Derby Week Festivities Commence
Real Writing on Racing 💯
It’s officially Kentucky Derby week which is as close to a horse racing holiday that exists. The Breeders Cup weekend is great and of course the Saratoga, Keeneland and Del Mar meets all have tons of popular support but nothing quite rivals the sole focus of horse racing folks on a race that so many have been thinking about since last summer.
What a week it figures to be with solid racing on Wednesday and Thursday before mega-cards scheduled for Oaks Friday and Derby Saturday. We will have individual previews for each of the days cards on Thursday - Sat, though today we will take an early look at the Derby as the closer we get, the more information overload is likely to occur. Going in Circles Big Monday is also going to have an expanded menu this week with a bunch of mini-pods to go along with the traditional Monday night affair (this week Barry and I are joined by Mike Mutnansky of The Mut Stack, which you can hear HERE.)
🎙️The DRF/TimeformUS Kentucky Derby seminar is up on YouTube. Check out two very sharp handicappers as David Aragona and Craig Milkowski discuss the 150th running by clicking HERE.
Kentucky Derby (Gr I) $5,000,000 3yo 1 1/4 Churchill Downs
There is going to be a ton of stuff written about the Kentucky Derby this week, much will range from the sublime to the ridiculous. You are going to be bombarded with people’s thoughts on all manners of theories or declarations that so and so trained great or poorly and worst of all….their picks. Ignore it all or at least do your best to because the facts are that people know less about this particular group of horses competing in this particular race than ever before. This is a lightly raced group of 3yo colts and with so many unknowns, it’s close to impossible for anyone to have a true reading on all of the competitors, do your own work and make your own choices. Believe me, anyone that is spewing absolutes about the majority of the 20 horses lined up in this starting gate is just guessing too.
We will do plenty of speculating based on the available information that exists, it’s not like we aren’t gonna be wagering, but the amount of unknowns and variables that occur in the first half mile of this race, let along the entire ten furlongs, exceed any other race run on the North American continent.
After the post positions were drawn Saturday night, naturally there was a swell of sentiment that Fierceness drew well and Dornoch and Sierra Leone didn’t. In theory that is true, a far outside draw allows Johnny Velazquez on Fierceness a little extra space to operate with and any gate issues for Dornoch or Sierra Leone could lead to them being buried behind a mass of horses. Yet theory is often blown up in smoke within a few seconds of the gates opening and the bulky field ambling out in all different directions. Rock Your World is a recent example of a lightly raced horse losing the race within 3 seconds of the gates being sprung. Eternal Prince in 1985 was a more historical example as a confirmed front-runner that drew an inside post and didn’t break alertly for Richard Migliore which allowed Spend a Buck and Angel Cordero a very loose lead, which he parlayed into a dominant win in what remains the 4th fastest Derby ever.
Kentucky Derby winners don’t have a cookie cutter look to them like say the Diana (Gr I) victor’s which are generally Chad Brown trained euro imports. For example here are some of the recent winners vs the betting favorite using DRF PP’s on the day of the race:
You get the drift. Draw your own conclusions about the potential winners and losers as you will just as likely be correct as the “experts” who have few advantages over the general public in the particular contest.
However the readers of the Going in Circles Digest are going to have a slight edge on the crowd as Craig Milkowski of TimeformUS was kind enough to share with us a chart of all the Derby Preps with his pace figures, identifying which runners came out of races that may or may not have flattered their own running styles.
The Pace Projector is missing a few notables that may be a part of the early scrum as they do not have figs for T O Password’s two Japanese races nor do they have official numbers from the UAE Derby (or Saudi Derby). Nonetheless the results are interesting with so many horses coming from different places and with a few of our notable preps having above or below par figures.
The Thoro-Graph Race Shapes has a similar look to the early pace, they focus on the first quarter rather than the half mile like the TFUS Pace Projector:
📺 Here is the video from Spend A Buck’s 1985 Kentucky Derby