Biased

This is usually the last place you'll read about track bias...unless I'm arguing to people that one didn't exist.  I generally think such claims are exaggerated, or that the supposed bias simply didn't exist.  Seems to me that race results can, far more often than not, be explained by circumstance and pace.

So, having only seen the last two Breeders Cup races on Friday, when I started to read a drumbeat of comments on Twitter about the main track being speed favoring, I shrugged and thought 'here we go again.'  I missed the first race of Saturday's card, in which the horses basically ran 1-2-3-4-5 all the way around the track, thus producing similar Twitter comments affirming what they'd seen the day before.  But then I did see the third race, the Damascus Stakes.  And it was an eye-opener.  In a seven furlong race, Private Zone and Mile High Magic dueled for the lead; and after a 22 second opening quarter, the half-mile was posted as 43 4/5 seconds!  In a seven furlong race.  My first impression was that the fraction had to be wrong....and that feeling was affirmed in watching the stretch run.  Because, surely if that fraction was correct, the speed would be folding up and the closers enveloping the field.

But that's not what happened.  Sure, Politicallycorrect came off the pace to win the race, but the speed never really came back.  Private Zone ran on and the winner was all out to get by; and even Mile High Magic weakened only inside the 1/8th pole and lost by less than 3 1/2 lengths.  Private Zone, in three prior US races, faded in the stretch each time, so it's not like we're talking about a monster here.  I was still convinced at that point that the fraction had to be wrong, but as it became apparent that it wasn't, it became apparent that there was something wrong with the track.

That's pretty much how it went the rest of the day.  Groupie Doll was able to overcome in the F&M Sprint, but she dominated her field on paper, and she also benefited from an extraordinarily quick first half in a seven furlong race.  The Juvenile featured a brief moment when it looked as if the field would swallow up Shanghai Bobby in the stretch, but that was only because the winner loafed on the lead until engaged.  The Dirt Mile, the Sprint, and the Classic not only all produced winners that were either on the lead (Fort Larned), or the only one in close attendance (Tapizar, Trinninberg), but nobody else in any of those races, with the exception of the late bid by Mucho Macho Man, second all the way around, even made a meaningful move!

It's not that any of the results were inexplicable - the fact that Fort Larned and Trinninberg paid the prices they did indicate to me that handicappers either failed to adjust, or were understandably set in their ways after spending weeks anticipating these races.  (I adjusted to the extent that I didn't bet Capital Account in the Sprint, but I kinda just checked out of the proceedings and passed, not really putting much further thought into it.)   But the main point to me was that the races were just dreadful.  If you have what's supposed to be the best horses in the country, and none of them other than the first two down the backstretch are ever even remotely engaged in the outcome, then something has to be terribly wrong.

And again, this is all coming from a major track bias-skeptic.  There was no doubt about this one....and, if Randy Moss and Jerry Bailey claimed that the track was fair as I read they did, then they must have just been saying it in an attempt to protect the integrity of the event; I don't believe for a milli-second that those two guys actually believe that.  Because it's surely not the case.  I don't often play Santa Anita, so I don't know if the main track always plays like that.  But that wasn't your garden variety track bias in my view....it was like Frankenbias.

I have to laugh thinking back to the people who were so horrified when the Breeders Cup was run on the synthetic surfaces at Santa Anita.  I'd love to hear them try and tell me that those races were any more "meaningless" to the notion of determining the Eclipse winners than these races were.  One thing for sure is that they couldn't possibly say that those races weren't ten times more exciting than these.  Here's a couple from 2009 run on the dreaded "plastic," in case you forgot what competitive championship racing should be like.