Book Review: Alydar’s Chief Counsel

If there was a Thoroughbred who ever needed legal counsel to mount an adequate defense of his life, then perhaps it would be Calumet Farm's MGISW Alydar.

His battles with rival Affirmed as both a juvenile, and of course, through the 1978 Triple Crown are now the stuff of legend. However, what has clouded all those spectacular past performances came during his stallion career when he tragically died from an injury which was sustained while he was in his Calumet stall on a November night in 1990. Officially chalked up as an accident, his sudden and shocking death has remained shrouded in conjecture ever since.

What happened to Alydar? That is the central question that Fred M. Kray attempts to tackle in his ambitiously titled new book, Broken: The Suspicious Death of Alydar and the End of Horse Racing's Golden Age.

There is nothing quite like a tenacious true crime writer. Plucky isn't a descriptor that goes far enough. It's one's dogged determination, coupled with an ability to stare deep into the abyss that demands sterner stuff. Kray has all of that and more. His passion for this topic is evident, and he possesses the requisite skills to follow a labyrinth of clues and misstatements that go back forty-plus years.

A former animal-rights attorney who was on hand to witness the John M. Veitch trainee when he won the 1978 GI Flamingo S. at Hialeah Park and the GI Florida Derby at Gulfstream Park, Kray began to delve into the case in 2018. He tried to track down those involved, performed seemingly countless interviews and attempted to weave together a story chock full of contradiction.

But has Kray actually uncovered a smoking gun or is this just a series of red herrings? Where exactly is the conspiracy to commit murder?

Broken flows rather like a true crime memoir. It's Kray's defense laid bare on behalf of the Thoroughbred in question. Committing the cardinal sin if we skip to the end of this mystery, the author mythically knots his favorite Windsor tie and strides to the same courtroom in Houston, Texas where the security guard who was on duty that fateful night was tried and sentenced. There, he gives his own account of why he believes Alydar was murdered. It's heartfelt, but somehow it falls just short of compelling drama à la Raymond Burr.

Still, what makes this work a worthy read is the journey. Kray starts with the initial, all-too-brief insurance investigation. He then moves briskly through a composite of Alydar's racing and breeding shed exploits and delves into the questionable economic practices of Calumet's J.T. Lundy & Co. After painstakingly wading through the ensuing trials which fingered less than a handful of Calumet figures, Kray opens the curtain for the final act in which he becomes the lead. Perched on his shoulder like a GoPro Camera, we watch as he sits in front of many a horse farm gate, chides a reluctant private detective who didn't deliver and relates a number of emotional moments with key witnesses.

Alydar visiting Lucille Gene Markey on Blue Grass S. Day in 1978 | Keeneland

The relationship he forms with Tom Dixon, the equine insurance agent who was the first on the scene at Calumet, is particularly poignant. Dixon is a no-nonsense umpire that calls them like he sees them, and Kray has to steadily battle for the former agent's uneasy trust in order to access key photographs and notes. 'Deep Throat', Dixon is not, but the back-and-forth between the pair as they argue points of view on several occasions is quite a chess match.

Speaking of emotional moments, Kray's interview with Alydar's groom, Michael Coulter is both enlightening to his case, but we also find a man who hasn't returned to the scene mentally in quite some time. Though a witness in one of the trials, Coulter's perspective was underutilized and from Kray's questions, we get a window into the relationship the groom built with this superb equine athlete. Coulter explains how tired Alydar was from over-breeding and addresses the horse's psychological state. This is important because there were constant questions throughout the different trials about Alydar's penchant for kicking stall doors.

What Kray finds is a trail of dead ends and memories which are parsed with a few nuggets of remembrance. The author leads us to the assumption that key players that do not want to talk are clinging to something deeper. His mission to ask everyone connected why there were no marks on the paint in Alydar's stall, and why the latch was not disturbed becomes an indelible part of the script. A tense section relates an interview with the well-known Dr. Larry Bramlage. It is particularly excruciating to plow through, but it also shows how resolute Kray is when it comes to defending Alydar. You feel both men's frustration bearing out and it makes for good theater in the Rood & Riddle waiting room where the interview was conducted.

There is something very Citizen Kane about Broken. Like the reporter who is sent to find out what Charles Foster Kane meant when he said 'Rosebud' on his deathbed, we may never know what happened to Alydar that night at Calumet in 1990. Was his leg hit with something? Was more than one person involved? Who knew about the coverup at Calumet? Who knows something right now? Questions will continue to float. While we are on a roll, did Kray prove that this was the end of horse racing's 'Golden Age' as the book's subtitle suggests? That answer seems even more amorphous.

Instead, maybe we can take a sliver of comfort in knowing that there are some things we just can't uncover about a tragedy. If you read Broken as an homage to this Thoroughbred, then we need to thank the author for his contribution and determination. What we can say is that if Fred Kray had defended Alydar, at the very least, he might have had his day in court.

Broken: The Suspicions Death of Alydar and the End of Horse Racing's Golden Age by Live Oak Press, 348 pages, photos, May 2023.

