[Bill Lyster]

The Breeders Cup is the year end two day meet up that show cases the best of young and older horses alike. So this post will cover the first day in which all the races are for two year olds.

First I am going to cover all the turf races, 6-8-10 which have come to be dominated by foreign horses almost exclusively. How do we find a winner when there are no races run in the US? The answer is to pay attention to the TM sort in the New Pace tab in RDSS.

Race 6 was a 5.5f race for 2 YO. In a field of 12, 9 were foreign horses. The top 4 finishers were all foreign. What is unique in this race is that 8 of the horses were fillies and only 4 were colts. When you look at the PPs under the Age of the races if a filly ran against fillies, the race is labeled 2f, but if it ran against both fillies and colts the race is labeled just "2".

It is of interest to note that the top 4 finishers all had more than 4 races coming into this race, with the top 4 having 5-5-6-6 races. In fact of the three 2yo races last week ALL win and place horses had 5 or more races under their belt.

For each horse I recorded the number of Graded races it had run. If it won I circled the graded race # and if it ran 2nd or 3rd but was within 2 lengths, I just wrote down the graded #. I also noted the highest speed rating run by that horse except if it was its maiden win.

There are not many G1 races for two year olds until later in the year, so I did not eliminate horses that had not run in a G1, and most of the entrants had run in G2 or G3 races. So I preferred horses with circled G1, G2 or G3 races. Only 7 of the 12 horses in this race had one or more circled races. They were the 1-3-4-5-9-10-11 and 12. The winning order was 3-11-5-9

The top NP horses in the TM sort were the 3-6-8-1-11 and their TM numbers were 117 (3)-116-116-114 (11)-114. The show 5 horse TM was 105, the 4th horse, 9 was 104. When horses have not run in the US, there will be no ratings in the NP sort if you chose the adjusted ratings. The only 3 horses with US rating s had 87-84 and 83 adjusted ratings, and NO I do not know how to calibrate the TM ratings to the adjusted ratings, but you could compare the final placings of the 10-4-13 horses to the lower valued TM horses and MAYBE produce a working number.

The winning 3 was a filly who had beaten males twice, but not in graded races. However it ran second in two G2 races and had won a G3. The place #11 had run a close third in two G2 races and 1 G3 race. The show horse, the 5 was the only horse to win a G1 race.

So the top 4 finishers had good races in G2, G3 and G1 races, all had 5 or more races and the win place horses were top 3 NP TM horses.

Next post will be for race 8