Truth vs Myth

We receive many questions. Inquiries, really—observations, theories, even the occasional half-baked conspiracy masquerading as insight. And so, in an effort to clarify—not to appease, mind you, but to clarify—we thought we’d take you on a little stroll behind the curtain. A glimpse, if you will, at how the proverbial sausage is made.

Now, we work one day in advance. Not two. Not six. One. It's deliberate. Intentional. Methodical. You see, while many are already salivating over Saturday’s card by Tuesday morning—spinning theories in group chats and tossing darts at past performance sheets—we’re buried in Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Because those cards run first. And the horses working for them? They deserve attention. Not speculation. Not fantasy.

Now, one of my personal favorite comments—truly, a gem of naive entitlement—was: "Don't you have somebody do that for you?" As if we operate in some fantasy land where trained elves identify horses from blurry video clips and magically intuit trainer intent from a morning gallop. No. There are three of us—three—who analyze and comment on these works. And only two of us, Amy Kearns and myself, are tasked with the identification of every single horse in every single video.

And here’s the thing most people simply do not grasp: there is no list. No lineup. No tidy Excel sheet handed out at 4:00 a.m. with names and saddle cloth numbers. The backside is chaos. Controlled, yes, but chaos nonetheless. Horses come out in waves, 40 gate works, 160 flats, 200-something bodies moving in the mist—and we’re responsible for making sense of it all. Watching 50 to 75 videos per track, every morning, every day.

So no—we're not lounging around handicapping Saturday's 10th race on a Wednesday afternoon. We're in the trenches, entering and evaluating works, creating order from disorder. It is not glamorous. It is not automated. And it is most certainly not delegated to an intern with a checklist and a dream.

Ah, but then came another gem. A “handicapper” with a bone to pick. He objected to my rating—insisting that the speed horse in a team drill deserved the higher mark. His logic? “It won the work.” How quaint.

You see, in this particular drill—a Wesley Ward pair, no less—the speed horse did what speed horses do: jumped out early, set a solid tempo, and finished ahead. But the other? A late-running closer type. One of those runners whose talent cannot be measured in the confines of a short, sharp workout. Speed horses always look better in the morning. It's not that they're better—it’s that they’re designed to look better in that context.

Still, this handicapper insisted. Argued. Protested, even. Until race day arrived.

The speed horse ran on Friday. Looked the part early, tired late. Finished a noble, yet unimpressive, third. And the closer? The very horse he dismissed? Stormed down the lane on Saturday and blew the field away—at 5-1.

And suddenly... silence.

See, this is where most people fail. They try to make calls—bets, really—on horses, based not on what’s actually in front of them, but on a series of myths and half-truths passed down like bedtime stories. “If a team work fails in a race, downgrade both.” Nonsense. “If a horse is eased, it must be a throwaway.” Ignorant. “The rider stiffed him.” Please.

What people don't understand—and often refuse to understand—is that horses tell you who they are. But only if you know how to listen. Most don’t. Most are too busy chasing narratives that sound clever over cocktails but fall apart in the light of day.

Handicapping with actual horse knowledge is foreign to many. They cling to their “speed and fade” angles, their “voided claim” theories, their little superstitions dressed up as expertise. But at the end of the day, excuses don’t cash tickets. Truth does.

Ah... truth. The quintessential ingredient in any worthwhile venture. “And the truth shall set you free”—where did I read that? Ah yes, the Book of John. Brilliant. And yet, so inconvenient for most. Especially, I find, in the world of handicapping.

Handicappers—God bless them—operate not in truth, but in shadows. They sift through numbers—man-made numbers—and clutch them like ancient scripture. A horse "regressed" by a point or two on a speed figure scale, and suddenly it’s a red alert, DEFCON 1. They’ll argue over a Beyer figure like Einstein himself calculated it with a chalkboard and a pipe.

But let’s be clear—it’s a guess. A sophisticated one, perhaps. But a guess nonetheless. No more definitive than the final time blinking on the toteboard—assuming, of course, the industry timed it correctly. Which, as we’ve chronicled time and again, is a generous assumption at best.

You see, horses can make liars out of you. They will, if you let them. But—and this is the part most miss—they also whisper truths. Subtle, fleeting little truths. Not in past performances or color-coded figures, but in movement, in behavior, in the tack they wear. The question is: are you listening?

Take, for instance, the horse wearing that unsightly outside-cup blinker over his right eye. He's not dressed as a pirate for Halloween. He’s not preparing for the Renaissance Faire. That “eye patch”, as some like to call it, is a message. The horse drifts out—lugs out—whether by habit, mental immaturity, or some undiagnosed physical ailment. And the blinker? A desperate attempt to keep him straight.

It goes long way to say that watching horses in the post parade is a must.

Then there’s the poor soul with the kitchen sink strapped to his face—blinkers, shadow roll, figure-eight noseband. Looks more like he's going to war than to the post parade. The average horseplayer sees it and shrugs, “must be some sort of equipment.” No... it’s a trainer’s quiet confession. A signal that everything short of divine intervention has been tried to make this horse live up to expectations—or at the very least, to finish the damn race with some energy and focus.

Personally, I have a deep affection for the horse who needs no equipment. Or at worst, a small pair of blinker cups—nothing you could drink your morning espresso out of. Subtle. Simple. Honest.

Because the truth, my dear friend, is not hidden in the numbers. It’s not encrypted in a past performance line or whispered on a podcast from a man who’s never mucked a stall in his life. The truth is what you see—if, and only if—you understand what you're looking at.

And that... that is what separates the tourists from the tacticians.

And in this game, as in life, the truth is rarely loud. But it is always there. If you know where to look.