Head Of The Class

According to Merriam-Webster, class can mean “a noting of different things including social rank, a division of rating based on grade or quality or the best of its kind, the class of the league”. The latter definition is the key for horseplayers that try to smoke out the horses with innate class.

People in your own neighborhood and horses on the track are all about guilt by association and what company they keep.

It is one of the oldest adages in the sport of horse racing and the term class tells may be far less true now than in years past.

This has to do with the changing of the game toward speed in the last few decades but that trend may be going out the window now that we are in the synthetic age. Often times on synthetic surfaces, runners need to be dead fit and have to be able to quicken in the later stages of a race. Hence, class seems to be changing.

For humans and the equine athlete, you can only be peaking for a certain amount of time.

Just like any athlete, you can only be on top of your game for so long. The key to superstardom in sports is the ability to play at a high level consistently for a long period of time, just pure class.

Stakes horses in this country are just that, stakes horses, because they keep their good form longer and are more capable of stringing together good race after good race.

As the horse bettor goes through any particular race card and comes across common claimers and low-level allowance runners, class becomes more of a fleeting thing than something to rely on totally.

The fact is that good horses wegering keep their form longer. That’s why they are good horses and are more reliable from a betting standpoint. They are usually sounder physically than the cheap horses and are just plain better athletes.

Just because a horse is coming off a solid effort in which he won or was close to winning, one cannot assume he will repeat that performance, especially if that runner is a claimer. A win or loss by a narrow margin, which may have resulted from an all-out effort, can knock an ordinary thoroughbred off his sharpness very quickly. This can be devastating in distaffers and sometimes in older stock.

It’s difficult for an inexpensive claimer to maintain his good form for any long period of time. A bettor has to be able to attempt to evaluate how a particular horse is going to respond from a previous strenuous effort. Is the horse coming off an easy win, where he was allowed to get an easy lead and wasn’t pressured at any point of the race? Or is he coming off a demanding race, a race in which he was pushed every step of the way during a serious speed duel and was life and death to hold off his foes at the wire?

One negative angle that horse bettors need to be well aware of is horses that suddenly drop down the claiming ladder and are supposedly racing today against horses inferior to ones he has been competing against.

Generally, the masses go bonkers and over bet these horses but there is a built-in problem with betting horses that are dropping in class.