Naaqoos

Gamla Stan said:
Hype is definied as "excessive publicity."
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Fair enough. But in a racing context isn't the word normally used to denote something that hasn't really done it on the track? Phrases like "pigeon catcher", "works the house down" and "held in the highest regard" spring to mind. For me, Rainbow View is the very opposite of a "hype" horse. She was available for the Guineas at 25/1 for some time after her debut win and I was surprised how little discussion there was about her given its impressive nature. Her price has simply contracted since following each and every victory. She may well be underpriced now but I don't think that's the same thing as being over-hyped.
 
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Thinking of Mastercraftsman, it will be interesting to see if Shaweel runs again this season and how he gets on. I believe he still holds an entry in the Dewhurst? I'm not suggesting he's Group 1 material but he'll have had a bit longer between the National stakes and his next run than Mastercraftsman. I certainly think the previous race took quite a lot out of the latter although the winner was pretty impressive in Sunday.
 
gus said:
She may well be underpriced now but I don't think that's the same thing as being over-hyped.
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Fair comment Gus. I guess she has shown the hype to be true but I do think this years crop of 2 year olds are a weak bunch compared to last year and I'd rather back Proportional at 8s than Rainbow View at 11/4 as she probably won't be massively shorter than her current price if she turns up on the day. That said, she definitely deserves to be favourite.
 
Fantastic Dubai.

Is it just possible Channon may be running his two best prospects back to back at Newbury tommorrow? I've heard a lot of word about Dunes Queen since the spring (I believe Chris doesn't think it's anything special though).

We shall see...
 
Gareth Flynn said:
That's pretty exalted company that Naaqoos has found himself in.
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I “failed to mention” the Salamandre as I did not feel it was relevant in the context of this debate. Since you have mentioned it, yes you are correct it was a significant 2 year old trial for the following years’ classics, and indeed formed part of the famed French juvenile “quadruple” of Papin, Morny, Salamandre and Grand Criterium, notably last won by Arazi in 1991.

Typically, Salamandre winners went to either Newmarket for the Dewhurst or Longchamp for the Grand Criterium (or indeed a notable end of season fillies’ trial as with Miesque). Victory in the Salamandre was not generally perceived as an end in itself, and winning juveniles tended to have to prove themselves in either the Dewhurst or Grand Criterium in order to be really taken seriously as Classic contenders.

Of more relevance to this thread however is the fact that I did not focus on the Grand Criterium in order to establish the Group 1 winning potential of its winners. I specifically referred to Classic winning potential displayed by former winners of the event, as the original poster believes this season’s winner is a Guineas victor waiting to happen.

Nobody doubts the Group 1 merits of many of the Salamandre winners you have listed. However, in terms of unearthing future Classic winners, and even allowing the Salamandre into the equation, you only add a further three names to the list of subsequent Classic winners – Pennekamp and Zafonic (who both won the Dewhurst, and by inference their legendary trainer seemed to regard the Newmarket race as more worthy of his two fledgling stars than the Grand Criterium) and Miesque who took the more orthodox route of the Prix Marcel Boussac (itself a significantly greater source of future Classic winners than the colts’ equivalent, providing 11 future Classic winners since 1970).

The Dewhurst, by way of comparison, has yielded somewhere in the region of 24 future Classic winners in the past 40 renewals. So the Criterium, either on its own, or morphed into the Salamandre is a very poor 3rd behind the Dewhurst and the Boussac in terms of a guide to future Classic winners. Putting it another way, the Dewhurst has yielded 14 individual Classic winners, the Boussac 11, and the Grand Criterium/Salamandre 8 (or 6 excluding Fabre’s two subsequent Dewhurst winners).

Personally I wouldn’t want to back Naaqoos for the Newmarket classic with anybody’s money. I also strongly suspect he will end up going to Longchamp in any event, with Angus Gold stating the decision will be last minute – suggesting to me they probably harbour doubts on the stamina front and will only go to Newmarket if it looks as if it will be particularly sub-standard. Given Head’s success in the sprinting department this year I wouldn’t be surprised to see Naaqoos ending up as a sprinter before next season is out. Only time will tell of course.

