Desert Orchid
Senior Jockey
- Joined
- Aug 2, 2005
- Messages
- 24,857
Early indications are that the time was very fast. We'll know a bit more after the c/d handicap about to be run.
Epsom Derby 2012
- Thread starter betsmate
- Start date
EC1
On a break
153.9 on SL site
154.52 for SNA
154.52 for SNA
chroniclandlord
Senior Jockey
How does that compare to recent years EC1?
EC1
On a break
the coronation is usually a poorly run affair and used to be run on Oaks day as far as i can remember
the 12f handicap looks a better comparison..it was a decently run affair by the looks of it
chroniclandlord
Senior Jockey
Timeform Chief Correspondent Jamie Lynch discusses the lure of the Triple Crown, or lack of it, in North America and Britain...
Successive years in the 2000s provided a modern snapshot of the respective difficulties and differences of the Triple Crown on either side of the Atlantic. In 2008, after dominant wins in the first two legs of the American Triple Crown, the Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes, Big Brown was pointed straight in the direction of New York for the Belmont, following the brightly-lit signs on the long-established road to racing immortality, for the highest honour in the sport, and it was considered to be a foregone conclusion for him.
'We're ready to roll,' said Big Brown's trainer Rick Dutrow Jnr. 'I'll be in the winner's circle when they get to the quarter pole. That's how I feel. I don't see a horse that can beat him.'
Only he didn't roll, and when the field got to the quarter pole he had already been pulled up, Big Brown becoming the eleventh horse to have gone hop, skip and flunk since the last Triple Crown winner, Affirmed, way back in 1978. The longest drought in the history of the series is telling that the Triple Crown sweep has become very difficult to accomplish, increasingly so, but not for the want of trying...
A year after Big Brown in America came Sea The Stars in Europe, likewise from the same Danzig stallion line and likewise dominant in the first two races of the English Triple Crown, the 2000 Guineas and Derby. The difference was that, at the same stage, where everybody in America would have been staggered if Big Brown hadn't chased the Triple Crown, everybody in Britain would have been staggered if Sea The Stars had been aimed at Doncaster, all because the St Leger is about as fashionable as bell-bottoms nowadays; in fact, people were wearing bell-bottoms the last time the Triple Crown was achieved in England, by Nijinsky in 1970.
Needless to say, Sea The Stars didn't go near it, despite the 'nice dream' line by his trainer John Oxx: 'I'm a believer in the Triple Crown and I don't accept it's a thing of the past, but then I'm a bit old-fashioned. I think it will be won again.' But Oxx wasn't going to ask the horse to be the one to reset the trend, even though the Triple Crown was at his mercy. Sea The Stars had a Timeform rating of 140; Mastery ran to a mark of 122 when he won that year's St Leger.
The questions are therefore all too clear regarding the current state of the Triple Crown: why has it become so hard to pull off in America, and why does it have no pull at all in England?
The English Patient
In England the Triple Crown is in a coma and has been for over four decades, needing life support from the past because it has no actual support from the present. The perceived need in the breed for speed is the major factor, whereby commercial considerations far outweigh the original concept of a champion racehorse. The St Leger, once hugely significant as the gateway to the Triple Crown, the highest status attainable by a thoroughbred on the British turf, has now become a stick with which to beat down the worth and price of a potential stallion, all because the race, run over an extended mile and three quarters, is seen to smear its winners with the slowness brush.
Another reason is that the St Leger, the oldest classic, faces much stiffer competition on the international stage nowadays, with higher-profile and higher-value events to target in Ireland, France and America. It's fair to question whether Nijinsky himself would have contested the St Leger had the Irish Champion Stakes - a race Sea The Stars won a week before the St Leger was run - been in existence in 1970, in which case we'd be going right back to Bahram in 1935 for the last Triple Crown winner. Priorities have changed, as has the racing landscape, and combined they have rendered the Triple Crown virtually extinct in Britain.
