Yeah great ride for the jockey and a little bit of luck too. Lanes opened up when he needed them but still some great jockey work.
I’ve been working my way through the 5-hour broadcast over the weekend. The quality has been surprisingly good, especially given NBC Sports’ notable recent efforts (coughWinterOlympicscough). The bucket list stuff had the potential to be super annoying but was played almost completely straight, and I’ve encountered only one Acceptable Story-y moment so far (the tornado).
There have been remarkably few commercials, so I definitely won’t be done (and see the actual race) until this evening. For now, simple question. How long do the track officials or stewards or whoever have to disqualify a horse before it affects the payouts? Obviously nine months is way too long, but I think even something as short as twenty minutes is going to cause a great deal of needless anxiety. With today’s technology, I think a limit of, say, three minutes to thoroughly go over the dispute should be reasonable.
I was at my local race book, where all we got was the Churchill Downs’ feed. That is, not the NBC production. CD’s feed concentrated on the horses and jockeys, showed the ever-changing tote and exotic probables, and commentators and their selections. Watching CD’s feed at the race book, I had no idea that DJT was even there.
About DJT in attendance here’s what the NY Times reported:
May 7, 2022, 6:49 p.m. Mike Wilson Reporting from Louisville, Ky.
Former President Donald J. Trump was shown on the large video screen. People cheered, people booed. There was a brief chant of “U.S.A.!” Everyone moved on.
I really hope that Rich Strike won’t test positive for banned substances. People are wondering, though; one of the comments on the pony-biting incident after the race was “Roid rage”. (linked in the original post)
On the other hand the horse’s pedigree is posted on Wikipedia and there are some huge names there and further back, including Man O’War and Triple Crown winner Count Fleet, so given that, it’s not like the win should be a total surprise.
My wife is a lifelong horse fan, and rode when she was younger. When we were watching that, she was saying, “that’s a stallion for you,” and didn’t think the behavior was that unusual. Her ire, at that moment, was with the rider of the lead pony (which was being bitten by Rich Strike), who was refusing to hand Rich Strike’s lead off to another groom.
Yes. I didn’t watch but heard it was acting crazy-aggressive toward the other horses.
The horse was a young stallion and very pumped up (people aren’t the only ones who can feel triumph after a big effort). Racing Thoroughbreds are barely trained by riding-horse standards – they only need to be capable of being shoved into a starting gate and then running as fast as they can go. I’m sure if the highly experienced pony-riders (the mounted guys who manage the race horses onto and off of the track) didn’t do anything different it was because what he was doing was the safest thing to do.
Stallions are very apt to bite. It’s what they do. There’s a reason why 98% of colts are gelded.
How many people actually placed that bet? I’ve been unable to find that number.
Yeah that’s hard to find. The official Churchill Downs site shows the payouts but not the total pools for each type of wager.
And sometimes, not even that.
I assume the rider responsible for grabbing the Derby winner knows what he/she is supposed to be doing. But at one point, it looked like he was essentially punching the horse in the head.
I’m pretty sure a horse has a thick skull this is impervious to damage by anything like a fist, but didn’t look like great optics on TV.
Can anyone in the know explain what was going on? At one point, someone was handing a different type of rope. How could it have been handled differently? Or was this the best it could be handled?
These outriders have decades of experience doing this exact stuff all day long. Socking a horse in the head (or anywhere else) is not going to hurt the horse but it may get their attention. May. His gelding was getting bitten, and stallion bites are not kidding. They can tear your arm off.
Stallions will bite down on a resistant mare and pick her front end up off the ground. That would be something more than 800 pounds of an average 1200 lb horse. Some stallions treat geldings like mares – the biting would have quickly turned into mounting the outrider’s gelding and then for certain the outrider would have been hurt and badly.
I’ve read comments elsewhere in the vein of “why didn’t he just let go of the rope?” Well, he didn’t because a jockey has very little control of his mount, they have these way high up stirrups and teeny saddles and so no leverage. He’d be letting an angry amped-up 1000 lb stallion loose with no way to catch him again easily. It would have been extremely dangerous and someone, for example the jockey, or other jockeys or their horses, or anyone on the ground, would be very likely to be hurt or worse.
I don’t know any knowledgeable person who thinks the guy did anything but what he had to.
Cool. Thx for sharing your expertise.
All I have experience w/ is dogs. WRT which I’m often bemused when folk suggest a controlled amount of physical correction is somehow gonna permanently harm the dog.
You get the same argument of let’s all be like the garden of eden with horses too. Horses are very physical with each other, and threats followed up by kicking, striking (hitting out with the front feet) and biting are simply vocabulary to a horse.
People who believe horses should never be disciplined are a death-sentence to a horse. A horse who thinks he can treat people like he would another horse he’s pissed off at is a horse who ends up in a can. Very few trainers will take on the re-education of a horse like that. It’s just way too dangerous.
Rich Strike, however, won’t end up in a can no matter how he acts.
Here’s an interview with the horse’s trainer. He talks about the behavior of Rich Strike after the race and explains why it happened. That part of the interview happens at about the 4:00 mark.
I spotted how fast the times were as it ran. I figured that any horse that tried to keep up that pace was in trouble (the early leader faded back to last place by the end).
Horses usually run the final quarter more slowly than the first – they are always tired. But if the jockey can control the pace, they are fresher and make up ground. It was a fine ride by the jockey, but I suspect Rich Strike may not do as well in the Preakness if the other jockeys can avoid the “radioactive” pace (as the Daily Racing Form put it).
Saw the complete race a few times, and in hindsight, this upset…really doesn’t surprise me too much. Oh, sure, I never would’ve PREDICTED it (Me. Predict. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. 
), but it’s not a monumental world-turned-upside-down shocker like, say, Leicester City’s dream season. When a horse is a long shot, that means the bettors don’t have confidence in it. That can happen for plenty of reasons, most of which have absolutely nothing to do with its chances of finishing in the money. If it’s an unknown, especially if it got entered at the last minute, it’s not going to get those gonzo six-figure bets. Even if it has a history of being great and terrible at lesser events, the Triple Crown is a much different beast. Plenty of college or minor league superstars absolutely bomb in the pros.
Bottom line: Phenomenal race, but Rich Strike isn’t taking everyone by surprise again. There are reasons it’s so damn hard to win the Triple Crown.
Right. Those times were unheard of–the first quarter in 21.78, the half in 45.36. And the splits indicate that the final quarter was actually faster than the previous one.
I’m another who is going to be careful with the Preakness. I’m wondering if this is a freak event. It may not necessarily be–some longshots can repeat–but it will require careful analysis of past performances of all entries, not just automatically going with Rich Strike on top of exotics.
Thx for that link!
Sorry for the stupid question, but why do they call the, um, accessory horses ‘ponies’? Watching the footage, it seems clear the outrider’s horse was actually both taller and quite a bit more massive than Rich Strike.
Are they actually different breeds or something? I assumed they just were horses that weren’t thought to have the most potential and so got gelded to be of more use.