Gareth Flynn said:
Yes, but I'm confident that Gamla Stan is basing his opinion on more than just the raw time - he'll have done the necessary adjustments.
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Well, that was not conveyed in his post, and are you/he telling me that he has gone through all previous renewals of the Grand Criterium to establish whether or not the early pace was false (as is so often the case in France) and applied a factor in order to compare the times with the unusually truly run renewal won by Naaqoos who made his own pace once it was clear, in Bonilla's opinion, that Dettori was trying to stack the field up?
 
Of more relevance to this thread however is the fact that I did not focus on the Grand Criterium in order to establish the Group 1 winning potential of its winners. I specifically referred to Classic winning potential displayed by former winners of the event, as the original poster believes this season’s winner is a Guineas victor waiting to happen.
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If Group 1 winning potential is too broad, then so is "Classic" winning potential. If we're talking about a possible Guineas winner, then what does a Derby or even a Leger have to do with it?

In the last 20 years, the winner of the Dewhurst has gone on to win the 2000 Guineas exactly 3 times. They were Zafonic, Pennekamp and Rock of Gibralter. All of whom also won either the Salamandre or Grand Criterium/Lagardere.

Here's the Guineas placings of the last 20 Dewhurst winners:

3 wins, 3 seconds, 1 third from 14 runners

And the Salamandre/Criterum:

3 wins, 3 seconds, 0 thirds from 12 runners

By that measure, the French 7f 2yo championship race has been just as good a pointer towards the 2000 Guineas as the British 7f 2yo championship.
 
chrisbeekracing said:
The Guineas winner aint stepped out its stable yet but may do on Friday. :)
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From Chris:

Mick Channon does have two nice horses at Newbury today. Dunes Queen (1.40) has improved of late and shows promise with Sweet Lily at home, whilst Fantastic Dubai (2.10) is a horse with plenty of potential but is American bred on soft ground. He works as good as Orizaba.

However my big horse today runs in the 3.50 and is a Mark Johnston horse. ROMAN REPUBLIC I'm told is the second coming on Shamardal.

His work at home has seen him saunter 5L clear of Shaweel and Jukebox Jury on the snaffle, whilst more recently he stretched away from easy Hamilton and Folkestone winners Q'uai D'Orsay and Saint Arch.

This horse is expected to go to Doncaster for the Racing Post Trophy after today and the guys in the Middleham long grass expect nothing but a classic from this horse. I've got 66s for the Guineas and 80s for the Derby about this fella and he has done plenty of work to suggest inexperience shouldn't be a factor today. I think he'll be around the 2/1 mark but is strongly expected to collect and go on to big things.
 
French race times and distances should be questioned more often I think.
This 6f 211 yard race official time of 1.18.4 [I timed at 1.17.8 and I'm usually half a sec under], seems highly questionable to me, on good to soft, 1400metres. I suggest, knowing how lackadaisacal the French can be [witness the It's Gino/Soldier of Fortune debacle], I believe this 6f 211 yds is more like 6f 150 yards, but well short of 7 furlongs. The winner to my eye didn't look like one who would be suited to a proper mile at Newmarket.
 
I am not impressed with Naqoos, in fact , if this one is the Guineas horse , what a bunch of 2yo colts this season, maybe the worst ever.
 
Dakota - the 1400m course is definitely short.

At 1400m, it should be around 1531 yards. Measured on Google Earth, it's around 1487 yards.
 
that's useful, - so that's about 6f 167 yards then, oh well I wasn't far out..lol
but distance anomalies aside, most 2000 Guineas these days are won in around 1.36-1.38, so the question I would ask is, did Naaqoos look like he'd be happy to be competitive for another 18-20 seconds and with a stiffer finish, albeit in 7 months time. Didn't look like it to me.
 
Galileo said:
However my big horse today runs in the 3.50 and is a Mark Johnston horse. ROMAN REPUBLIC I'm told is the second coming on Shamardal.

His work at home has seen him saunter 5L clear of Shaweel and Jukebox Jury on the snaffle, whilst more recently he stretched away from easy Hamilton and Folkestone winners Q'uai D'Orsay and Saint Arch.

This horse is expected to go to Doncaster for the Racing Post Trophy after today and the guys in the Middleham long grass expect nothing but a classic from this horse. I've got 66s for the Guineas and 80s for the Derby about this fella and he has done plenty of work to suggest inexperience shouldn't be a factor today. I think he'll be around the 2/1 mark but is strongly expected to collect and go on to big things.
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Finished midfield with the RP saying he found little under pressure.
 