American History: X no. of runs
Quite why the wait for another Triple Crown sweep has gone on almost as long in the US as the UK is harder to explain. Unlike in England, the lustre of the Triple Crown has stood the test of time in America, highlighted by the 11 since Affirmed who had their sights set on it after getting two-thirds of the way there, but none were able to complete the job, which itself defies the law of averages. Admittedly, the Belmont is a demanding race due to the mile-and-a-half trip and the fact it comes so soon after Churchill Downs and Pimlico, the whole Triple Crown programme compressed into an intensive five weeks, compared to the outspread five-month series in England. But it has been done before, plenty of times, and so what's changed in the last 33 years?
There is one statistical anomaly in that timespan which might, just might, be at the heart of the matter. In the 1970s, when the Triple Crown was completed three times in arguably its greatest ever era, featuring Secretariat and Seattle Slew prior to Affirmed, horses in the US raced on average 10.2 times per season. Since then, year on year, without fail, that number has steadily dropped, down to a low of 6.1 in 2010. Maybe the breed isn't quite so robust as it used to be, or perhaps the difference is in the approach and conditioning, but whatever the reason there's no ignoring the fact that modern-day horses generally run 40% less in a season than their counterparts from yesteryear, raising the issue of soundness and durability: the two key elements - almost over and above ability - that are tested to the full by the terms and timing of the kingmaker that is the Belmont Stakes, the Triple Crown's final hurdle, the hurdle at which the last 11 would-be kings have fallen.
As the run-ratio evidence suggests, horses in the US seem less able, or less prepared, to race so hard so often as their ancestors, and that's possibly at least part of the explanation why the final piece of the formidable Triple Crown jigsaw has been missing for a third of a century.
So here we are in the middle of 2012 with Triple Crown legs two and three looming for the UK and US respectively, and the game is on...in a big way. Given that it has happened on average once every three years since Affirmed, it's no great surprise that a horse has put himself in position to hole out for the championship on the American tour after two immaculate approach shots, I'll Have Another his name, but what is surprising, nay astounding, is that for the first time in a long time there's a bleep on the heart monitor of the English Triple Crown, and the reason is as much for who's behind the horse as the horse itself.
Four, three, six, five, eight: those are the number of individual horses Aidan O'Brien has run in each of the last five renewals of the Derby, the representation so heavy because O'Brien and the Coolmore partners are essentially traditionalists who regard the Epsom Derby as the greatest race in the world. For traditionalists, the Triple Crown is still the Holy Grail. Since Aidan O'Brien took over at Ballydoyle in 1996 following the retirement of his namesake Vincent, who trained Nijinsky, he's had no end of top-class horses to work with, but none with the magic mix to mould a Triple Crown winner. St Nicholas Abbey was talked of in hushed tones as potentially 'the one', but he failed the first test. Camelot didn't.
Camelot, late-surging winner of the 2000 Guineas and red-hot favourite for the Derby, is by Montjeu, which brings us to another point of climate change. The success of the Coolmore breeding empire, generated by Sadler's Wells and amplified by his sons, in particular Montjeu (died in March but already had three Derby winners to his name), Galileo (sire of Frankel) and High Chaparral (sire of So You Think), has resulted in middle-distance stallions coming back in vogue.
The crucial point is that Coolmore can afford to give Camelot a shot at the Triple Crown because the risk-reward ratio is different for them than almost any other owner-breeder who had a similar horse on their hands. They already have the best stallion roster in Europe, and the Camelot brand is to some degree safeguarded by virtue of his classic win at a mile, added to which Coolmore will have strict control over what mares he's bred with when the time comes.
Coming in the age of Sea The Stars and Frankel, two giants of the turf and neither Coolmore-owned, Camelot, however good he may be, is in danger of being overshadowed in status and value unless he does something special, and what better way to create a competitive legacy than to single-handedly revive the series that was once the only true measure of a champion thoroughbred, the Triple Crown.
