Early Odds, And Why Pegasus Winner Life Is Good Is A Threat To Flightline

With such a dominant favorite as Flightline in this year’s Breeders’ Cup Classic at Keeneland, it’s perhaps a little too easy to accept his amazing talents as the be-all-and-end-all of the 2022 field. Or, arguably worse, allow Flightline’s superior abilities to blur your vision of his competitors. But his main rival, 2022 Pegasus winner Life Is Good, makes a strong case for himself with his own apparently bottomless reserves of talent. Both horses are at Keeneland now, polishing off their last breezes before race day, November 5.

Last Saturday, they both clocked works. Life Is Good breezed five furlongs in 1:00 3/5, and galloped out a mile in 1:39 4/5, characterized by exercise rider Amelia Green in this way: “It’s not normal for other horses, but it’s normal for him.”

Ominously, that five-furlong time of a minute and change exactly — repeat exactly — matched the five-furlong time of Flightline, who had run a couple of hours earlier in the morning. In a kind of early-morning, private dress rehearsal for the Classic next weekend, both horses had people lining the rails.

His trainer, Todd Pletcher had this to say last weekend: “That gallop out is very standard for him. Everyone asks why we’re going the mile and a quarter, and it’s because we’re accustomed to seeing the gallop outs like he had this morning. It gives you confidence that he’ll stay a little further.”

In other words, there is a bit of a distance question that Life Is Good has to answer on Saturday. On the other hand, Life Is Good didn’t have to sit out his third year on the planet and on the track because of injury, as Flightline had to do. He spent it racing, clocking up win after win, including in the Breeders’ Cup Dirt Mile last year. We could point to several more wins, but certainly his biggest money win, the Pegasus World Cup last January, was, also a characteristic one for his style, in which he used his very high cruising speed to great advantage and retained enough in the tank to make it a gate-to-wire victory. As we know, the Pegasus was one-and-an-eighth. That’s what Pletcher’s talking about when he uses the words “stay a little further.”

Life Is Good’s rider, leading jockey Irad Ortiz, Jr., who has ridden a few winners in his day, had this to say after beating Knicks Go to win the Pegasus in January:

“I thought it was going to be a match race (between Life Is Good and Knicks Go). But going into the first turn, my horse was so fast, so I just let him do his thing. I felt like I had a lot of horse and I couldn’t wait to let him run. I just wanted to get to the second turn. But when I let him go, he kept going. They broke faster, the first couple of steps, than me. But as soon as I saw that I said, ‘I’m going to clear them because I know I’ve got speed.’ I just let my horse break without asking him.”

Remember, the 2022 Pegasus was a gate-to-wire win. There are two key points Ortiz makes. First, Ortiz — and everybody else in the world — knows that Life Is Good has murderous speed, so he wasn’t overly worried in the moment about the slightly stuttered break. But Ortiz also knew that he had “a lot of horse” and that the horse could keep prosecuting his run, if not actually increasing his speed — meaning, when Ortiz let the reins out, the horse had more than enough to stretch out the lead and take the race.

Those kinds of performances are the kinds of performances that should have Flightline’s connections studying the replays closely. In fact, in his own gate-to-wire wins, Flightline seems to run exactly the same way, arguably with a little more pure puissance.

Herewith, in ascending order of odds (descending order of probability to win) is a Monday primer on some pre-morning-line odds from SportsLine. Significantly, Life Is Good is second, but not by much to the formidable Epicenter. We’ll know more as the post positions are drawn, but for the moment, the greater distance between Flightline and the others still holds. Nota bene: Post positions have not — reapeat, have not — been drawn, so this table is only in descending order of odds.

(Odds ranking, Horse, Odds)

1) Flightline, 3-5

2) Life Is Good, 5-1

3) Epicenter, 6-1

4) Taiba, 8-1

5) Hot Rod Charlie, 15-1

6) Olympiad, 15-1

7) Rich Strike, 20-1

8) Happy Saver, 30-1

(Source: SportsLine, 10/31/2022)