Ultra Sports Bet

T-minus 17 days and counting until the Breeders’ Cup. Not that I’m counting the seconds or anything. Or at least not that I am going to admit. With the races getting near I am thinking about them more and more, and watching more and more video. Here are a few BC thoughts that have popped up over the last few days:

• I have watched Curlin win the Jockey Club Gold Cup over Lawyer Ron several times over the last few days (I’m such a geek that I have the video loaded onto my iPod for portable viewing pleasure). Two things stick out from my admittedly biased position. First, Lawyer Ron didn’t like being caught at all. If you watch his ears they drop back when he is caught – a sign, in my mind, that he gave up. It’s a decidedly amateur theory, but I’m not sure that horses, being herd animals, bounce back from that very well. Second, that’s just a gutsy performance. Curlin could have given up when Lawyer Ron began to pull away with a furlong left. The fact that he had another run left makes me very high on this horse.
• Speaking of Curlin, Bodog has Futures odds available on the Classic, and he is at 5/1. If you like the horse you might want to take a look – that’s a better price by quite a bit than you are likely to get on race day. Lawyer Ron is the current favorite at 7/2 (he should be at least that good on race day), and Street Sense is at 6/1.
• Alan at Left at the Gate (the best racing blog there is, by the way), talks about something I noticed, too. War pass, the undefeated winner of the Champagne on Saturday, is a potential favorite in the Juvenile, but I’m not buying it. First, the Champagne is a lousy BC prep, and the horse has never gone two turns, but more importantly, he won the Champagne with a last quarter mile of 25.88 seconds. If your not a hardcore horse racing fan here’s what you need to know about that – it is painfully slow. He won because the pace set up well for him, but he won’t win against the best in the country if that’s the best he can do in 17 days. Like Alan, I will happily throw him out at anything but a shockingly high price on race day.
• I pay much less attention to European racing than I probably should, so each year at this time I have a ton of catching up to do so I am ready for the races run on turf (a job made much, much easier thanks to Youtube). The Prix de la Foret, run last Saturday, was to be the last test for several top candidates for the BC Mile. All it did, though, was create a mess. There’s no audio in this clip, but the horse that absolutely smashes the field is called Toylsome, and he went off at 100/1. Oops. So much for gaining insight into the BC field from that race. There will be a lot of re-evaluating to do among the camps of the top horses after that disaster – it doesn’t look like the weather or the track were to blame. Favored Tariq was fifth, and Linngari, a previously well-respected BC potential entrant, was ninth:

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