Unfortunately I'm decamped on a machine that is taking me about 5 mins to open a thread (and will be for a few days yet). I meant to start a thread on this as race times at Longchamp in particular and Deauville to a lesser extent are getting nothing short of hysterical. Standards are routinely blasted apart by 3 or 4 secs on ground that is described as being good to soft.

There's obviously a number of reasons as to why this might be happening, but its getting very hard to get an accurate handle things. The distances being wrong is an obvious answer, but that won't matter provided they're proportionately wrong at each specified distance to the same degree. I was wondering how old the standards are? If it's down the ground, that's potentially to our advantage as we have the edge.

So far I've been lucky, as the fast horses I've unearthed in France, have for the most part looked after me, but it could just be I've caught it right through good fortune rather than judgement, and that over a period of time I'm going to be drawing more wrong conclusions than right. I suspect the standards need recalcualting, for even if they've got the distances wrong, it won't matter so long as the stalls are being put in the wrong place each time.
 
I think the reason that the Nouvelle Piste is short is down to it being on a spur.

Measuring the Arc course on Google Earth shows it to be the advertised distance. All other distances on the Grande Piste and Moyenne Piste should also be as advertised although there's no obvious point of reference to measure them from.

Regarding the Racing Post standards... personally I think they're poor.

Firstly, they make no allowance for whether the race was run on the Moyenne Piste or Grande Piste (or the Piste Ronde for that matter). Indeed if you went solely by the info on the RP site you wouldn't even know there was multiple tracks there!

Secondly, lets just take a look at the standards for the distances between 1m and 1m4f. Let's assume that the RP standards intend to reflect the Grande Piste (with the possible exception of 9f, which might be only on the Moyenne Piste), and let's ignore the extra inaccuracies brought in by using the imperial measurements rather than the metric ones that the course uses. Remember, all these distances are subsets of each other; they're run on the same piece of track:

Yards : Seconds
1760 : 97.4
1870 : 104
1980 : 110.5
2035 : 113
2145 : 119
2200 : 123.9
2310 : 130
2420 : 137
2640 : 151.5

Now, if we graph these figures we get:

2927211775_a8db594845_o.png


Now that looks a bit odd to me. On the same piece of track, where the topography isn't dramatic, I'd expect the above relationship to be a little more uniform.

Another way of graphing it is not to look at the distance vs the standard time, but at the distance vs the average speed required to meet the standard time.

Obviously you wouldn't expect the relationship to be linear, as an 8f race would be run at a higher relative speed to a 12f race.

Here's the data:

Yards : Miles per hour
1760 : 36.96
1870 : 36.78
1980 : 36.65
2035 : 36.84
2145 : 36.87
2200 : 36.32
2310 : 36.35
2420 : 36.13
2640 : 35.64

The eagle-eyed amongst you won't need the graph, but here it is anyway:

2928144002_8b2832660a_o.png


Does it make sense to anyone why the average speed required to meet the standard actually goes up no less than 3 times despite the distance increasing? Am I wrong about the topography? Is there a big downhill bit exclusive only to those distances or something?!? Or are the standard times just, well, slapdash? Given that only 4 of the 9 are precise to less than a second, I know which one I think it is...
 
Gareth,

Firstly the debate about Naaqoos has been regarding his chances of winning the Newmarket 2,000 Guineas, so taking into account placings of 2 year old trials winners is spurious.

Secondly you appear to have selected a timeframe (20 years) which makes your theory more impressive than if we were to focus back on the period of the last 40 runnings of each race which is where my stats were from.

Moreover I still don't buy this "Salamandre/Criterium" as one race element of your argument. Especially as the two horses that make your stats appear more impressive, Pennekamp and Zafonic, would have been aimed at the Grand Criterium had they not been considered worthy Newmarket horses.

But even sticking with your theory for a moment, and reapplying my original timeframe, we find the Dewhurst responsible for 6 Guineas winners, the Grand Criterium just the 1 (I am actually going back to Sir Ivor now so you don't accuse me of manipulating my sample) and the Salamandre 3.

