Trainers say the darnedest things

In the days after the 2003 Wood Memorial and leading up to the Kentucky Derby, a clear consensus emerged.

It claimed that Empire Maker, who had won by a diminishing neck over Funny Cide, had triumphed easily, as he pleased.  That he could have won by five if they’d wanted him to.  That he was fooling around in the stretch.  Even after he suffered a foot bruise the week before the Derby, jockey Jerry Bailey and trainer Bobby Frankel insisted that he would run a big race and all but guaranteed victory.  “Bet against him at your peril,” Frankel warned the assembled masses.

Fast-forward to last week.  In the days before Saturday’s Holy Bull, trainer Anthony Dutrow had this to say about Winslow Homer: “[A] one-turn mile is not what my horse wants and I’m not excited about the Holy Bull a little bit.”  He suggested that future, longer races, like the Fountain of Youth and the Florida Derby, would be more relevant tests of the horse’s ability.

Of course, in the 2003 Kentucky Derby, the unbeatable Empire Maker loomed up outside of Funny Cide at the head of the lane but could not keep the pace, settling ultimately for second.  And on Saturday, Winslow Homer, after a less than ideal trip around the turn, shot a gap between horses to grab the lead and then held Jackson Bend off through the lane to win by three-quarters of a length.

All of which points to an interesting question for handicappers: how to assess the words of horses’ human connections and how to integrate those words with the evidence on the page and on the racetrack.  Put a different way, the question is whether to listen to connections or not.

It’s a tricky question.  For one thing, training a horse is more art that science.  It’s not at all uncommon for horses to train well and then run poorly; many’s the trainer of a beaten favorite who has repeated the mantra, “I don’t know what happened today.”  Any number of things — a bad trip, tough track conditions, a snotty nose — can conspire to prevent a horse from running well on any given day.  Plus, as young horses take on new and different challenges — stretching out, switching surfaces, etc. — their connections are constantly in a “best guess” mode: making their best guess that the horse will like turf, or dirt, or will want to go farther.  We never really know until they try.

Moreover, the best you can hope for out of a trainer (or owner) is that he will accurately assess his own horse’s likely performance; he’ll  have no idea how other horses might perform.  A couple of years ago, a friend told me that a certain high-profile trainer had told him that his horse “couldn’t lose” in a maiden race that afternoon.  In fact, the horse ran a terrific race — but was beaten by an unheralded first starter.  These things happen.

Finally, in racing, as in all competitive endeavors, there’s a certain amount of gamesmanship that takes place.  Horse trainers are under no particular obligation to tell the public the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but; and more than one has used the media to try to scare off rivals, suggest one strategy while actually following another, or otherwise create what Oliver North inventively called “a version of the facts that wasn’t true.”

I was smart enough, in 2003, to go with my eyes — that Funny Cide was gaining on Empire Maker in the Wood — rather than my ears.  On Saturday, unfortunately, I wasn’t so smart and tossed Winslow Homer without a second thought.

All of this leads to an obvious but easily forgettable conclusion: the words of trainers are an additional data point for handicappers to consider.  No more, and no less.  The confidence of one trainer and the doubt of another are additional items to consider in making selections — but they don’t trump what your basic handicapping skills tell you.  Until someone figures out how to get info straight from the horse’s mouth, what we hear from the connections might be educated, but it’s still, ultimately, guesswork.