Pacific Classic and Oaks Commentary

For any one looking for answers for what happened in the Pacific Classic, there aren’t any. The horse that won, Higher Power, had never won a graded stakes race in his career and didn’t have a leg to stand on quantitatively, and yet he beat multiple graded stakes winners and million dollar earners, who looked pitiful. The odds of the horses that finished in the top three were 9-1, 13-1, and 18-1. To put this into perspective, the combined implied winning probabilities of these horses was only 20%, a virtually impossible result considering that the three favorites in Seeking the Soul, Pavel and Quip had low risk with Coefficient of Variance ratios of 4%, 6% and 7%. In other words, these top horses do not deviate from their performances norms, so for all long-shots to have won, all the favorites would have had to fallen out of form at the same time. It is all the more unlikely in view of the fact that Pavel and Quip came into the race off career best performances. This was quite a woeful result for one of California’s premier races. It will go down as one of the worst ever for a grade 1 stakes race from a statistical handicapping perspective.

That said, the program had the winner of the Del Mar Oaks with its second selection in Cambier Parc, and had three of the top four finishers with its top four selections in Keeper of the Stars (4th) at 22-1, Cambier Parc (1st) at 6-5 and Lady Prancelot (3rd) at 15-1. Unlike the Pacific Classic, this race had integrity, even though it was a much more difficult one to handicap, in that the results were quantifiable.