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        BREEDING FORUM >> Not sure where this should be Galileo and Coolmore
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TOPOFTHEHILL



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Posted: Sun Jun 06, 2021 8:30 am

While we have just had a weekend of classic races and it is always unwise to interpret a ‘snapshot’ of form too literally it does seem to indicate a couple of things that we have discussed on this and the racing forum in the past few months. Is Galileo in terminal decline? Do the Coolmore team know what they are doing. Well the simple answers to those two questions are Yes and No! but of course its not that simple.
Although Galileo featured close up in the pedigree of both the Derby and Oaks winner he was not directly responsible for either. Furthermore he is falling down the sires lists quite quickly. One of the data bases that I use runs a cumulative yearly table of sires and from January the top sire always used to be Galileo. Today it is Deep Impact and although that comes with a bit of a health warning as Japanese racing is still not open in the true sense the numbers are staggering. He is running at 12% G1 winners to runners and nearly 44% stakes winners to runners. (The Oaks would not yet be included). Dubawi is next, Galileo is 10th on the list (0.6% G1 winners to runner 5.4% Stakes winners to runners). Fastnet Rock and Sea The Stars are higher. So sadly the evidence suggests that the inevitable is happening.
I have argued for several years that team Coolmore don’t know what they have or how good their horses are. My opinion for what its worth is based on pedigree profiles and general analysis. Bolshoi Ballet did not have a profile that could win a Derby. Santa Barbara did not have a profile that could win an Oaks. Bolshoi ballet had 2 negative affinities and I don’t know any horse anywhere in the world that has won a proper G1 race with 2 negatives. (I did find one once but it was an egg and spoon race in Chile or Argentina and frankly I have never been able to find it again). Top 2yo of a few years ago Airforce Blue was favourite for the 2000 guineas, his pedigree went negative early in his 3yo season he could not win a Classic with that profile he didn’t in fact I don’t think he won a race at all after the Classic. It happens over and over again. I thought the best chance they had was with High Definition who does have a profile that could win a G1. They abandoned the usual run 6 approach because they were so confident, well they were properly wrong.
You will argue that they could never win all these top class races if they didn’t know what they were doing and that it is stupid of me to suggest it, (and you might be right!) but is it possible that with all the Montjeu and Galileo’s that they had they had so many horses of superior class and quality that they didn’t need to know what they were doing. They had the best horses and in numbers so deep that they were winning almost by default. They regularly used to get the first 2 or 3 in a top race to support this theory. That is my starting point. Montjeu is long gone and Galileo is in decline and they no longer have the absolute monopoly of top class runners. If that is the case they need to get a lot smarter.
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