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This Side Up: How To Make The Crown Fit Again

Nostalgia, they say, isn't quite what it used to be. In times past, it was not so much a wistful state of mind as an outright medical condition. The Union Army in the first two years of the Civil War reported precisely 2,588 cases, no fewer than 13 of which proved fatal. And I must admit to some concern that this may in fact be the version to which I am destined to succumb, nailed into the same coffin as the five-week Triple Crown.

The whole premise of nostalgia is irretrievability: the yearning for a time or place that can't be revisited. (Very often, perhaps, because it never existed in the first place.) This morbidity is suggested in the Greek stems of the word: nostos, homecoming, and algos, pain or distress. Unfortunately, while the first of these is doomed to remain notional, the second can even be national. It spills over into the here and now, corroding the happiness not just of individuals but whole societies. All round the world, we see populists promising to renew some golden age by restoring lapsed imperial or demographic boundaries.

But that observation obliges me to ask myself whether I'm doing anything so very different, in stubbornly resisting the groundswell towards Triple Crown reform?

With a solitary Kentucky Derby runner deigning to line up for the second leg of the series, for the first time since the current schedule was adopted in 1969, many whose opinions I respect appear to be accepting that there is no longer any point trying to turn back the side. They look at the seven runners in the GI Preakness S. on Saturday, and say the time has come to yield principle to pragmatism.

Well, they may be right. But first, I have a couple of questions. One is exactly where we can find this putative engagement with a disaffected wider public? Is it from having more competitive Triple Crown races, or is it from the romance of the quest itself?

Mage, Pimlico Race Course | Horsephotos

For a long time, during the drought between Affirmed and American Pharoah, we were told (despite several extremely close misses) that the assignment lay beyond the modern Thoroughbred and that we were duly squandering our best chance of engaging fan attention. On that basis, however, the defection of so many rivals clearly only enhances the prospects of Mage (Good Magic) heading to Belmont with a Triple Crown within reach. If that is supposed the grail of publicity, pricelessly combining heritage and accessibility, then does anyone imagine that casual viewers will tune out because the Preakness field lacked triple-figure Beyers?

But maybe the whole premise is wrong anyhow. If the Triple Crown is the best way of stemming our sport's drift from mainstream affections, then how do we assess the impact of the two we have saluted as recently as 2015 and 2018? While unanswerably demonstrating that the current schedule remains perfectly within the competence of the 21st Century Thoroughbred, American Pharoah and Justify hardly reversed the slide. As should be painfully obvious by now, we must address far more serious and challenging deficiencies in the way we present ourselves to a changing world.

Not that we can afford complacency in the audience we already have: the people, that is, who know enough about our arcane world to be dismayed by the lack of both quality and quantity in the field awaiting Mage at Pimlico. When so many indices are spiraling down, retention must be a still bigger priority than expansion. But a Triple Crown extended into July–which, in itself, might well stretch the fickle attention of a casual sports fan–could prove disastrous for other cherished races of high summer, especially now that horses are supposed to need a break before regrouping for a Breeders' Cup prep.

It is, as we know, the trainers who are driving this whole agenda. They have either seen or for some reason decided that horses today cannot soak up the kind of campaign that once allowed breeders a reliable measure of the kind of genetic resources they could aspire to replicate. The incidental benefit of this approach, of course, was precisely the fan engagement we have forfeited in protecting horses not only from competition but also from visibility.

The trainers have given the industry a choice. Either we concede that commercial breeding must be producing a Thoroughbred lacking the physical resources of its predecessors; or we candidly take issue with the trainers, and employ people who will explore the capacity of their charges more thoroughly. In both cases, however, the solution is in our own hands. What we are seeing in the Triple Crown series is a symptom of the problem, not the cause.

If it's about the physical caliber of the horses we are producing, then that obviously ties into another and far more serious challenge. If modern horses can't race twice under the same moon, or even stand up to federal regulation, then surely, we need to address the crazy situation where breeding for the sales ring has somehow become different from breeding a runner.

If it's simply the trainers that are wrong, however, then there are also things we can do about it. And that's not just because D. Wayne Lukas is still doing his thing at 87. I've regularly cited the example of another old master, Jim Bolger, just a couple of years ago running Poetic Flare (Ire) (Dawn Approach {Ire}) in three Classics in 22 days, before winning at Royal Ascot barely three weeks later; and, as often, deplored how only the Japanese could find a place for this horse at stud. But Bolger was also the mentor of Aidan O'Brien, who has himself frequently taken a similar approach. (One of my favorite instances was Peeping Fawn (Danehill). She was placed in a Classic 11 days after breaking her maiden at the fourth attempt; and then ran second in another, over an extra half-mile, five days after that. That experience so damaged her that she proceeded to four Group 1 wins inside eight weeks.)

Good Magic | Sarah Andrew

To me, it looks as though Bolger and O'Brien both believe that a thriving horse has a window of opportunity. And, on that basis, it may actually prove harder to maintain a Derby winner at the same peak for a Belmont in July than with the present calendar.

Most American trainers today evidently disagree. And look, I accept that times change. Mage himself, a horse we hadn't heard of 10 minutes ago, is a Derby winner for our times. He has a different scenario to tackle this time, and shouldn't give a start to one working as briskly as National Treasure (Quality Road). Even in this small field there are some pretty legitimate horses, and it's certainly an incredible achievement for Good Magic's first crop to yield three of seven starters in a Classic.

