From James Willoughbys Racing Post Blog:
Mine That Bird: the other side of the story
KENTUCKY DERBY 135: REDUX
Let's say that Mine That Bird wins the Preakness, or even runs second or third. What rationalisation could we construct to explain the transformation which would now have been validated?
So, it turns out it wasn't the pace or the rails bias or the muddy track which caused his dramatic improvement. His two defeats at Sunland Park in New Mexico had suggested he was a Listed class performer at best, but now we know he is a Grade 1 star.
Conspiracy theorists have pointed to the fact that his owner is a vet. In this day and age, it is hardly surprising this is the cause of suspicion. But let's not get sidetracked by this fanciful aspersion.
Instead, let's focus on the fact that Mine That Bird was actually a good two-year-old. He was the champion juvenile of Canada, to be exact. While this doesn't usually amount to a hill of beans by top-class standards, it does prove that the colt was at least the best of his subculture.
Next, we need to forget that he was thrashed in the Breeders' Cup Juvenile. His trainer now says he wasn't right for that mission and he should never have run him. So, we still have an unexposed colt.
In the Sunland Park defeats, Mine That Bird was ridden prominently. He was probably not fully fit anyway, but this style of running may not suit him. Now we know he wants dropping out and riding patiently.
Before his Churchill Downs romp, Mine That Bird had been running and been trained at altitude in New Mexico. Could this highly unusual factor have served to give him an advantage?
It is tempting to mock the idea, I know, but ifyou are a regularly punter at Turf Paradise in Arizona, as I am, you will be familiar with the notion that horses who ship in have a big disadvantage, even when they appear to have superior credentials.
This is such an apparent angle that shippers often look to represent good value because the locals have learned not to trust their credentials. And the reason that interlopers bomb out so often is that they need to become accustomed to the thinner air.
You don't buy this as a factor for Mine That Bird's dramatic improvement? No, neither do I, but some have advanced it as a theory in a desperate search to link elusive cause and dramatic effect.
Horses do improve for no apparent reason. As punters, we have to accept that they are simply reborn, or else we will pay the price when assessing them in future.
Perhaps Mine That Bird simply improved fora bit of maturity. Perhaps something just clicked. Perhaps.
To be honest, I don't know. And if he goes and wins the Preakness, or even runs well, I will still not know.
Predicting how horses are going to run is not an exact science. But if Mine That Bird is for real after all, it will be hard to think of racing as a sceince at all.
To be fair, you can't run 2:02.66 for 10 furlongs atChurchill Downs and be a bad horse. The shocking 2006 Derby winner Giacomo wasn't a bad horse. He was plodding along minding his own business and the race just collapsed around his ears.
But this was something else. I won't go into the reasons specific to the peculiar circumstances of Kentucky Derby 135 which I think caused Mine That Bird to pull the shocker. If you are interested in the race, you will have heard these already or beenable to work them out for yourself.
Whether they are real of imagined, objective or constructed to fit the circumstances, they were a freakish combination of elements and conspired to produce what I think was a truly freakish result. 50-1? He should have been 250-1.
But I wll say this. In just over the two minutes on Saturday, months of work which you may have read on this blog were ruined, in addition to a £350 superfecta perm and the three lots of £200 I had on Quality Road at 14-1 before it.
Incidentally, I haven't been doing very well with my ante-post betting recently. You can read in Monday's Racing Post my philosophical response to the non-participation of Fantasia and Crowded House in their respective Guineas, now that we know that horses who were preferred to them by the same connections did not run.
I didn't have much on either, and I had more on Rainbow View, to be honest. But I still think it is ridiculous that Fantasia wasn't there.
But the money means nothing in the case of the Kentucky Derby. What really hurts is the damage to the reputation of a race whose vitues and excitement I have tried to bring to a sceptical British audience - despite the doping controversies, the deaths and the deep-seated antipathy of all things American.
I so wanted Racing UK to be able to bring a brilliant race between brilliant horses to its viewers on Saturday night. Instead, it was a muddy nighgtmare for punters and a result which threatened to plunge the whole occasion into farce.
It took a fabulous Breeders' Cup at Santa Anita to repair some of the damage caused by Monmouth before it. Now, I think Kentucky Derby 136 will need to be truly special. After all, people are going to remember Mine That Bird's farcical romp for a long time.
The more I think about it, the more I would like him to win the Preakness to show that the whole damn thing wasn't quite as bizarre as it looked.
But I don't believe it. And I have solid, scientific reasons for not believing it, more numerous and concrete than anything I can come up with to explain the reverse.
You, of course, may disagree. But don't wait until he has won the Preakness to make that claim. Stand up for your beliefs now, so that you will appear as daft when he finishes tailed off as the rest of us will if he wins.
So, who's going tostart the Mine That Bird fan club? Please sign in underneath.
Good to see him back and hopefully his foot held out.