Halley's Comet, synonymous with the spectacular and the mystical, was originally thought to be one of the many extinct comets, the type that loses all its effervescence and resonance, until the discovery that it is in fact of the dormant variety, reappearing every 76 years. It's 76 years since the one and only occasion in history that saw cross-Atlantic conjoint winners of the Triple Crown, a once-spectacular and mystical series that has seemed to lose all its effervescence and resonance in Britain and has gone unclaimed for so long in America as to be close to extinction. This year, thanks to the twin stars of I'll Have Another and Camelot, the Triple Crown may reveal itself to have merely been dormant.
Successive years in the 2000s provided a modern snapshot of the respective difficulties and differences of the Triple Crown on either side of the Atlantic. In 2008, after dominant wins in the first two legs of the American Triple Crown, the Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes, Big Brown was pointed straight in the direction of New York for the Belmont, following the brightly-lit signs on the long-established road to racing immortality, for the highest honour in the sport, and it was considered to be a foregone conclusion for him.
'We're ready to roll,' said Big Brown's trainer Rick Dutrow Jnr. 'I'll be in the winner's circle when they get to the quarter pole. That's how I feel. I don't see a horse that can beat him.'
Only he didn't roll, and when the field got to the quarter pole he had already been pulled up, Big Brown becoming the eleventh horse to have gone hop, skip and flunk since the last Triple Crown winner, Affirmed, way back in 1978. The longest drought in the history of the series is telling that the Triple Crown sweep has become very difficult to accomplish, increasingly so, but not for the want of trying...
A year after Big Brown in America came Sea The Stars in Europe, likewise from the same Danzig stallion line and likewise dominant in the first two races of the English Triple Crown, the 2000 Guineas and Derby. The difference was that, at the same stage, where everybody in America would have been staggered if Big Brown hadn't chased the Triple Crown, everybody in Britain would have been staggered if Sea The Stars had been aimed at Doncaster, all because the St Leger is about as fashionable as bell-bottoms nowadays; in fact, people were wearing bell-bottoms the last time the Triple Crown was achieved in England, by Nijinsky in 1970.
Needless to say, Sea The Stars didn't go near it, despite the 'nice dream' line by his trainer John Oxx: 'I'm a believer in the Triple Crown and I don't accept it's a thing of the past, but then I'm a bit old-fashioned. I think it will be won again.' But Oxx wasn't going to ask the horse to be the one to reset the trend, even though the Triple Crown was at his mercy. Sea The Stars had a Timeform rating of 140; Mastery ran to a mark of 122 when he won that year's St Leger.
The questions are therefore all too clear regarding the current state of the Triple Crown: why has it become so hard to pull off in America, and why does it have no pull at all in England?
The English Patient
In England the Triple Crown is in a coma and has been for over four decades, needing life support from the past because it has no actual support from the present. The perceived need in the breed for speed is the major factor, whereby commercial considerations far outweigh the original concept of a champion racehorse. The St Leger, once hugely significant as the gateway to the Triple Crown, the highest status attainable by a thoroughbred on the British turf, has now become a stick with which to beat down the worth and price of a potential stallion, all because the race, run over an extended mile and three quarters, is seen to smear its winners with the slowness brush.
Another reason is that the St Leger, the oldest classic, faces much stiffer competition on the international stage nowadays, with higher-profile and higher-value events to target in Ireland, France and America. It's fair to question whether Nijinsky himself would have contested the St Leger had the Irish Champion Stakes - a race Sea The Stars won a week before the St Leger was run - been in existence in 1970, in which case we'd be going right back to Bahram in 1935 for the last Triple Crown winner. Priorities have changed, as has the racing landscape, and combined they have rendered the Triple Crown virtually extinct in Britain.
American History: X no. of runs
Quite why the wait for another Triple Crown sweep has gone on almost as long in the US as the UK is harder to explain. Unlike in England, the lustre of the Triple Crown has stood the test of time in America, highlighted by the 11 since Affirmed who had their sights set on it after getting two-thirds of the way there, but none were able to complete the job, which itself defies the law of averages. Admittedly, the Belmont is a demanding race due to the mile-and-a-half trip and the fact it comes so soon after Churchill Downs and Pimlico, the whole Triple Crown programme compressed into an intensive five weeks, compared to the outspread five-month series in England. But it has been done before, plenty of times, and so what's changed in the last 33 years?