According to the behavior of trainers, it should be nearly inevitable that a raw colt like Mage regresses from his effort two weeks ago. If he happened to do that, however, it's a fair bet that whichever “mediocre” horse (not my view, I stress) took advantage could still be rewarded with 200 mares at stud next spring. Suffice to say that we have a lot of other stuff to sort out before we start scapegoating an anachronistic Triple Crown.

Good luck to Mage. He has a ton of talent. Who knows? Maybe he will prove the last Triple Crown winner over five weeks–and the last, therefore, who can validly claim parity with the previous 13. And then, when these elusive young fans become as old and grumpy as me, he may even be the stuff of nostalgia.

 

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Turcotte: Secretariat Was Better

Secretariat vs. Flightline (Tapit): Who was better?

“I think Secretariat would have beat him,” Secretariat's jockey Ron Turcotte said of a hypothetical match up between the two legendary horses. “That's no knock against the other horse. He's a beautiful horse. Well put together. I can't fault him in any way. But he has hasn't done enough for me to say he is better than Secretariat.”

That's not to say that Turcotte isn't a Flightline fan.

“He's a fabulous horse,” he said. “We don't know how fast he could run.”

Turcotte, 81, resides in Drummond, New Brunswick, Canada. He watched the GI Breeders' Cup Classic live on television and took a look back at Flightline's previous races on YouTube. He sees some similarities between Flightline and Secretariat.

“He's very muscular like Secretariat,” Turcotte said. “He's got a real large stride like Secretariat and it looks to me than he's taller than Secretariat was.”

But Turcotte added that he finds it difficult to compare a horse who ran only six times to Secretariat, who made 21 career starts.

“There aren't enough races for me to really judge him,” he said. “It's very hard to judge a horse against Secretariat when he only had six races. Secretariat was a machine  The same goes for some of the great horses like Kelso. He won the Gold Cup five times in a row. I rode against him and know what a great horse he was.

“I would have loved to see Flightline run another year because it's very hard to judge him on just six races. it would have been much better for racing if they ran him another year, but I can understand why the people did what they did, with all the money there is now in breeding.”

Turcotte said another factor that makes a comparison difficulty is that Secretariat did not run as a 4-year-old while Flightline did.

“Comparing a 4-year-old and a 3-year-old, that's awful hard to do,” he said. “Secretariat was just maturing when he was retired. His last two races were just unbelievable.”

He also pointed to Secretariat's versatility and the track records Secretariat set in his three Triple Crown wins.

“Secretariat would run in the slop , the mud, on a fast track, the grass. He would run on anything.” he said. “The other horse only ran on fast tracks. And he never broke a track record, like Secretariat did.”

It's been 49 years since Turcotte rode Secretariat and there have been some tremendous horses that have come after him, like Seattle Slew, Affirmed, Spectacular Bid, Cigar, Zenyatta and, of course Flightline. But will there ever be a horse that compares to Secretariat?

“I've always said we'd never see a horse as good as Secretariat,” Turcotte said. “But you never know.”

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Florida Sire Stakes Returns in 2022

The FTBOA Florida Sire Stakes will return to Gulfstream Park with a series of races for 2-year-olds sired by accredited stallions standing in Florida from late summer through early fall.

The $100,000 Dr. Fager, a six-furlong sprint, and the $100,000 Desert Vixen, a six-furlong dash for fillies, will kick off the 2022 FSS series Aug. 6. The $200,000 Affirmed will be contested at seven-furlongs Sept. 3, the same day as the $200,000 Susan's Girl for fillies. The $400,000 In Reality and the $400,000 My Dear Girl for fillies, the 1 1/16-mile final legs of the series, will be run Oct. 1.

The inaugural $100,000 FTBOA Florida Sire Stakes Gil Campbell Memorial, a mile stakes for 3-year-olds, will also be run Oct. 1.

The Florida Sire Stakes Series has produced five Eclipse Award champions: Awesome Feather (2010 Juvenile Filly), Big Drama (2010 Sprinter), Smile (1986 Sprinter), Brave Raj (1986 Juvenile Filly) and Not Surprising (1995 Sprint).

The six Florida Sire Stakes races are among 40 stakes races scheduled during the spring, summer and fall months at Gulfstream Park. The $75,000 Honey Ryder, a mile turf stakes for 3-year-old fillies, and the $75,000 English Channel, a mile turf event for 3-year-olds, will kick off the stakes schedule next Saturday, followed by the $75,000 Monroe, a 1 1/16-mile turf stakes for fillies and mares, next Sunday.

The Royal Palm Meet's stakes schedule will be headlined by the $250,000 GII Princess Rooney Invitational, a seven-furlong sprint for fillies and mares, and the $100,000 GIII Smile Sprint, a six-furlong race for 3-year-olds and up, July 2 on Summit of Speed Weekend, which will also feature the $100,000 Bob Umphrey Sprint, a five-furlong dash for 3-year-olds and up on Tapeta.

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