However, if we actually go the whole hog and go back to 1875 when the Criterium was first run, only 2 subsequent Guineas winners have ever won the Grand Criterium. In that same period 14 Dewhurst winners went on to take the Guineas. The Salamandre was only short lived and from 1959-200 it was responsible for 3 Guineas winners whereas the Dewhurst was responsible for twice that figure.

If you still insist the Salamandre must be included as part of the measurement of the Criterium's classic winner finding credentials from 1959-2000, then it is only fair to couple the Dewhurst with one of the main English Group 1/2 juvenile contests run in mid-late September to provide a fair comparison. This leaves us with the Middle Park over 6 furlongs and the Champagne over 7 furlongs. Both races that would have been regarded as direct competitors of the Salamandre.

The Middle Park has yielded 4 Guineas winners since 1968 and the Champagne Stakes 3. However since 1875, the year the Grand Criterium started, both the Middle Park and Champagne have yielded 17 Guineas winners each - compared with the Dewhurst total of 14 and the Grand Criterium/Salamandre total of 5. Although if we are being totally accurate we need to add the Middle Park or Champagne totals to the Dewhurst for the period 1959-2000 (when the Salamandre existed), which increases the Dewhurst total to 17.

Whichever way you look at it fairly, the Grand Criterium is a very poor trial for the English 2,000 Guineas.

Gareth Flynn said:
If Group 1 winning potential is too broad, then so is "Classic" winning potential. If we're talking about a possible Guineas winner, then what does a Derby or even a Leger have to do with it?

In the last 20 years, the winner of the Dewhurst has gone on to win the 2000 Guineas exactly 3 times. They were Zafonic, Pennekamp and Rock of Gibralter. All of whom also won either the Salamandre or Grand Criterium/Lagardere.

Here's the Guineas placings of the last 20 Dewhurst winners:

3 wins, 3 seconds, 1 third from 14 runners

And the Salamandre/Criterum:

3 wins, 3 seconds, 0 thirds from 12 runners

By that measure, the French 7f 2yo championship race has been just as good a pointer towards the 2000 Guineas as the British 7f 2yo championship.
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I would regard the Salamandre as the predecessor to the Prix Jean-Luc Lagardere for the following reasons.

1) It is run over the same C&D as the Salamandre was, at a time a couple of weeks later in the calendar.
2) The Criterium International was also introduced at the same time as the Lagardere, being run at roughly the same point in the calendar as the old Grand Criterium and at the same distance as the Grand Criterium (and attracting much the same type of horse in the process).
3) The Grand Criterium was shit for producing top notch 3yo's, the Salamandre was not. The Lagardere is also not shit at producing top notch 3yo's. I suspect the distance has much to do with this.
4) On the first running of the Lagardere, some geezer off the telly said, "this is a new race which has replaced the old Prix de la Salamandre".
5) I don't care if the French have it labelled with Grand Criterium in brackets. They just didn't like the fact that their supposedly premier Group 1 2yo race was shit.

As for the relative merits of the Salamandre and Dewhurst in producing 2000 Guineas winners, I would suggest that using the last 20 years is a much more reliable means. One could probably dig up some stat or other that suggests that the "We're All Going To Newmarket To Piss On The Peasantry - no grading because grading is for peasants Stakes", now run at Kempton on the all-weather as the "Grade F crap that used to be a very reliable trial for the 2000 Guineas don't you know Stakes" was won by 40 winners between 1780 and 1852. In other words, trends in horse racing are fluid. I also can't be arsed looking further back.

I would further suggest that as 9 of the last 20 runnings have been won by a horse which won one of the 3 7f Gp1's (Dewhurst, Lagardere/Salamandre and National Stakes) that all have equal relevance in the search for next year's Guineas winner although I would not regard a 15% success rate as sufficient evidence to make me want to place a bet on that basis alone.
 
(Gareth) What's RP's course-code for Longchamps?

Trying to load the Longchamps course info on RP, using a url like:
[FONT=&quot]www.racingpost.co.uk/horses/a_days_racing.sd?r_date=2008-10-06&crs=LNG&ctry=FR&data=standard_times[/FONT]

... but without luck.

Either it's only visible when the date is not in the past or my guesses for the tla for Longchamps have been no good ....
 
They don't have pages for the French courses - to get the standard times you have to find actual races and reverse-calculate them from the time info. I'll try and post the full set they use for Longchamp later this evening.
 
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