Sunday Workouts

- Good job by bloodhorse.com updating to include the times of this morning's important Derby workouts. Zito sent out a trio - Bellamy Road got 5f in 1:00 2/5; Noble Causeway in 1:00, and High Fly in 1:00 3/5.

Going Wild, who Lukas recently indicated was actually doing the best of his pair, got the distance in a brisk :59 3/5.

And Pletcher sent out his top two for their first, and I guess only workouts between their last preps and the Derby. Bandini went 1:00 3/5; and Flower Alley 1:00 2/5. I'll be watching all of these on TVG a bit later.

- I had a dream last night that Closing Argument won some big race that looked like it could be a Kentucky Derby. Out of every horse that's either in or maybe in the race, there isn't one that I've give less thought to. The mind works in funny ways. The one thing that stands out on his resume is his win in the Holy Bull, when he defeated High Fly. But recall that High Fly had an awful wide trip in what was his first try around 2 turns. Closing Argument regressed to an 88 Beyer when finishing third in the Blue Grass; the fact that he beat Consolidator and Sun King in that race seems more like a negative to those two than a positive for Closing Argument.

- Interesting comments by Frankel in a piece up on Thoroughbred Times. He's a figs guy, and feels they favor High Limit.

"I don’t know if it’ll be good enough to win, but he’s on a good pattern right now and I hope he can move forward. You never know until they do it." Frankel said. "Those other horses, they may be going backward. I think they may have run too fast [in their previous starts]."
.....
"I think going a mile and a quarter for the first time, that’s the main reason horses need more experience [for the Derby]. I’d like to see preps going a mile and a quarter like they do in Europe."

I think it's odd he would say that about the preps. Isn't the fact that they're all going the distance the first time what makes the race so intriguing? I don't think we'd all be talking about it so much if these horses had all been racing 10 furlongs already. It's the mystery of the unknown, like the World Series used to be when you'd have teams meeting that you had no real way to measure up against each other; that was before the Series was partly ruined by interleague play. In the Derby, no matter how the horses finished up in their preps, no matter what the pedigree charts say, there's no real way to measure them up against the distance they've never before tried.