anybody you have talked to. I have been told the NTRA also thought it was too expensive, which is why they didn\'t include it in that bull---t plan intended to keep the Feds off racing\'s back without spending the money to solve the problems. Wrong. It\'s not that expensive. And it\'s in the works.

They don\'t have to mask things that aren\'t being tested for or there are no tests for YET.

[miff]

2-- Those 30 guys represent about 2,000 horses at any given time. They also infest a very significant percentage of the races run.



.....Yes and one of your move up trainers is the under performing Todd Pletcher. Brilliant, you really know the game.


Mike