There is one statistical anomaly in that timespan which might, just might, be at the heart of the matter. In the 1970s, when the Triple Crown was completed three times in arguably its greatest ever era, featuring Secretariat and Seattle Slew prior to Affirmed, horses in the US raced on average 10.2 times per season. Since then, year on year, without fail, that number has steadily dropped, down to a low of 6.1 in 2010. Maybe the breed isn't quite so robust as it used to be, or perhaps the difference is in the approach and conditioning, but whatever the reason there's no ignoring the fact that modern-day horses generally run 40% less in a season than their counterparts from yesteryear, raising the issue of soundness and durability: the two key elements - almost over and above ability - that are tested to the full by the terms and timing of the kingmaker that is the Belmont Stakes, the Triple Crown's final hurdle, the hurdle at which the last 11 would-be kings have fallen.
As the run-ratio evidence suggests, horses in the US seem less able, or less prepared, to race so hard so often as their ancestors, and that's possibly at least part of the explanation why the final piece of the formidable Triple Crown jigsaw has been missing for a third of a century.
So here we are in the middle of 2012 with Triple Crown legs two and three looming for the UK and US respectively, and the game is on...in a big way. Given that it has happened on average once every three years since Affirmed, it's no great surprise that a horse has put himself in position to hole out for the championship on the American tour after two immaculate approach shots, I'll Have Another his name, but what is surprising, nay astounding, is that for the first time in a long time there's a bleep on the heart monitor of the English Triple Crown, and the reason is as much for who's behind the horse as the horse itself.
Four, three, six, five, eight: those are the number of individual horses Aidan O'Brien has run in each of the last five renewals of the Derby, the representation so heavy because O'Brien and the Coolmore partners are essentially traditionalists who regard the Epsom Derby as the greatest race in the world. For traditionalists, the Triple Crown is still the Holy Grail. Since Aidan O'Brien took over at Ballydoyle in 1996 following the retirement of his namesake Vincent, who trained Nijinsky, he's had no end of top-class horses to work with, but none with the magic mix to mould a Triple Crown winner. St Nicholas Abbey was talked of in hushed tones as potentially 'the one', but he failed the first test. Camelot didn't.
Camelot, late-surging winner of the 2000 Guineas and red-hot favourite for the Derby, is by Montjeu, which brings us to another point of climate change. The success of the Coolmore breeding empire, generated by Sadler's Wells and amplified by his sons, in particular Montjeu (died in March but already had three Derby winners to his name), Galileo (sire of Frankel) and High Chaparral (sire of So You Think), has resulted in middle-distance stallions coming back in vogue.
The crucial point is that Coolmore can afford to give Camelot a shot at the Triple Crown because the risk-reward ratio is different for them than almost any other owner-breeder who had a similar horse on their hands. They already have the best stallion roster in Europe, and the Camelot brand is to some degree safeguarded by virtue of his classic win at a mile, added to which Coolmore will have strict control over what mares he's bred with when the time comes.
Coming in the age of Sea The Stars and Frankel, two giants of the turf and neither Coolmore-owned, Camelot, however good he may be, is in danger of being overshadowed in status and value unless he does something special, and what better way to create a competitive legacy than to single-handedly revive the series that was once the only true measure of a champion thoroughbred, the Triple Crown.
Halley's Comet, synonymous with the spectacular and the mystical, was originally thought to be one of the many extinct comets, the type that loses all its effervescence and resonance, until the discovery that it is in fact of the dormant variety, reappearing every 76 years. It's 76 years since the one and only occasion in history that saw cross-Atlantic conjoint winners of the Triple Crown, a once-spectacular and mystical series that has seemed to lose all its effervescence and resonance in Britain and has gone unclaimed for so long in America as to be close to extinction. This year, thanks to the twin stars of I'll Have Another and Camelot, the Triple Crown may reveal itself to have merely been dormant.
