Weighty Question to Ponder : Horse racing: Unbridled’s trainer asks why Grade I races aren’t all run under the same allowance conditions.

The 117th Kentucky Derby winner was recovering from his efforts of the previous afternoon Sunday morning at Churchill Downs while Carl Nafzger was preparing to send the 116th to Baltimore for Saturday’s $750,000 Pimlico Special.

After a winter respite during which his connections savored his 1990 3-year-old championship and Breeders’ Cup Classic victory, Unbridled signaled his return to competition in mid-March with a wild late run in a seven-furlong race at Gulfstream Park in which he upset the defending sprint champion, Housebuster. The effort left the impression that a stronger, even better Unbridled would be a formidable figure this season.

Unbridled and Nafzger then waded into the new American Championship Racing Series and, as a result of his victory at Gulfstream, the horse was handed high weight, 124 pounds, for the nine-furlong Oaklawn Park Handicap. Nafzger was displeased. His horse had not run in a two-turn race or a graded stakes in almost six months, but Unbridled was asked to concede weight to the then-undefeated Jolie’s Halo, who had won two recent Grade I stakes--the Donn and Gulfstream Park options.

Seldom is a horse assigned more than 126 pounds in a Grade I handicap, and the practice of compensating on the low end of the scale has come into vogue. In reality, the entire concept of the handicap, whether it involves piling weight on a favorite or shaving it off the bottom, is no longer valid in Grade I races and probably never was.

“The game,” Nafzger said, “has changed. In the old days, when you shipped a horse to a race it involved days on a train or a van, so you had top horses running against the same competition over and over again. The world is not the same. The airplane has changed the game. It used to be that before you could get a group of good horses all together, most of them would go bad. Nowadays, when a horse gets good, he’s there the next day looking at you. These (ACRS) races are worth anywhere from $500,000 to $1 million. This is a business. When horses get good, they’re going to fly in there and run at you.”

Nafzger contends that Grade I races, if they are to be used to measure the relative merits of the best horses in each division, should be played on a level field, under allowance or weight-for-age conditions.

“What if Joe Montana was playing against the Dallas Cowboys and they made him wear a three-pound weight on his throwing arm? I’m saying we’ve got to make horses play each other,” Nafzger said. “Our Grade I races have to be showcases. They should not be handicaps. We’ve got to stop penalizing our champions. Weight only keeps good horses out of races and brings cheaper horses in. They’ve got to quit worrying about big fields and gimmick betting and worry about three or four quality horses. You worry about filling other races. These horses have fans.

“What does the average fan know about weight? Nothing. Does the average football fan like the game because he understands it? It’s the same with weight in racing. The average fan knows that this horse won three in a row, but I bet on him and he lost. He doesn’t understand anything about weight. The best horses get beat often enough without having to pack weight on the champions. Make them run straight up.”