As I thought it would happen, Down The Jazz's condition did turn Sharp again two weeks later and he now had his inevetable recessive race behind him. Now we could get to work.
Sometimes you can end up being too clever for you own good. I had good intentions in that I thought I had solid reasoning behind what I had planned but it may actually have cost Down The Jazz a win.
Looking at the two Grade I races coming up if Florida; The Fountain Of Ute = $200K , and the Florida Derby = $750K . It doesn't take a genuis to figure which one you would rather win. A horse could win both, but why? Why would you wan't your horse to be running so well that it would be peaking two months before the Blugrass Derby? This is still February, that's a long time to expect a horse to be in peak condition, then to compete in all Triple Crown races too? it would be completely impractical to expevt your horse to maintain it's winning form for that long a period.
So, my plan was to focus on winning the Florida Derby and use the Fountain Of Ute as a prep race for that one. I figured to work on Jazz's earlyn speed again by giving the jockey the instructions of:
What I thought would happen during the race is that a sprinter would take the early lead and try to stretch his lead wire-to-wire, Down The Jazz would be able to sit off that horse and rate off that one. To my surprise, there wasn't any true speed in the race, Down The Jazz immeaditely took control of the pace and set very slow fractions. Unbelievably to me, Down The Jazz kept his lead all the way to the last few feet before the finish line and then losing by only half a lenght. Very gutsy performance!!
What was even more impressive, he held off the #1 rated 3yo in the SIM; Woody's Smurfs. Woody put in a closing effort against the slow pace, which is very good also, but for all the effort put in by Woody, Down The Jazz dug in and would not let Woody pass him. This showed me that Down The Jazz had a tremendous amount of class. To control the pace and only losing by half a length with jockey instructions that went against his natural running style, then still have enough left to hold of the top ranked 3yo proved to me that I have a very special horse here. Great Race!!
