I was a mere pup when the Spaghetti Western trilogy of a 'Fist full of Dollars', 'For a Few Dollars more' and the 'The Good, the Bad and The Ugly', came out in the theatres, I saw 'Fist Full of Dollars' in a theatre when i was 6, most likely my first experience in a movie theater, the trilogy ended with the classsic 'The Good., The Bad and The Ugly', starring Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cliff, and Eli Wallach, catapulted Eastwood into stardom.
The track conditions at Pimlico yesterday was a reminder of the Good, The Bad, and the Ugly.
The plot of the Preakness at Pimlico was good to start of with, on both turf and main track.
David Grenig posted this before the first race, approximately at 10:11 AM EDT
In the meantime, Turf races on a labeled 'good' turf were being taken off. Race 1 & 5 taken off the 'good' turf and moved to the 'good' main track wich was sealed and wet.
David, stated the obvious, it was a muddly/sloppy main track from the 1st race of the day.
Ray Paulick also chimed in with well timed note.
The turf course went right past yielding to soft.
Speed was absolutely dead on arrival in the stretch, they were in quicksand, but there was a path that was lighting fast.
We made two references to the turf an hour apart:
You had to be in the middle of the course to rally, maybe that was the part of the turf that was good, yet riders were driving inside and running what seemed to be quicksand.
In one of the interviews, it was Lanfranco Dettori on the winner and he was covered with mud after the race, even drawing a comment from Donna Brothers, I believe, "You are covered in mud".
The turf course was definitely a unbalanced wet mess.
Meanwhile on the main:
Samantha Perry, one of my favorite on-track handicappers makes this comment ☝️
However, after the track was harrowed another rain storm came through and more water got dumped on an already muddy track which had been listed as good but had been harrowed and now its muddy.
i didn't think speed had been deadly early in the card, but it seemed to have an advantage well off the inside on that 'good' track.
Lizbeth hit the nail right on the head. She was absolutely spot on responding to David Grening.
All of us, on the outside looking in, could see right thru the 'good and 'good', 'good and soft', whatever it was.
Ray was also on point, there had been conflicting track conditions all day long.
As we now head into the Preakness itself, another announcement was made:
So, the main track, which had been labelled 'good' all day, now is listed as muddy right before the Preakness.
On the Pimlico RTN feed a statement was made and I paraphrase it 'if you are handicapping the Preakness you need to make note its a muddy track', like it just happened NOW out of the blue.
The main track had a lot of water and moisture all day long, it had always been muddy, sealed, track, but now it seemed official?
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly showed us the disjointed and comical approach to track conditions, on one hand, Equibase was recording the track correctly for charts and past performances, but publicly, track officials, were sticking with their own notations, which had to be confusing to the unbeknownst horseplayer who takes track conditions notations to heart.
In the Preakness, Seize the Grey took control of the race early and there was no passing in the stretch as the 1-2-3 horses at the top of the lane finished in the same order.
Congratulations to Michael Behrens and My Racehorse for winning the Preakness, no matter the conditions.
Horses like Tuscan Gold, which I believed was a big player, was swiming from the start, he was making hard work of the track, he was tapped with the whip on the shoulder 100 yards out of the gate, which tells me he was not responding, he tried, he couldn't stand up on it.
Just Steel, another we felt had a shot off its form prior to the Derby, came out of the race lame, and as David reported he is done for the year or even longer.
Also there was another post about the whole moving the Triple Crown to having four to five weeks between a moot point, the first three place finishers had raced two weeks before on Kentucky Derby weekend.
Seize the Grey had won on the Derby undercard, and Mystik Dan and Catching Freedom had run in the Kentucky Derby, the whole hysteria of running back in 2 weeks was null and voided and just noise. Case closed.
That's the good.
The bad was how the track conditions were handled, we are not children , we don't need our hand held and told bedtime stories, we could see the track for what it was.
We appreciated David and Ray giving to us straight.
The ugly, aside from the conflicting information, the weather played a big part the entire day, Tuscan Gold never handling the track, Just Steel heads into surgery with Dr Bramlage, added an exclaimation point to Preakness 2024. That part was the ugly.