American Pharoah wins again in brilliant fashion!

Am Pharoah is a really – really – really good horse and maybe even a great horse.  However, I can’t help but feel the Preakness Picture was muddied up by the torrential rains that fell, just a few minutes before the Preakness was loaded and sent off.  Certainly, Am Pharoah was great – he broke a little sideways, but responded to the urging of Victor Espinoza and he ran with some real brilliance to manage the entire field without any moment of discomfort – enve though he wasn’t running in his preferred fashion.  He did what all his fans must have wanted, he went to the lead and improved his position from there!

Firing Line didn’t break properly and started to pull himself up immediately, even though G. Stevens attempted to get him to run, to my eye, Firing Line simply would not run on the sealed – sloppy track.  Dortmund was a bit different, he tried to run, but ran as if his best effort was left a month ago.  To my eye, as great a job as Bob Baffert did with American Pharoah, he did not do his best work with Dortmund.  Horse’s even fool great trainers.  This is not a knock on B. Baffert, just a statement on how difficult training great race horses is, and he certainly is one of the best since I started following horse racing in the late 1970’s.

Divining Rod ran about the as expected, he made a nice run on the rail, caught up to the front and then started to go sideways in the stretch and was beaten by Tale of Verve who was clearly “much the 2nd best” and more likely to continue to improve at longer distances.  Nice effort for Tale of Verve….  Divining Rod looks like a nice miler to me…

Congrats to all connected with American Pharoah!