Breeders’ Cup at Del Mar challenges horsemen, bettors – Orange County Register

For any major sports event that moves from place to place from year to year, the venue can be a big part of the story. That’s true of the Breeders’ Cup, whose moveable feast of multimillion-dollar thoroughbred races has visited a dozen tracks in eight states and provinces in its 40 years. And nowhere is it more true than at Del Mar, which hosts the 14-race festival for the third time next Friday and Saturday, Nov. 1-2.

Del Mar’s quirky main track and turf course can dictate strategy for horsemen and horseplayers, or leave them guessing over the next week.

Among them is Chad Brown, the nation’s highest-earning trainer in 2024, a four-time winner of the annual Eclipse Award as North America’s outstanding trainer and the most successful Breeders’ Cup trainer in recent years. The horses Brown entered this week include contenders in as many as seven Breeders’ Cup races. But many of those are horses whose come-from-behind running style could be compromised if the Del Mar main track plays the way it often did during the summer season.

“It’s a bit concerning that the track favored (early) speed at the most recent meet,” Brown, who’s based in New York, said this week when I asked him about it on a Breeders’ Cup media conference call. “Hopefully it’ll change a little bit. These tracks do change.”

It’s not only the racing surface that could work against late-running horses, including Brown’s Sierra Leone in the $7 million Breeders’ Cup Classic, the main event of the second day, and Chancer McPatrick in the $2 million Breeders’ Cup Juvenile, the focus of the first day.

“The shorter stretch at Del Mar would also be a bit of a concern for horses that close,” Brown said. “So these are real challenges for those two horses to get to the winner’s circle. We’ll have to overcome it.

“Certainly it’s not impossible for horses that are coming from well off the pace to win at Del Mar. We’ve seen it before. My hope would be that they wouldn’t be quite as far back in these races.”

Del Mar and Breeders’ Cup executives can’t promise how the track will be, and with the Del Mar fall meet opening Thursday we’ll have only one afternoon of pre-Breeders’ Cup racing to judge by.

“The track at Del Mar can be a little bit different during the fall meet than it is during the summer meet,” said Tom Robbins, executive vice president for racing industry relations at Del Mar and executive director of the Breeders’ Cup selection panel. “Hopefully we can achieve all that we want: fairness from inside to outside (of the track), and the safest possible surface.”

Bettors are already analyzing the lists of 212 “pre-entered” horses announced Wednesday, including a Breeders’ Cup-record 80 from overseas. Handicapping will get more intense after fields, post positions and official morning-line odds are finalized Monday.

Some of Del Mar’s sharpest handicappers talked about the factors, specific to Del Mar, that they’re weighing.

• The possible speed bias of the dirt track.

Although overall statistics show front-running horses at the Breeders’ Cup distances on dirt won no higher a percentage of races in the Del Mar summer season than, say, at the current Santa Anita fall meet, there were many afternoons at the San Diego County track when early speedsters could not be caught.

“Speed is always a good commodity, but it seemed unbeatable on certain days,” said Bob Ike, proprietor of BobIkePicks.com and co-host of the Thoroughbred Los Angeles radio show.

“If the main track is anything like it was during the meet earlier this year, speed will be king,” said Bob Mieszerski, the Southern California News Group’s lead handicapper.

In the 2021 Breeders’ Cup at Del Mar, front-runners won four of the seven dirt races, including Knicks Go in the 1¼-mile Classic. In 2017, only one front-runner won, but it was Gun Runner in the Classic.

• The short homestretch, which measures 919 feet from the turn to the finish – shortest among one-mile tracks in the United States – gives stretch runners less ground to work with.

Handicapper, radio host and horse owner Jon Lindo calls the short stretch the “biggest difference” about Del Mar.

“Riders with local knowledge – especially on the dirt course – have a slight edge on knowing when to move,” Lindo said. “(A) 1¼-mile dirt race at Del Mar has proven to be a ‘short’ race for the distance, meaning horses that at other tracks have struggled to get the distance have proven successful at Del Mar.”

• A home-track advantage appears negligible. Horses who ran their previous race in California scored one win at the 2017 Breeders’ Cup at Del Mar and two in 2021, fewer than average in the era of two-day Breeders’ Cups. This may reflect a general decline in the strength of California contingents.

• Post position can be decisive on the Del Mar turf, especially in 5-furlong sprints (like the Breeders’ Cup Turf Sprint and Juvenile Turf Sprint), which start close to turns.

“I won’t take a short price on a horse who is very likely to lose a lot of ground in a turf race,” said Frank Scatoni, the online handicapper, Del Mar seminar host and “Six Secrets of Successful Bettors” author. “But if that same horse was 10-1, I might feel OK about it.”

Chad Brown, who has contenders Carl Spackler in the Mile and Zulu Kingdom in the Juvenile Turf, said he hopes his grass-course horses “draw more toward the inside.”