Yorkshire Oaks market looks all wrong
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Sometimes we can all get carried away with recent results but on what we've seen this season the three-year-old fillies aren't up to much.
First up there was the Falmouth when Nashwa blitzed some of the better miling fillies, then came the Prix Rothschild where the older fillies dominated and at Goodwood in the Nassau the older fillies finished at the front with the three-year-olds out the back.
Consequently I'm not convinced the market should look like it does for the Yorkshire Oaks on Thursday with the three-year-olds Savethelastdance and Bluestocking at the head of it.
Savethelastdance intrigues me because she looked pretty slow for the most part in both the Epsom and Irish Oaks but showed a willing attitude to keep on rolling when she looked sure to be well beaten.
At Epsom on fast ground Soul Sister had too much raw ability for her, but Savethelastdance snatched victory from the jaws of defeat at the Curragh and clearly has stacks of stamina.
Unless there's lots of rain I'd be worried about her at York, where she could get in trouble a long way from home. In any case she doesn't travel through her races like she's top class.
Bluestocking is improving but hasn't won this year and I think the form of the four-year-old Al Husn and five-year-old Free Wind is at least as good, if not better.
Free Wind (right) lands an excellent win at York in the Middleton Stakes
I don't see the step up to a mile and a half being any great issue for Al Husn but there can be no doubt she was in the right spot in the slowly run Nassau last time and it's John and Thady Gosden's Free Wind who interests me most at this stage.
Like her stablemate Inspiral, Free Wind got completely stuck in the mud at Goodwood and we saw what Inspiral did back on a better surface at Deauville next time.
At the start of the season Free Wind won the Middleton at York over a trip short of her best and the form of that race could hardly have worked out any better. If she returns to that sort of level, I reckon the three-year-olds will have their work cut out to beat her.
As for the race the meeting is named after, the Sky Bet Ebor doesn't look as classy as usual and, while I'll get no prizes for originality, Sweet William is another Gosden-trained horse with an awful lot going for him.
Not only is he one of the youngest horses in the race but he's one of the least exposed and officially 4lb well in too.
I'm not sure the Ebor is that much better than the races he won at Newbury and Goodwood and a price around the 4-1 mark is probably more than fair.
York ground makes it a special track
York is a world-class racetrack and we have witnessed some truly amazing performances on the Knavesmire down the years.
However, I'm of an inquisitive nature and it gets me thinking when a top-class race like the Juddmonte International often produces a runaway winner.
Most of the time it's simply because a brilliant horse outclasses the opposition but I also think the ground at York is quite different to anywhere else in the country, which makes it a specialists' course of the highest order.
I'm not saying that's a bad thing, just that horses who act on good to firm or good ground anywhere else might not like it at York, which leads to plenty of wide-margin winners.
It's not that the right horse doesn't win at York, and you only have to look at the results of the Juddmonte or Yorkshire Oaks to see that, but it does explain why some horses get beaten out of sight there. As punters we should be forgiving when it comes to a bad run at York.
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