There's definitely a trend towards late bloomers in the three year old crops. Justify beat the Apollo curse, he wouldn't have even been pointed towards the Triple Crown path not too long ago. Then there was West Coast last year, Arrogate (!!) the year before. Arrogate's Travers was probably the second greatest performance by a three year old in thoroughbred history. And I'm not uncertain his Dubai World Cup performance wasn't the best race ever run.
Justify was definitely a better horse than Pharoah, who benefited from the worst three year old crop in recent memory. Pharoah doesn't win the Triple Crown if he's running in 2014, California Chrome wins if he's running in 2015. But winning the Triple Crown isn't easy.
This crop wasn't nearly as bad, and horses like Vino Rosso, Tenfold, Bravazo, and Hofburg should continue to develop into legitimate forces (along with Malibu Moon and Audible), though it would have been nice to see Justify face Audible in the Belmont.
I'll be at Travers this year for the first time in like five years, so I'm pretty excited. Hopefully Baffert doesn't get cold feet after Pharoah fell victim to the Graveyard of Champions.
As for Gronkowski the horse, he ran a nice race. Didn't give believe in him coming off an injury with the European road to the Derby being notoriously low quality, but huge credit to Chad Brown and Jose, who ran his own race the whole way and let the pack wear themselves out over the 12 furlongs. Justify is just a freak and can run all day, nothing to be done. Turns out everyone else was just running for second.
