In a nw1x for 3 yo at Gulfstream Saturday, one High Cotton was favored and ran 3rd, and another one won. I doubt High Cotton received the kind of opportunity at stud that he should be that much of a presence in good races, so I'm impressed. He also only has 44 horses in the entire 2009 crop.
To interject a minor sour note, while his percentage of winners from starters is impressive at 50%, his percentage of wins from starts at 13% is not. The High Cottons seem to have been sound so far: both making it to the races, and running quite a few times each on the average. Thus all the winners.
The colt who won this allowance race, Tarpy's Goal, was coming back having run just five days earlier. Dale Romans may have given him a pure prep on the 16th, which was a 5f turf race where he was never close. Tarpy's Goal's other races did not inspire the confidence to bet him, however: he'd run 3rd, 6th, 7th, and 3rd since breaking his maiden, and hadn't come closer than 4 lengths. It's not unusual to find solid, well-placed horses who go long stretches never losing by more than 4 lengths.
I would also never have picked out Tarpy's Goal on the Form as one who would take to 7f (for one thing, the average distance of his six previous races was 5 3/4 furlongs), but he did.
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