I don’t think it’s ever too early to start talking Kentucky Derby. There is nothing that gets me more excited than seeing 20 horses duke it out for a shot at racing supremacy, and with the Kentucky Derby future book, finding that derby horse before anyone else does can really pay dividends.  There are some horses here that I think are really milers asquerading as derby horses and then there are some true contenders-let’s sort them out shall we?

The Cash Call Futurity really shook the derby picture up. Shared Belief tracked the pace so professionally and then ignored that horse who made an early move. When you see
a horse tune out his competitors and just wait for his cue to run you’ve got a smart horse; smart horses are dangerous come derby time so I do like Shared Belief a lot. Now for the
negatives, he looks like he would rather stay at a mile and a sixteenth. His pedigree isn’t bad, but it doesn’t scream distance. You might say he didn’t look tired after the race but none of the horses really challenged him. The race must’ve felt like a seven furlong race rather than a mile and a sixteenth. I’m not saying that I’m throwing out Shared
Belief, I’m just saying that there are more intriguing prospects out there.

Honor Code is not the type of horse that’s easy to fall in love with. His times are never that dazzling and he always runs in New York. The thing that makes Honor Code intriguing to me is that I believe that in the Champagne Havana was fully cranked up and Honor Code still gave him the race of his life- there’s something to be said for that. People also decided to deride the horse over the bizarre running style of the Remsen,
but don’t they realize that they should praise him? He is a closer who had absolutely no pace at all to run at and he got the job done anyway. I really believe if that race were run with a halfway decent pace Honor Code wins by three. You also have to accept the fact that trainers count and Shug knows how to get a horse ready for the run for the
roses.

Now, you can never predict the conditions in Louisville on Derby day so the next part of the puzzle becomes who like mud? The answer to that is several horses do, but it seems like Strong Mandate wants to bathe in mud and eat mudpies and watch the Matthew McConaughey movie Mud-you get the idea. His win in the Hopeful was breathtaking and hopefully a sign of things to come. I like seeing Deputy Minister as the broodmare sire and Tiznow as the sire because I think this will give him some tactical speed. The devil is in the details, so take a look at Strong Mandate’s Breeder’s Cup Juvenile. He committed every single cardinal sin in the book and still came in third! That to me is the sign of a horse that is a bit of a freak.  There is so much upside on this horse that Lukas must be licking his chops right now. He has a monster in the barn and he knows it.

The next horse we need to talk about has what I call a case of the Animal Kingdom. We all know that Animal Kingdom was basically a turf horse who could transfer about 90% of his form to dirt and so he wound up winning the Kentucky Derby. Well, I’m willing to believe that Bobby’s Kitten can transfer 90% of his turf form to dirt; the question becomes whether or not Bobby’s Kitten at 90% is as good as or better than the rest of these two-year olds, and I just don’t know, but boy am I intrigued.

There are a bunch of other Juveniles who are worth mentioning like Havana and Giovanni Boldini. I think Havana still has a lot to prove, but there’s a chance that he progresses and being by Dunkirk I’m not too worried about his distance limitations. Giovanni Boldini is the horse that frustrates me. He is owned by Derrick Smith and
Michael Tabor which means he probably isn’t headed to Kentucky unless it is as
a stud. I wish his connections would reconsider because if this horse is anywhere near as good on dirt as he is on turf then we have ourselves the Kentucky Derby winner. Like I said before, there isn’t much point talking about him because he probably isn’t competing in the derby, but if you asked me who I think the most talented two year old is right now, I would easily say it’s this scrappy son of War Front.