[King Glorious]

My opinion is that you can't take too much out of this race. Daaher is obviously a quality horse but I don't think this race did anything to prove that. I thought he had only one horse to beat and that one horse had many things going against him. First, there was a nine pound weight disadvantage for ML. Second, he was making a relatively short (for him and for today's racehorse) comeback after being trained to peak just a month ago. I do not like backing horses that come back soon after running in a peak race. Same reason why I'll not bet an Arc winner running back in the BC Turf. Fourth, the winner was allowed to waltz along under very moderate fractions and would have been hard to catch by ANY horse, especially carrying only 114 pounds on his back. Fourth, the distance was further than he had ever shown his best at. I know all about the breathing issues and Baffert saying that they had been overcome but I'm not so sure about how much stock I put into that excuse. I mean, when he was losing his route races early in the year, it's not like he was running horrible races. To me, his performances didn't look like a horse that was having breathing issues. When I see a horse making moves and then all of a sudden stop and give it up, that's when I can see something is wrong. Lute never exhibited that. In his two route tries, he earned figures of 105 and 103 and both races were lost by less than two lengths. Instead of looking like a horse that was running and stopped because he wasn't getting his air, he looked to me like a horse that didn't want to run that far. It looked the same to me in the Cigar. Fifth, it looked like a very overconfident ride by ML's jockey. It seemed like the horse wanted to go on but the rider was fighting not to let him. Maybe it doesn't effect the outcome but I would have liked to see what would have happened had they allowed Lute to go after Daaher earlier and put some pressure on him instead of choking him down and, IMO, taking some of the fight out of him.