Weekend Winners Club

Monday, June 11, 2018, Belmont Park. The usual Monday morning jockeying has been going on since Saturday night, with the backers of the favorite happily saying they told you so. These were the same people who wanted to tell you so 12 times between 1978 and 2015, but couldn’t.
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Then there are those looking for excuses, some claiming collusion with stablemate Restoring Hope, who set out in pursuit of the champ from the gate. What are stablemates for anyway? Although he did appear to box in Bravazo, who I told you was a non contender beforehand, they both faded anyway.
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What happened was that the favorite won! Imagine that. Justify was the betting favorite, as most Kentucky Derby – Preakness champions are, even those such as Charismatic and War Emblem who had trouble getting backers on Preakness day. But he’s also only the 2nd such horse in the last 14 attempts to win the Belmont.
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Justify is clearly an excellent racehorse, and the best of this group of 3yos, and deserved to win, whether Restoring Hope was in the race or not. Rumor has it Baffert didn’t even want the other one in the race, but the owners wanted the chance at Belmont glory. Good for them.
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Undefeated and with 4-5 odds, most people thought Justify would win. I personally thought he would finish 2nd, given that the Derby-Preakness favorite has lost 12 of the last 14 Belmont Stakes, normally finishing 2nd or 3rd. But I was hardly surprised that Justify won, and nobody should be.
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What many are probably surprised about was who finished 2nd. Gronkowski, obviously still no favorite or friend of New York, had a great late kick to chase the favorite into the wire for 2nd at 25-1. This one was hard for most to figure out, given his track record. Let’s look at that record.
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Gronk came off 4 wins on polytrack at a mile each in Europe, including 2 Kentucky Derby qualifying races, which gave him the right to run for the roses, which he did not. But Chad Brown is a favorite and friend of New York, and probably not have put him in the race if he thought it was too tall an order.
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Unfortunately, like most American racing statistics outfits, including the biggest ones like DRF and Brisnet, we don’t have the full race data and fractions for European races. Therefore you see a bunch of blanks where speed and performance figures should be.
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Except that DRF issued Timeform ratings for him, along with Beyers for the other horses, expecting you to make some kind of comparison. Which you actually can, because we have a conversion chart for that. In the future, hopefully we can just get the data from somewhere and insert it into our own database.
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So like most Triple Crown races, there was at least 1 wildcard longshot finishing in the superfecta that few people expected. The next 2, Hofburg and Vino Rosso, were back to exact betting order. In 5th place was 5th choice Tenfold, edging out Bravazo who was the 4th betting choice.
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So, we have a new Triple Crown Champion, obviously. Perhaps more importantly, Bob Baffert now has two such champions, joining an elite group of 1 or maybe 2 other trainers, depending on who’s counting. Some people have it that Citation was a collaboration between Horace Jones and his father Ben, who had also trained TC champ Whirlaway.
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Whatever the case, training a Triple Crown Champion horse is still a very short list, with now a total of 13 such champion horses in history. We can now proudly add Justify, also just the 2nd TC champion to be also undefeated, like Seattle Slew, who went on to win 5 of 8 more races. Also a very short list.
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What does this mean moving forward? Will Justify run another 8 races, or another 13 like TC Champion Affirmed did, winning 8 of those? No, this isn’t the 1970s. American Pharoah went on to run 3 more races, winning the Haskell and Breeders Cup Classic, before retiring the same year he won it.
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As lightly raced as Justify, who has the least amount of races of any TC Champ, may be, chances are he won’t run past his 3yo year. There is not much left to prove except the BC Classic. It would be nice to see him in there, but he might just as well be retired before that ever happens. Others who never won more than 1 Triple Crown race have been retired before November.
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In my opinion, they will pretend to be training him for the Haskell, Travers, and BC Classic, then retire him, claiming random inflammation somewhere from a mysterious bruise, as if horses routinely die from bruises. But, at least we got to see him while we could, all 6 career races so far.
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We also got to see the first great classic horse from the Storm Cat sireline. Prior to Justify, the SCAT sireline had produced 1 Preakness champion and 1 Breeders Cup champion, both long shots that were considered flukes. It’s now time, with the arrival of Scat Daddy, that we take this sireline seriously in the American classic races.

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