Weighty Issues
Martin Panza risked running a superstar out of town, the wrath of his employer and defied conventional wisdom. But he did it anyway. Good for him.
When Panza, the racing secretary at Hollywood Park, issued the weights for Saturday's Grade I Vanity Handicap he refused to make a mockery of the handicap system. His job is to try to make the race, within reason, as fair as possible for everyone involved. He did just that when he assigned Zenyatta 129 pounds.
There might not be another racing secretary in America who would have had the you-know-what to do that. Zenyatta carried 126 pounds in her prior start, the Milady Handicap. Even though she made mincemeat out of the competition that day, the easy thing for Panza to do would have been to give her 127 pounds for her next start. Perhaps 128, but never 129 pounds. That way, the Zenyatta camp would have been happy.
That's usually how it works. Handicap races in this country have become a farce. The racing secretary wants to pamper the star attraction more than he or she wants to do the job right. The whole idea behind handicap races is to give the inferior horses some sort of chance against a big star like Zenyatta, but it never quite works out that way when the weight assignments come out.
Panza looked at a filly that has never lost and crushed the field in the Milady under the 126 pounds. He couldn't justify going easy on her.
"In her Milady win, she carried 126 pounds and she was pretty much toying with the field," Panza said. "At the sixteenth pole, she was in front and was being eased. In my mind, there's no doubt she's the best horse in America, colts or fillies. I don't think there's a colt that can beat her on the dirt at equal weights. In today's world, 129 is probably a lot of weight, but realistically speaking, they're big animals and she is by far the best horse in the county. If you don't weight the race fairly then you make the handicap system a joke."
That's exactly what Panza tried to do. Life is Sweet, the second highweight on Panza's list at 122 pounds, has already bowed out. Owner Martin Wygod wants no part of Zenyatta after finishing second behind her in the Milady and will run his filly instead against males in the Hollywood Gold Cup. That means that Zenyatta will give away at least 13 pounds to her closest rival on the scale, which is Dawn After Dawn, who got 116 pounds. Can Dawn After Dawn beat Zenyatta with a 13-pound break in the weights? Probably not, but at least it might be worth giving it a try.
"Do I feel comfortable putting that much weight on (Zenyatta)? It makes me a little nervous because you don't want to get the best horse beat," Panza said. "At the same time, they are handicaps. Unfortunately, people will say that Tiger Woods doesn't get handicapped. But Tiger Woods doesn't rely on gambling dollars to pay the purse. That's how handicaps came about, to try to level the playing field to make the race a better betting race.
Should her connections stick to the same schedule they used last year, Zenyatta will be done with handicaps after Saturday. Her next start would be the Clement Hirsch at Del Mar, which is no longer a handicap race, followed by Lady's Secret at Santa Anita and the Breeders' Cup Ladies' Classic, also at Santa Anita.
In the meantime, trainer John Shirreffs hasn't publicly made an issue out of the weights for the Vanity or given any indication that he's going to pull Zenyatta from a race that has been on his schedule all along. Good for him. He's got a great racehorse and great racehorses should be asked to carry weight.
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Zenyatta vs. Rachel Alexandra? It looks more and more like it's not going to happen. Zenyatta's connections have said they are not going to take their mare out of California this year and Rachel Alexandra's owner Jess Jackson reiterated Wednesday that he won't run his filly on synthetic tracks. The major California tracks all have synthetic surfaces.
"It's absolutely certain," Jackson said of his plans not to run Rachel Alexandra in the Breeders' Cup. "The Breeders' Cup is not that essential for her. I just don't want to risk her. You may think it's not a risk, but I saw what Curlin did and how he struggled. I've seen four or five other horses that I've raced over the plastic and they struggled. If it's a dirt horse, it's a dirt horse."
Bill Finley is an award-winning racing writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, USA Today and Sports Illustrated. Contact Bill at wnfinley@aol.com.
