Cashmere

If you're going to make your stakes debut in graded company, may as well go big, right? Alexander Helios (Cairo Prince) certainly thought so as he took his grudge match with Banishing (Ghostzapper) down to the wire in the GIII Razorback Handicap. It took him eight tries to break his maiden, and a new trainer, but that 2 1/4-length victory beneath the Twin Spires in November 2023 yielded him a 93 Beyer in his first attempt at 1 1/8-miles for the barn of Saffie Joseph Jr.. It took three attempts...

Curious how we can always explain what makes a pedigree work once a horse has shown he can actually run. They call it "ex post rationalization" or sometimes "hindsight bias". Working backward from a high-functioning racehorse, you isolate whatever elements of the page flatter your prejudices and methodology, and triumphantly announce that you have found the key to the genetic engine. You could, of course, perform pretty much the same exercise with countless slow horses whose antecedents contain equally plausible elements. Funnily enough, however, we don't bother doing that quite...