"What I found out was the Beyer Figures by the top stakes horses were relatively similar from 1992 to 2005. And then it all started to slow down. With a few exceptions that don't last long (Uncle Mo), the best horses just keep getting slower on the Beyer scale."

"Still, as the Derby has been progressively corporatized, to the point that its very name has been purchased by the Yum! Brands conglomerate of fast-food chains, the actual race itself has been shoved to the margins. After all, it’s only two minutes. The real point of the Kentucky Derby seems more and more rooted in the anticipation, the parades, the steamboat races, the corporate suites, the merchandising, and the constant feeding of a multimedia beast that aids and abets the process."

Jeff Scott on the direction of racing over the past decade. "Another Saratoga trend is the continued decline in the number of conditioned allowance races, particularly in open (non-statebred) events. By limiting fields to horses who have won a similar number of races ("other than maiden, claiming, starter or restricted") conditioned allowances pit horses of roughly equal accomplishment against each other, and thus are often attractive betting propositions. The number of open, conditioned allowances at Saratoga (including those run as optional claimers) decreased from 54 to 34 between 2004 and 2009. Ten years earlier, in 1999, there were 72."