What It Means To Go Back To School

Now that the Travers is done, and Forte’s more than slightly disappointing run in it is being digested, it’s an apt moment in the horse’s career to examine his style and predilections as he has shown them in this third year of life. The reason that this is such a good opportunity is that the superbly talented athlete, himself, is at a fork in the road when we could fairly say his award-winning trainer, Todd Pletcher and his owners are taking the time to think about the next steps.

It’s axiomatic in training horses that a trainer will take careful, small steps before building up to place this or that larger challenge in front of any athlete in his or her care. It’s about figuring out who that racer is. The last thing anybody in racing wants to do is to waste time and energy training a sprinter for the Belmont, or vice versa, attempting to put a budding Seattle Slew in a mile sprint.

And yet: Forte was perfectly positioned for the Travers. His win in the Jim Dandy with blinkers on seemed just the ticket, he was focused, according to both Pletcher and Ortiz, and it seemed that he delivered the proof everybody was looking for that he had at last settled down and found himself again — after a long lapse since his stellar runs during his second year, missing the Kentucky Derby, and running gamely to place in the Belmont.

In Forte’s case, we do now know that, although he had been training quite well at Saratoga, he seemed not to like the somewhat muddy track presented to him by the Travers, and there are several reasons that can be in play for that. First, Forte’s running style: The horse has a way of leaving himself too much to do in the last furlongs, as he did in the Belmont, though his bounce back to place in that very long, tough race was admirably strong. But neither his stamina nor his athletic ability are the point.

What happens to any horse that is not a front runner on a muddy track is that they get pelted in the face and chest with all manner of dirt and mud thrown up by the horses blasting through the slop in front of them. Some horses it bothers, and some it doesn’t. Asked another way, why would anybody like that?

Because: If the top speed of a Thoroughbred in the heat of battle is something like 35-40 miles per hour, the mud thrown at them is coming the other way, into their faces and chests, with at least that speed. It can sting. Nobody, man nor beast, would “like” that. In racing, it’s a question of tolerance, not “like.” As we know, Forte battled through the mudball fight to take fourth, but it seems to have been a factor for Forte on August 26.

In the largest sense, however, even when there is zero mud flying up in his face, it seems Forte has a switch that can flop this way or that — affecting his desire to run. It wasn’t so evident in his races as a two-year-old, it’s something that has emerged as he has matured, and that’s what makes it especially difficult to parse and surmount. It’s also why Pletcher and jockey Irad Ortiz were tinkering over the summer, since the Belmont.