Can Pioneer of the Nile Do It?

[Wrongly]

Rumor has it Robby Albarado.

[miff]

What am I missing? No Ramon Dominguez??

[Dana666]

All reports are that he is thriving these days, looking better than he has ever looked before and maturing beautifully! I think he\'ll be so much better with a few horses in front of him and a legit pace. He has always shown himself to be a racehorse of superior class. Has Gomez made his decision yet? That might be the final factor. If Gomez opts off, I\'d be surprised. We\'ll see. Always loved him though and remember the numbers on poly/synthetic mean very little.

[jimbo66]

Looking good and developing between 2 and 3 are two different things.

Old Fashioned \"looked good\" physically too, but didn\'t develop a lick between last year and this year.  

POTN and all his phony paced races on pro-ride-crap mask his entire form, at least as it relates to his chances to win the Kentucky Derby on dirt.  

Take a guess.  That is all it is.  With no dirt form to speak of, it really is a guess.  The \"clues\" are ready differently by different people.  The things I see point me to think poly/turf horse who hasn\'t gotten any better from 2 to 3 and is about 5% to win the Derby.

[jimbo66]

This looks like bogus information on both fronts.

It is all over the wires that GG and Anderson will make their choice tomorrow.

It is also all over the wires that the connections of the Dubai horses won\'t decide until after next weekend\'s workouts.  

It is still 3-5 that GG picks Dunkirk, but let\'s wait for rumor to be fact!!

[Uncle Buck]

This \"As the Gomez Derby Mount Turns\" is stupid. TVG has been advertising all day that they will be the exclusive network of the \"Announcement\" tomorrow at Noon Eastern. Who cares! He\'s a great jock but he doesn\'t have a Derby win and frankly his fall-out-and-make-one-big-move rides are all too predictable. It took him like 8 days to catch on that the move wasn\'t working at Keeneland all too well early in the meet. Worked today but that track is so quirky.

I want him to ride Dunkirk. Sweetens the pot on POTN. After careful consideration, I think Calvin Bo-Rail would be the perfect jock for POTN. I don\'t think Baffy would use him though. Would Desormeaux get off HMB for this mount?

[jimbo66]

Buck,

Publicity is good for the game.  And, while GG\'s decision doesn\'t guarantee anything, it is at least interesting and may matter.

Your criticism of GG isn\'t warranted.  Maybe you have had some bad experiences with betting him, but most people in the game and those that bet it seriously, would want him on their horse, period.  

While I have often read that \"jockeys are the worst handicappers\", I don\'t find that true.  I would be willing to bet that when a good jockey has a choice of two horses for a race, and has ridden them both, the one he picks outfinishes the other more than 50 percent of the time.

GG picking Dunkirk doesn\'t tell me much, in that it is the safe move, taking the dirt horse, for a trainer who you rider more often more.  However, if by some chance GG does pick POTN, I really have to take a stronger look at POTN and even more importantly I drop Dunkirk quite a bit on my own list.

[Uncle Buck]

OK Jimbro. You get the last word. Fine. I just truly can\'t remember such hullabaloo surrounding ONE jock\'s Derby mount and it warranting TV coverage. I like Gomez but do consider him one dimensional. Had he been in So-Cal in the 70s-early 90s he would have been just another jock.

[congaree1]

Here is my breakdown for the win spot:
Dunkirk has never won a stakes race and does not have the running style to win.

Pioneer: I had no problem tossing Colonel John last year. Same goes here.

[dlf]

TGJB or TGAB,
Toppled brings up a point about Empire Maker\'s TGI Dirt/Synth #s that has me wondering.
It often seems that sires who I think of as having more of a \'dirt\' pedigree (A.P. Indy, FuPeg, Unbridled\'s Song) have better TGI averages on Synth than on Dirt. Is it possible that these averages are distorted by the fact(?) that the TG numbers on Synth tend to be more tightly compressed? For example, maybe a sire is throwing some really fast dirt runners, and a lot of really mediocre synth runners, but since his progeny\'s dirt numbers are more \"spread out\", (i.e. a lot of poor dirt numbers) relative to their synth numbers, the Dirt average is lower?
Am I making some faulty assumptions here?
Please advise, as many of us will be debating what to make of POTN\'s TG pedigree figures in the coming two weeks.
Thanks.

[mlnolan00]

HRTV\'s gonna scoop TVG on this on...Ron Anderson is supposed to be on their set in CA this morning \"a little bit before noon ET\" to annouce who Garrett is riding.  Makes me laugh a little.

[Dana666]

Take a guess!? Yeah, welcome to the wild and wonderful world of synthetic surfaces! My point exactly is he could jump forward on dirt - I don\'t trust #\'s on synthetic tracks anyway, they don\'t mean that much. Or I should say they mean much more going from dirt to synthetic than vice-versa. All I can say is he\'s a classy horse with many gears! He was a dead closer and Baffert worked speed into him as evidenced in the Cash Call Futurity (that\'s the key race of the campaign along with the Fla derby) - that race really showed me something that this was a horse to be reckoned with. He\'s healthy and doing great and he will run a new top in the derby, I feel very sure of that. Will it be enough? Maybe not, but I think there will be so much speed, a mid-pack stalker will do very well. Just look at IWR and how well he did moving to dirt - well, as I pointed out, Pioneer looked him square in the eye and said, \"you aint passing me buddy, no way brother\". We\'ll see in a few weeks.

[Silver Charm]

Things can not be going any better for this horse.

First he lands Gomez for the ride. The hottest jock alive.
Second he galloped over CD slop today like he was on a jet ski.
Third Baffert will be a confirmed Hall of Fame inductee.

This might be the Kharma horse.

[covelj70]

Silver,

Only problem is that you could have said almost all of this about Col John last year.

Had Gomez in the irons, HUGE work on the Churchill surface that had everyone buzzing and too many sheet players (including yours truly) just assumed that he would jump up first time dirt off the poly because his figures weren\'t fast enough.  Also, he had a pedigree that seemed like it was more suited to dirt than POTN does.

Funny thing happened though, gates, opened up, he hated the dirt getting kicked in his face and he fought gomez all the way around the first turn putting himself in a horrible position that he couldn\'t overcome.  

He made the huge move to get into contention at the top of the stretch but ultimately wound up pairing up his (too slow) figure.

Baffert should be better than Harty in getting them ready but how can we take 6 or 7 or whatever to 1 on a horse that looks exactly like the one that flimped so badly with so many similarities last year?

[big18741]

You beat me to it Cove.

Two minutes later on the Summer Bird thread.