Talk:2018 Road to the Kentucky Derby

Standings - Conflict with KentuckyDerby.com and Bloodhorse.com

To the major contributors (@Jlvsclrk:, @Stylteralmaldo:, @Bcp67:, @69.62.161.180:, @Montanabw:) of this article I bring up a topic just so we can get some stability and conformity without stepping on each others toes.

According to the Rank there is a reference appended to it that we are using the official site KentuckeyDerby.com. Fair enough, but there are some things in there which are questionable and are leading to probable conflict. In particular to two things that I see. News reports have indicated Avery Island is out of the running due to a 90 day restriction on his injury. Yet according to the official site he is still ranked. If we omit him in the rankings then the reference is wrong. IMO we should leave him rank and just have him grayed out as per our legend. Having the note of must be "in training" is a bit misnomer because really until they retire they are still in training - albeit recovery.

Now if we use the Bloodhorse.com ranking then they try to update the information much quicker except they also have a deficiency of not having Flameaway in their rankings due to non-payment yet of nominations - which either they have overlooked or there is something else that is not clear. In the category of Non-Restricted Stakes Earnings they are also much quicker to update. For some reason the official site is lagging behind especially for horses which finish in non-qualification-point places i.e. fifth, sixth places and so forth were stakes are earned.

Hence, give us your thoughts on this topic in the much read/viewed article. Cheers! Brudder Andrusha (talk) 14:26, 18 March 2018 (UTC)

Hi, yes I'm troubled about Avery Island being still ranked at kentuckyderby.com when he's clearly off the trail and don't know of the best solution. I probably should have done as you suggest and left him at 17 but it irks me to still see him there. Kentuckyderby.com (run by Churchill Downs) is the best source for this since it is their race after all, but the person who does the updating doesn't always do the greatest job. I do know that Churchill Downs provides a PDF to the media each week that contains full details for horses ranked and unranked and the reason for the latter. (Here's an example from a few years back) They also talk with the trainers to see if the horse is being pointed towards the Derby or not (hence the comment about 'in training for the Derby'). For example, last year they did not rank Cloud Computing since his connections said they were going to bypass the Derby for the Preakness. OTOH, they do include a horse as soon as they know the owner is going to fork up a late nomination (or even when a supplementary entry fee is going to be paid as with Oscar Nominated in 2016). That's why they added Flameaway a week or two back on the rankings - they got a firm commitment and quite possibly even received the late nomination fee, which is due by March 19. Perhaps bloodhorse is just waiting for the official announcement of the late nominations received, so this question may be resolved soon enough.

There is a secondary problem with using the Derby site or the bloodhorse page or the DRF page for that matter: unfortunately, they recycle the same page each year and the info for year's gone by just disappears. That's why we link to the other sources as much as possible for details on the races and connections and such like. The ranking itself is only important in the run-up to the race so people can see who's in and who's on the bubble. Jlvsclrk (talk) 15:52, 18 March 2018 (UTC)

Thoughts:

1. One thing we can do is use archive.org to archive the older pages and then link to THAT page once it changes for the next year. I think we can even run that automated check bot (can't recall what it's called) to try and fix the older articles
2. As for discrepancies, I think we have to keep the "official" rankings, even for the lame horses (because, hey, miracles happen) but we can use the color coding to indicate that they are off the trail and say so somewhere... use both sources.
3. Where possible, those weekly PDF files are the best to use because they are (usually) permanent and contains the date of publication.

All I can think of for now. Montanabw^(talk) 19:27, 20 March 2018 (UTC)

So kentuckyderby.com sent a press release this week on late nominations, so that should resolve the flameaway question. They finally took out Avery Island, so that discrepancy with the bloodhorse ranking is also gone. A few more horses at the bottom of the previous Derby rankings also disappeared, presumably because their trainers decided they weren't up to the distance. I checked around for confirmations on their status but couldn't find anything though. Jlvsclrk (talk) 14:53, 24 March 2018 (UTC)

Found a link to the PDF that Churchill Downs sends the media re eligibility. [March 24 update|https://www.kentuckyderby.com/uploads/wysiwyg/assets/uploads/20180324_Road_to_the_Kentucky_Derby_Leaderboard.pdf] Jlvsclrk (talk) 00:25, 30 March 2018 (UTC)