Don't Get Fooled Again!
- Bruno@Racingwithbruno
- Apr 20
- 4 min read
Ah… the stopwatch. That charming little tyrant, ticking away with all the subtlety of a metronome at a funeral, can fool everyone who's paying too much attention to it.
Beware of opinions born from it.
Them Who was quite astute, "Won't get Fooled Again"
"I'll tip my hat to the new Constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I'll get on my knees and pray
We don't get fooled again"
You see, people love certainty. Numbers give them that illusion—clean, digestible, absolute.
But racing… horses… they exist in the margins, in the spaces numbers can’t quite reach. And yet, you’ll find no shortage of zealots willing to push every last chip into that tidy little basket.
It’s all they have.
A wise horseman once told me, “If you’re looking at your stopwatch, you’re not looking at the horse.” Brilliant. Brutal. Entirely ignored.
We shouldn't get fooled again, year after year, but most do.
Because what passes for expertise these days—particularly on those delightful little social media stages—is A timed performance. Flash. Velocity. Emotion masquerading as insight.
They want brilliance at a glance, a spectacle they can applaud before their coffee cools. And so they miss it… the texture, the restraint, the individuality. Every horse a different mind, a different temperament, a different negotiation.
But let’s get technical, shall we?
Morning works… ah, now there’s an art form butchered daily by the uninitiated. Trainers will stage them—carefully, deliberately. A workmate isn’t competition; it’s theater. A chaperone. A steadying presence to carry a Derby horse to a designated point before quietly stepping aside, allowing the principal actor to finish the scene alone.
Why? Confidence. Composure. Pressure management.
Because the last thing you want—the very last thing—is to empty the tank ten days out of the biggest race of the year.
Gallops, now… that’s where the real misunderstandings bloom.
Most people aren’t fluent in them. Not even conversationally. They see a gallop the same way they see a timed work—through the crude lens of speed, energy, tempo. They crave flashiness. A strong, aggressive gallop gets them leaning forward, nodding approvingly, convinced they’ve witnessed something meaningful.
The trainer, meanwhile… is quietly horrified.
A horse rolling through furlongs in 13s and 14s during a gallop? That’s not impressive—it’s excessive. It’s leakage. Too much, too soon, too often. And now you have a problem.
Because training is a balancing act, not a fireworks display.
If you gallop fast, you must work slow.If you gallop slow—16s, 17s, 18s—you can afford to let them roll when it counts.
Do both fast and out of control, and you have a greyhound in the barn. [meaning the horse loses weight faster than being on ozempic]
American Pharoah lost the Travers to Keen Ice after galloping like a madman, fueled by a crowd of ten thousand at 8 am at Saratoga. 'Pharoah was galloping in 13s and 14s on back to back days, that's taxxing. He lost.
That's the tell… the subtle betrayal of a horse teetering on the edge. Over the top. Heading for that inevitable, disappointing regression—the bounce. They’ll gallop too fast, too eager, unable to contain themselves. It looks like enthusiasm to the casual observer.
American Pharoah was on edge, got in a speed duel and here came Keen Ice, the product of the 'Pharoah' doing too much.
Too much really - It isn’t what you want.
It’s imbalance.
"But why Bruno, why, you wisin up dummies"
You tell someone until you are blue in the face, and the next day, they just get fooled again.
As that wonderfully paradoxical philosopher Yogi Berra once quipped, “This game is 90% mental and the other half is physical.” Absurd… and yet, uncomfortably accurate. Because it’s the mental strain—the pressure, the expectation, the overexertion—that cracks them first.
So when you hear it—“He was full of energy in his gallop!”—delivered with breathless enthusiasm and an exclamation point…
Understand something.
That’s not praise.
That’s a warning.
You don’t want fireworks in the morning. You want quiet. Control. A horse that listens to itself… and to you.
Ah, pedigrees… the aristocracy of assumption.
One of my personal favorites. The reverence, the certainty—“This one will run forever. His brother won at Santa Anita, came back and did it again at Hollywood Park…”—as if stamina were a family heirloom, neatly folded and passed down like grandmother’s silver.
Please.
What they’re selling you is lineage. What they’re ignoring is the mind.
You can trace bloodlines back through champions, map them like constellations, convince yourself you’re reading destiny written in bone and muscle. But the truth? Each horse arrives with its own private calculus—its own limits, fears, appetites, tolerances. Mental capacity… that’s the currency. And it doesn’t show up in a sales catalog.
I’ve seen beautifully bred horses—royalty, on paper—fold at the first sign of pressure. And others, modestly assembled, rise with a kind of stubborn brilliance you simply can’t predict. Because they want it differently. They process it differently.
It’s not so unlike people.
You might have a brother—disciplined, relentless, lives in the gym, thrives on routine. And then there’s you… less enthusiastic about self-inflicted suffering. Same blood, same upbringing… entirely different wiring.
But in racing, we have this charming habit of flattening complexity. Of lassoing individuality into tidy narratives so we can sound informed, authoritative… impressive at brunch.
“How’s he bred?” they ask, as if that settles it.
It doesn’t.
Horses aren’t carbon copies, and they certainly aren’t bound by the expectations of their relatives. Very few siblings—human or otherwise—share identical character. Why would they?
They wouldn’t.
And yet, here we are… still pretending.
Horses ain’t no different, Sparky and that is has to be something to be reminded to professionals and casual onlookers every Triple Crown season:
'Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss"
