Vito,
It depends on the horse but for some of them, I put a tremendous emphasis on the workouts.
Some examples of my own horses,
Screenplay isn\'t a flashy workhorse at all, especially on the dirt so as long as he\'s moving comfortably, I would never enter or not enter a race with him based on how he works.
Swift Warrior on the other hand is the exact oppossite. When he breezes well, he runs well, when he\'s not breezing/galloping well, we don\'t usually even put him in the gate let alone expect him to run well. He has a bunch of mostly minor physical issues and when they are bugging him, it shows in the morning. When he\'s feeling good, he breezes well.
Falling Sky is another story all together, he always works well in the mornings so how he\'s breezing isn\'t really an indication of how he is going to run.
The more I know about a horse, the more emphasis I put on the workouts. If I know how the horse typically trains when he doing well, that\'s very valuable.
Finally, as I typically remind people on this subject so as not to get ahead of myself in all of this. There are many people who forgot more about how to analyze workouts and morning training in the last 24 hours than I will ever know. My racing manager is one of those people. I am totally defferential to those folks when I watch horses train. I am an absolute novice on the subject compared to these folks. That said, most of the folks in the media who opine on morning works either a) don\'t know what they are looking at, or b) are hamstrung by their need to maintain relationships with the connections so they don\'t say negative things about the big outfits.
I mention this last point as there were some pretty prominent horses that were training terribly before the Derby (inclding 2 of the favorites) that the media never said a negative word about and to the contrary, actually were pretty favorable toward.
