Originally posted by Headstrong@Apr 4 2008, 05:48 PM
The King horses are flying right now and I'm more than ever convinced there was a bug in the yard [or parts of it at least] earlier in the season. Great to see this horse come really good again; tho MM didn't look the same horse to me.
Maybe the sticky ground at Cheltenham took an awful lot out of the winners? - form is carrying through even less than other years
I don't think Ruby is to blame for either KS yesterday or MM today ploughing through the fences - both horses were at the end of their tether at the time, and it can be better to leave them be in those circumstances
This would be the virus that was used selectively during the months of December and January to explain away a few poor performances even though December was very productive for King, and the two months combined gave him 44 winners at a strike rate of 20% for a LSP of 55.91
If King ever finds this virus, can I suggest he bottles it, patents it, and sells it to a few other trainers who could only dream of such chronic under performance.
The explanation for VPU is pretty straight forward imo. I'm sure I must be on record on this forum somewhere, (I certainly am elsewhere) as suggesting that King has had his 2 milers the wrong way round all season. MWDS should have been his 2 miler, and VPU his 2 and half miler.
In the World Hurdle we saw MWDS travel well until he hit that 19.75F to 21F area where he goes out like a light under a strong gallop. In the Champion Chase we saw VPU taken off his feet (but in fairness I can't think of any horse in training who wouldn't have been). But when he's stepped up, he wins. At least my hypothesis is increasingly capable of being supported by factual evidence as things have unfolded, rather than speculation which had little grounding in facts then, and none more now.
As regards Ruby not being at fault;
I thought both Nicholls's and Walsh's revisions of yesterdays events with 24 hours to consider it were most illuminating. Walsh conceeded that it was the jump at the second last that cost Kauto the race, not the tactics, though obviously stopped short of blaming himself, other than to say that it's his job to deliver the horse. Nicholls basically said the horse didn't jump well enough, (though stopped short of saying that the jockey let him go from too far back). If the horses were at the end of their tethers (something I doubt given that both had just hit the front and were starting to assert). Then surely the jockey, if he were going to do anything, should get in closer and at least ensure a safe passage, with a slow jump?. By standing so far off the fence and asking for a big one which is going to require even more energy, makes it even more of Ruby's fault (if the horses were emptying).
Your explanations might hold some water Headstrong, but I think there are increasingly more convincing ones.