'HAIR CUT "
- Bruno@Racingwithbruno
- 13 hours ago
- 4 min read
Well, hell, ALL HAIL SOVEREIGNTY. We all bend the knee.
Knowing Mott, he’ll put him in bubble wrap, point him toward the Breeders’ Cup at Keeneland, and call it his last hoorah. That’s probably the plan.
We felt Magnitude wasn’t coming into the race Asmussen-style. The filly is courageous. White Abarrio? He can’t stand Saratoga. Baeza?
Baeza is the dilemma.
He has tons of talent, but I’m starting to believe there are some hind-end hiccups going on that are causing him to break slowly and not take the turns as well as he should. You see, you need that hind end to push off to get out of the gate, and Baeza is getting worse at it.
I’d be focused on the rear end.
Handicappers think it’s elementary: put him in the gate and school him.
That’s not the problem.
He knows what to do.
It’s like you and your back issues. Try getting up off the couch the way you did when you were 20. No shot. You need some help, or you slowly crank yourself up and get moving.
Same thing with Baeza.
We can’t tease him with Cheetos to get him out of the gate.
And another question was brought up to me: Why did Baeza go to Mott when Mott already had Sovereignty at the same class level?
I gave up a long time ago trying to figure out why owners pick certain trainers. Other than cashing a ticket on a trainer with a good win percentage, the decision-making process is way beyond my pay grade.
Personally, I look for a trainer who does well, communicates, and doesn’t have 500 horses spread out across the country. I don’t believe in paying $125 a day to get an assistant I don’t know, somewhere I don’t know, and then having to beg, borrow and steal for a morsel of information about my own horse.
I’m lucky. I have David Fawkes and his assistant, Eric Gary. I get to throw my two cents in. They communicate. That means something to me.
Then you have the jockey colony at Saratoga, which controls everything.
Right now, they’re focused on which one of them is going to win six races on a day.
Irad did it.
Franco did it.
Now it’s Jose’s turn.
Your handicapping should start and stop with Irad and Jose.
Except Irad is out right now with an ankle issue and is off all his mounts today.
So now we get to the elephants in the room.
The Triple Crown.
The new series.
The Preakness moving a week later.
And what does that do? It throws the Belmont Stakes into flux. Now you have to move it back or face the backlash from trainers who say they can’t get the necessary veterinary work done after the Preakness.
And there it is.
The veterinary work.
Trainers nowadays can’t run without vet work. Some can’t seem to run without injecting everything in the barn goats included. Joint injections have become the go-to training technique.
This whole Preakness and Triple Crown uproar isn’t really about horse safety.
It’s about veterinary work.
An old-time jockey and horseman put it to me pretty plainly: “It’s a slap in the face to old horsemen.The Triple Crown was the toughest thing to win in sports.” Said former rider and baby developer Rudy Delguidice.
Then he added, “Back then, there were no injections in the joints.”
I recall the late Jack Van Berg telling me, “I can do with ice what other trainers do with chemicals.”
Different era.
Different horsemen.
Now it’s inject and run.
Look at Forego.
That horse had ankles the size of baseballs. Frank Whiteley didn’t reach for a needle first. He iced them. He hosed them with cold water. He did it for hours with Rudy’s help.
Whiteley would have Rudy Delguidice stand outside and hose Forego down for thirty minutes, then another thirty minutes, then probably another thirty minutes.
And horses like Honorable Miss.
You didn’t say no to Frank Whiteley.
Rudy told me the story.
Whiteley had told him, “You are not getting on one of my horses if you don’t cut your hair.”
Rudy was stubborn about his hair.
Very stubborn.
He told me his valet chased him around the jockeys’ room with scissors, yelling that he was crazy for refusing to cut his hair and ride for Whiteley.
Rudy was stubborn about that hair, maybe even worse than Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever.
Then Rudy said, “Whiteley liked me. You know what he did to Jacinto Vazquez?”
Now I’m all ears.
“That crusty old trainer made Jacinto, who was suspended at the time, get on a pony and take Ruffian to the post at Monmouth.”
That’s Frank Whiteley.
And Rudy eventually fessed up: “The Rudy today would have gotten his hair cut.”
Exactly.
Trainers today want the ability to push the envelope.
So do the jockeys.
And you see jockeys riding for trainers who love seeing the veterinarians in their barn. Nobody is asking them to stand around with a hose for an hour. Nobody is threatening to cut their hair.
The old horsemen had ice.
They had water.
They had patience.
They had horsemanship.
Today?
We have a needle.
And everybody wants to tell us it’s about horse safety.
Maybe some of it is.
But don’t tell me the veterinary component isn’t sitting in the middle of this entire Triple Crown argument, because it is.
The game has changed.
The horses have changed.
The trainers have changed.
And apparently, the haircuts have changed too.
But if you want to understand where racing is going, don’t just look at the dates on the Triple Crown calendar.
Look at who is standing outside the barn with a hose on horses ankles—
Today is a BIG DAY at Ellis with a full workout report our 4 Star Works have been gold there.