Desert Orchid
Senior Jockey
- Joined
- Aug 2, 2005
- Messages
- 24,857
Handicap was moderately run, it seems.
chroniclandlord
Senior Jockey
Or Irish Derby, Juddmonte International, St Leger.
Arazi
At the Start
- Joined
- Oct 13, 2007
- Messages
- 187
Yeah, I didn't think about the Champion Stakes. I just hope that if Frankel does move up to 1m 2f that we actually get the chance to see the two meet at some point.
Euronymous
Senior Jockey
As would Juddmonte to Leger. I agree with Arazi that it's more important for Camelot to meet Frankel than it is him going for the Leger.
Desert Orchid
Senior Jockey
- Joined
- Aug 2, 2005
- Messages
- 24,857
Go the Nijinsky route: Irish Derby, King George and St Leger but leave the season there.
chroniclandlord
Senior Jockey
In truth we have been very lucky to have had Sea the Stars, Frankel and Camelot within 4 crops.
Harbinger
At the Start
- Joined
- Mar 22, 2004
- Messages
- 11,282
Absolutely - it makes Frankel's non-entry in the Irish Champion all the more annoying since Camelot would be 1.01 to run in that if the Leger was ruled out.
Euronymous
Senior Jockey
Frankel vs Camelot would be like Long Run vs Kauto Star vs Denman. Camelot in the Leger would be like Best Mate in his last Gold Cup against so many handicappers. Which Gold Cup did you prefer???
chroniclandlord
Senior Jockey
Can't understand why Frankel's connections didn't leave themselves with the option of the Irish Champion Stakes.
Last edited:
Harbinger
At the Start
- Joined
- Mar 22, 2004
- Messages
- 11,282
Maybe they're 100% set on running him in the Juddmonte and aren't willing to turn him around in 2 1/2 weeks. But you'd think they'd at least give him the option, unless they just don't want to travel him.
chroniclandlord
Senior Jockey
Even if it was only as an insurance against something minor ruling him out of York.
Euronymous
Senior Jockey
The insurance policy there is probably to just wait for the Champion Stakes.
Desert Orchid
Senior Jockey
- Joined
- Aug 2, 2005
- Messages
- 24,857
Yes, without them we'd have had three crap crops.
Euronymous
Senior Jockey
I think the 3yos were up to standard in STS's year.
B
Bruce_Savage
Guest
What a performance from Camelot! I always knew he was capable of such a performance and the 2000 Guineas showed he was the classiest three year old in Europe and stepped up on that with an emphatic but easy dominating performance which was never in doubt throughout the race.
What a prospect, simply an amazing specimen and quite frightening should one horse emerge right after the passing of Montjeu and it's nothing short of remarkable which Ballydoyle are no more deserving off.
Well done Aidan & the team, probably the greatest Derby horse I've witnessed on The Downs.
What a prospect, simply an amazing specimen and quite frightening should one horse emerge right after the passing of Montjeu and it's nothing short of remarkable which Ballydoyle are no more deserving off.
Well done Aidan & the team, probably the greatest Derby horse I've witnessed on The Downs.
edgt
Senior Jockey
Sir Henry is less likely to take in any Irish race historically. He ran Sheikh Mohammed horses to run in and win Irish Derby and Oaks. Twice Over ran in an Irish Champion and Midday a Pretty Polly but that is about it. He prefers the English pattern above all else or at least seems to. Maybe if he had received a little Coolmore patronage like Sir Michael Stoute things may be different.
On another theme Gareth Flynn may be onto something. St Leger followed by Arc is the route nobody took successfully. St Leger Champion route is more doable with the extra weeks in between. Leave Irish Derby for Astrology or Imperial Monarch. From the point of view of stallion makers it is better to maximise Group 1 winners than Group 1 wins.