12APR Weekend Derby Prep Action

This week brings us the Arkansas Derby and the Bluegrass. Both top shelf preps and I suspect the derby winner is in one of these two races.

The Arkansas Derby should be listed as a grade 1.51 this thing is as close to a grade I you can get without being a grade I. Curiously the race has a mutuel field, something we used to see at Aqueduct in 1988 when I first started looking at horse racing. Lets get down to the matter at hand, I suspect the favorite will be Z Fortune who drew an unfavorable outside post. his form has been tailing off. Anyone worth two cents has to go against him here. There seems to be five speed horses(can you name them?) which have all drawn inside so the pace will be honest here. This bodes well for one of the closers to power up late for the big share of the purse. The two I zeroed in are Liberty Bull and Blackberry road. Liberty Bull is shipping from New Mexico and I can not imagine that to be a pleasurable trip for an equine. Blackberry road finally finds a race with an honest pace and has been running at the Fairgrounds. Blackberry should benefit the most from a hot pace and is the pick to win it all.

The Bluegrass Stakes is a poly prep and last year was a real head scratcher. There was the glacial pace of 27 and 52 for the Jamie Sanders colt (Teuflesberg) who faded after setting the slowest pace this side of turtle racing. Then when they turned for home it sort of looked like a quarter horse race with anchors dragging behind the horses as there were nine horses in a line all plodding for the wire. There is little chance I can effectively handicap this race with these horrid images at the fore of my mind. The favorite will most certainly be Pyro who races first time poly, why take 3-5 on the first time poly donut horse? Medjool has raced exclusively on the all weather surfaces and and has proven that he runs well and can get the distance. Hofmans' is a conservative trainer and if he ships in he has a shot. Medjool is the pick at a profitable price.