"As you guys know, true mile and a quarter horses, there aren’t a lot of them." ~ Wayne Lukas

And by the time we know that, the Derby will be over. And that’s the great thing about the Derby. By and large it’s a bunch of horses that can’t run a mile and a quarter being asked to run a mile and a quarter. Facts are stubborn and statistics can be fickle; Giacomo won and that’s a fact. Bellamy Road had the highest Beyer of any horse going into his Derby but he wasn’t a mile and a quarter horse; that’s a fact.

Year after year the best laid plans of talented trainers and horses like Nick Zito and Bellamy Road, Todd Pletcher and Bandini and Kenny McPeek and Harlan's Holiday come undone in that last quarter mile.

Will this year will be any different; I will be betting it won’t. It should be Todd’s year. Todd has a winning formula with one flaw, it doesn’t work in the Triple Crown and underperforms in the Breeders Cup. Why is it that his horses all peak one race too soon. I don’t know but it is a fact and given his resources it makes you wonder what Michael Matz, Michael Dickinson or John Servis could do with them. Maybe you really can’t be prepared for Kentucky Derby? Too many really good horses have lost the Derby to discount that idea.

That’s why I am not looking at any of Todd’s horses to win this year. He may very well win every prep up to the Derby and wind up losing to that mile and a quarter horse whose name we don’t know yet.