Todd Pletcher Horse Quotations

Pollard was tough, durable and consistent -- a real warrior, the type of horse everyone would want to own. He gave you everything he had.

I felt like if we can get this horse straightened away and focused and he matures, then he can be any kind of horse.

He was a fresh horse and ran exactly the way we wanted him to.

He can run from off the pace if we need to do that, but maybe letting him be a free-running horse is his best style. We're certainly not going to try to take him off the pace. The most likely scenario is he's going to be on the lead, but if somebody else wants the lead then that's fine, too.

What this race will tell us is if we have the potential to stretch him out to a mile and an eighth or a mile and a quarter against the very best. I would be surprised if he didn't run well at a mile and a sixteenth. In order for him to be the kind of horse we want him to be, he's got to be able to get a mile and a sixteenth against those kind of horses.

He's a pretty forward horse and the key is just really if they can relax just enough to make their speed dangerous and keep carrying it.

I don't want to get in the way of Johnny with his Kentucky Derby mounts. This was a particularly hard decision, because anyone who works or trains or is around Keyed Entry knows how good he is. You'd want to stay with a horse like that as long as possible. He's undefeated. He's training super. In a perfect world, Keyed Entry would already have gone two turns, so Johnny could have made a better comparison with Bluegrass Cat. Bluegrass Cat already has been a mile and an eighth, and he's already been a mile and a sixteenth this year. I think it came down to that.

He ran much-improved races last fall and has continued to develop physically. They stamped him as a horse moving toward the top of the handicap division.

If he were to win the Sprint, I think he puts himself in position to make a strong case for not only horse of the year, but champion three-year-old.