BET PIMLICO RACE COURSE

BETTING PIMLICO

To help you prepare for the Preakness (G1), NYRA Bets handicapper Matthew DeSantis provides some handicapping angles, historical trends, and recent developments that will help you have a leg up on the competition.

Myth-busting Pimlico’s Tight Turns

For years horse racing fans had to hear about the supposedly tight turns at Pimlico. For context, this was often brought up in comparison to the oval configuration at Churchill Downs with the implied assumption that the tighter turns at Pimlico were tighter, and therefore biased against certain running styles. While it is fun to talk about the tight turns of Pimlico, it is also just flat-out untrue. The configuration of the two tracks is nearly identical and nearly a decade ago one of the track maintenance people at Pimlico posited the theory that this urban myth got popular because the track gets narrower, which gave an optical illusion of having tighter turns.

People using the “tight turns” handicapping angle will often point out that the track favors horses on the front end of the race since the tighter turns makes it more difficult for horses coming from the back to gather momentum and get underway with their bid until the top of the stretch when they can more fully accelerate. The problem is that Pimlico’s speed favoring history has very little to do with the turns and much more to do with the track surface, but even that can be exaggerated.

A New Day for the Preakness

In recent history, the Preakness (G1) often featured several runners from the Kentucky Derby (G1) coming back on two week’s rest to challenge for the Triple Crown. However, in recent years we have seen fewer Kentucky Derby (G1) runners make the trip to Baltimore, which makes historical trend analysis more difficult as the fields are now comprised of a fundamentally different group of horses.

From 2010-22, on average four horses from the Kentucky Derby (G1) would run back on short rest and comprised over 40% of the Preakness (G1) fields. Only twice during that stretch (2019 and 2022) did the Kentucky Derby (G1) winner skip the Preakness (G1). However, last year we only saw the winner of the Kentucky Derby (G1), Mage, come back to run at Pimlico and that appears to be the case again in 2024 as Mystik Dan is the only horse slated to enter the Preakness who ran in the Kentucky Derby (G1). Instead of seeing a cohort of horses going through the Triple Crown gauntlet together, we now see new faces eagerly awaiting a lone Kentucky Derby (G1) runner coming back on short rest.

There is a common-held belief that Kentucky Derby (G1) winners can occasionally improve in the Preakness as we had a stretch of horses that were able to capture the first two legs of the Triple Crown before faltering at the Belmont Stake (G1). War Emblem, Smarty Jones, Funny Cide, I’ll Have Another, and California Chrome are just a few of the horses since 2000 that were able to get two-thirds of the way to immortality, but not able to win all three races in horse racing’s Triple Crown.

The dynamics of the race in 2022 and 2023 are quite different due to the lingering suspension of California-based trainer Bob Baffert from entering horses at Churchill Downs. Baffert, who has won the Preakness (G1) a record eight times, has a fleet of Kentucky Derby-caliber horses who were not allowed to run the first Saturday in May, but who are fresh and have significant talent. Last year we saw one of his trainees, National Treasure, win the Preakness (G1) and this year he is expected to have at least two entries in the race in the form of Arkansas Derby (G1) winner, Muth, and Santa Anita Derby (G1) runner-up, Imagination. Note that Muth defeated Kentucky Derby (G1) winner Mystik Dan by 6 ¼ lengths the last time they faced off in the Arkansas Derby (G1).

The Fillies Don’t Have a Triple Crown (or Tiara)

The Black-Eyed Susan (G2) is a terrific race for three-year-old filles, but it is not the equivalent of the Preakness (G1) for the three-year-old colts. There is not an official cycle of three races for fillies to complete in the same way the boys have the Triple Crown. In Japan they have a Triple Tiara series for their three-year-old fillies, but we do not have the equivalent. Therefore, the Black-Eyed Susan (G2) is a distinctly different type of race as it will not feature any of the fillies that ran in the Kentucky Oaks (G1) on Friday, May 3. Historically, the field is comprised of fillies who just missed out on their placement in the Kentucky Oaks or late-developing fillies who might not have raced in the Kentucky Oaks prep races, but who have big futures. Also, it is common for at least one or two local Mid-Atlantic fillies to garner an invitation to the race, which gives it a much more local feel.