(Bloomberg) -- It took wunderkind racehorse trainer Chad Brown a decade to capture his first Triple Crown trophy. I’m betting his second one comes just three weeks later.
Is it a longshot? Yeah, it’s a longshot, especially because the horse he’s sending out in the Belmont Stakes on Saturday isn’t the same up-and-coming colt that won the Preakness Stakes last month.
That was Cloud Computing.
This is Twisted Tom.
And Tom, to be frank, has his problems. He’s slow -- on a speed-figure scale, he’s not even close to the top Belmont contenders -- and he’s never faced elite competition like this before. But he also has some things going for him: He’s won three races in a row, he’s training well and he’s drawn a favorable inside post position for the race. What’s more, that grind-it-out, slow-and-steady way he has about him is perfect for the marathon Belmont distance of 1 1/2 miles.
At expected odds of 20-1, I like the risk-reward equation.
I’m betting Tom to win and will also weave him into an exacta box with Tapwrit, a talented colt who finished a respectable sixth in the Kentucky Derby after a rough start. To try to further juice returns, I’ll pair Tom up in a Daily Double wager with a horse named Time Test in the race prior to the Belmont. Unlike Tom, there’s nothing slow about Time Test. He can flat-out run.
(David Papadopoulos, a managing editor at Bloomberg News, is a voter in the thoroughbred industry’s annual Eclipse Awards. He has been publishing his Triple Crown picks since 2012.)
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