Derby Field Lacks Speed of Horses in the Past

They drew the field for the 137th running of the Kentucky Derby on Wednesday, but it did little to clear up the intrigue over whether Uncle Mo, last year’s 2-year-old champion, will actually show up for the race Saturday. Nor did it solve the mystery of why this group of 3-year-old horses is so slow.

Uncle Mo’s owner, Mike Repole, paid the $25,000 entry fee for the colt’s spot in the starting gate but said he would make a race-day decision about whether to let him break from the No. 18 hole in the Derby. He said Uncle Mo’s recovery from a gastrointestinal infection, discovered after finishing a disappointing third in the Wood Memorial last month, was progressing.

Both Repole and the trainer Todd Pletcher have been vague about what exactly ails Uncle Mo and what exactly they need to see from him in the next few days. Veterinarians will conduct a variety of tests Thursday.

Asked if Uncle Mo would compete if the Derby were held Wednesday evening, each had a different answer.

“Sure,” Pletcher said of the colt the Churchill Downs oddsmaker, Mike Battaglia, made the second favorite in the morning line at 9-2.

“I honestly don’t know,” Repole said.

So far this Triple Crown season has been one of the funkiest in recent memory, with prominent contenders like the San Felipe winner Premier Pegasus, the Rebel Stakes champion The Factor and, on Tuesday, the Wood Memorial victor Toby’s Corner being injured and declared out of the Derby.

Left in their wake is a field of 20 horses that speed figures and pace numbers say are slow. The Beyer Speed Figures published in the Daily Racing Form break down the time of the race and speed of a racing surface on a particular day to produce a numerical scale of a horse’s past performance.

The numbers have not been kind to the class of 2011.

In fact, for the first time in a decade, not a single winner of the six major Kentucky Derby prep races — the Arkansas Derby, the Blue Grass Stakes, the Florida Derby, the Louisiana Derby, the Santa Anita Derby and the Wood Memorial — earned a Beyer Speed Figure of at least 100, considered the standard for a high-quality stakes champion.

The fastest of them, Archarcharch, recorded the highest Beyer, a 98, in the Arkansas Derby last month. Archarcharch, who is 10-1 in the morning line, may have a difficult time duplicating that Saturday after drawing the dreaded No. 1 position in the starting gate. Last year, Lookin at Lucky, the eventual 3-year-old champion, broke from there and lost all chance of winning after being bumped twice in the opening eighth of a mile.

“We’re going to make it work,” his jockey, Jon Court, said, echoing the sentiments of the colt’s trainer and his father-in-law, Jinks Fires.

Even many of the Derby trainers concede that, on paper at least, this could be one of the least distinguished groups of horses in recent years.

“No one really has burned it up, but they are pretty evenly matched,” said the trainer Bob Baffert, a three-time Derby winner, whose Midnight Interlude (10-1) will start from No. 15 hole.

The 4-1 morning-line favorite, Dialed In, ran the last three-eighths of a mile — or came home, in racetrack parlance — of the Florida Derby in 38.24 seconds, which is considered pedestrian. It was fast enough to win a $1 million race and run Dialed In’s record to 3 for 4, but his trainer, Nick Zito, acknowledged that it was not mathematically impressive.

“What difference does it make?” said Zito, who has won the Derby twice. “My colt does what he has to do to win. It’s not his fault he was born in this crop of horses and they haven’t run big numbers as a group.”

Last year, Uncle Mo was head and shoulders above his contemporaries, winning all three starts by a combined 23 lengths and posting Beyer numbers of 102 and 108. So far he has failed to return to that form.

Still, Pletcher is not keen on leading Uncle Mo to the paddock unless he is fully healthy, even if the numbers say the colt does not have much to beat. This, after all, is the time of year that 3-year-old horses blossom into physically and mentally mature racehorses.

“I think it’s a crop that needs to improve,” said Pletcher, who won his first Derby last year with Super Saver. “But I think it’s premature to write them off. In the next five weeks, we’re going watch them grow up, and maybe one of them gets their first and wins the Triple Crown or maybe a few of them will jump up and get different legs of it.”