With the two year old sales season fast approaching, here's a teachable moment about workout times.  Take a look at XBTV’s video of Kenwood Racing's and Jerry Hollendorfer's Magic Musketier’s recent work on February 17^th at Santa Anita.

We've stated this many times before in previous blogs - columns; what matters most is NOT the time, it’s HOW the horse does it. Notice in the video of Magic Musketier's work, the rider is practically standing up in the saddle almost the entire way, not asking for speed. Yes, the time was good, but if he’d been whipping and driving the horse the same time would have been a disappointing work. Almost any horse can be pushed to work ‘fast’, that’s not the goal of most works. They don’t pay money for fast work times, we save that for the race! That’s why it’s much more important to see the work and listen to what the rider felt than it is to look at a work time. If your horse works slow and the rider comes back and says “I had a ton of horse, could have gone much faster” that’s much MUCH MUCH better than if the horse has the best work of the day and the rider comes back and says “he got real tired at the end, that’s all he had”.

This applies (in spades!) at the sales as well. People pay a huge premium for two things; fast work times and a good pedigree. Both are grossly overrated and widely mis-understood. A baby working 1/8^th of a mile ‘fast’ at the sale has little or nothing to do with a more mature horse running 3/4 of a mile 6 months later (let alone 1 & ¼ miles in the Derby the following year!). Yet people will almost always pay 2-3 times as much (or more!) for the exact same horse if he works 1/8^th of a mile in 10.0 seconds vs. 10.3 seconds. And even if you think 3/5 of a second matters at that stage-age-distance, the time says nothing about how fast or easily the horse gallops out afterwards. Some ‘shut down’ after the work, that’s all they have. Others are just getting started and gallop out with speed to spare. That’s why people who are serious, employ a private clocker to time every single one of the horse’s works, AND their gallop out times afterwards, AND note HOW they did it!  Seems obvious when spending $50,000 - $100,000 for a racehorse as Kenwood generally does, let alone the $500,000 + some people do, yet it's absolutely stunning how many owners simply look at the catalog page, and the work time, and raise their hands to bid!  That's one reason there are so many horses that sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars at the sales and never run, or never win.  

While the main focus of this Blog is workout times and what they do and don’t mean, a few words on the importance of pedigree is in order. Yes, pedigree does matter but as with fast workout times it’s overrated and mis-used by most owners. That’s perfectly understandable; it’s a lot easier to look for ‘black type’ on a catalog page than it is assimilate and balance all the information that goes into finding a good racehorse. When the sales catalog first is published we always have people ask us for our ‘list of HIP numbers we are looking at’. Most people are very surprised when we explain it simply doesn’t work that way. We do plenty of looking at the catalog (and statistical information from other sources) prior to the sale, but the list comes AFTER we see the horses breeze on the track the week before the sale. That initial list is refined to a serious ‘bid’ list AFTER our team physically inspects each horse.

Bottom line, there’s a lot that goes into the process and while all that time, money and research still offers no guarantees, it clearly moves the needle in your favor. Those who have attended a sale with us will attest to that….

For those who are interested in more information, an article in the May 18th 2018 issue of the Mid-Atlantic Thoroughbred, "Slow Down?: Fast times matter at breeze show, but there’s always plenty more to it" offers an excellent explanation of what matters at the sales....