Wasteful

Courtesy Carrot Club

I was going to entitle this article 'Limit Reached', but in reality I'd reached my limit with Carrot Club ages ago, and Sophisticate's outing 30 minutes earlier simply confirmed my stance. For a horse that came a promising fourth in its first race, Sophisticate has done nothing but disappoint since. Tenth was the best he could do today, a full 2.8 seconds down (or about 17 lengths adrift!) on the winner, and completely out of touch with all the horses ahead of him. This is beyond a joke. Although he looks beautiful, he has no right to be near a race track as long as his performances are at this level. I would question the race distance first and foremost, for his only decent run came at 1400m - today was a furlong-and-a-half longer than that, and all the poor races have been at a mile or more on dirt. If he is to run again, and personally I wouldn't bother unless some serious changes are made to his training programme and/or entry policy, I would like to see him tackle a mile on turf to see what happens. Again and again, all we see is Carrot Club and the clueless JRA trainers trying something that obviously doesn't work on multiple occasions, when club horses don't have that many chances to waste...