Often, I find running lines where a horse was beat by several lengths after engaging the pace for a time, or made an evident move at some point in the race to gain contention. However, watching the replay of the actual race, I may observe that the jockey is either easing the horse back once all hope for a money finish is lost, resulting in a finish that appears worse than it looked, or the jockey basically stops riding hard, letting the horse cruise under his own power, almost like being eased, but a similar outcome.
For obvious reasons, I wouldn't select a pace line where these situations occur, because you're going to give the horse inferior treatment in some way, shape or form. Finishes like these basically render speed figures of those horses as nearly irrelevant, because they are no longer under any drive and are basically just finishing the race with minimal effort. However, if a line either 2 or 3 starts back (within a reasonable time frame, i.e. within the last 90 days) shows a usable line, and line 1 and/or line 2 show evidence that the rider basically stopped or eased once hope was lost AFTER making an early or mid move, should we go ahead and use the usable line since the horse did do some legitimate running during one or two segments of the race? Or, should we as Ted likes to say, "trust our tools", select no line due to evident "poor form" and let the horse beat us should they run back to their "usable" race?
I apologize if my question is on a neophyte level, but I would love to hear some thoughts on the topic.
