Postby Mahubah » Sat Jul 21, 2007 6:21 am
Folk has shown very good form in Dubai, but Dubai isn't the US and the fields she beat have so far produced nothing that has shown top Northern Hemisphere form. The two South American-bred fillies who followed her closest home had good credentials in their native countries, to be sure, but may or may not have made a fully successful transition to Northern Hemisphere conditions, a process which often takes six months or more; also, I think both had scored their biggest previous wins on turf.
It is true that the races for older horses during the Dubai World Cup festival invariably draw deep fields, but the same cannot be said for the three-year-old races, which seem to be more trials for the Maktoum family's Classic hopefuls than anything else. Last year's UAE Derby, which had two high-class horses in its field in Invasor and Discreet Cat, was the exception and not the rule to judge by the results from horses emerging from previous years' fields.
I expect Folk to be a genuine threat in the CCA Oaks with Rags to Riches out of the race, but the idea that Rags was scratched to avoid her after going head to head with Curlin and Hard Spun seems pretty ludicrous, especially given that Rags is proven over the distance and Folk is not.
"A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher...You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse." C. S. Lewis
