EXCERPT FROM MARK CRAMER’S NEW BOOK
“HANDICAPPING ON THE ROAD”

AVAILABLE NOW

THE AMERICAN SPRINT PEDIGREE FACTOR

America is all about speed. Hot, nasty speed. - misattributed to Eleanor Roosevelt

It makes sense. The sprint game is the leading specialty of American racing. Young sprinters at foreign venues with a (USA) next to their name in the program deserve special consideration. With 2-year-old racing on the summer marquee, I was poised to identify and define any betting opportunities that might arrive.

British/Irish bred sprinters usually outrun the French-breds, while anecdotal evidence uncovers that American-bred sprinters have enjoyed an edge over British or Irish breds in grass sprints, and this edge can increase on the all-weather surface.

I roughly defined an approach: in two-year-old sprint races, for maidens or the lightly-raced, the American-bred horse is eligible for a bet, as long as some other positive factor supports the cause: late betting action, a promising career debut, a specialty trainer, a particularly well-spotted rider, and especially any piece of pedigree evidence that might be available.

Illustrations of this method will be featured in the bicycle-diaries section that follows. In this chapter we introduce the approach.

Let’s look at a 16-horse maiden race at Windsor, the quirky English track whose course on grass is shaped like a bent figure 8. This 6-furlong sprint, August 9, 2010, is virtually a straightaway trip, crossing the point where the two cloverleaves intersect.

The track is compact and cozy, so the 6,000 people in attendance look like a throng.

On the interactive site of the Racing Post, I found only one American-bred in the 2-year-old event: number 3, Gold Pearl, sire, Henny Hughes. Gold Pearl had finished second in his only start. The Racing Post comment was: “encouraging debut two months ago, this trip should fit”.

Click on to the Thoroughbred Times website: Henny Hughes was right up there with Bernardini among the top freshman sires, and he had broken the record in the Vosburgh, so no question about sprint pedigree. He won three of six races as a 2-year-old, finishing second in the other three, including a place in the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile, so a high probability of both precocity and class.

By clicking onto Windsor, all kinds of interesting stats spread out like a peacock. The 5-year jockey stat showed Ryan Moore among the top five riders at Windsor. Moore was aboard the American bred Gold Pearl.

I also checked the stats of each trainer, just by clicking on the trainers’ names. I found only one trainer with a flat-bet profit for 2-year-olds, R. Ingram, but he earned that profit with only a 7% hit rate and his horse entered in this race had already been off-the-board twice, with proven loser now inscribed on his resumé. The handicapper comment was: “hint of ability”. There was no betting action on the Ingram horse, a bad sign for 2-year-olds, and he went off at above 100-1. Continued >