Wild Again's inaugural Classic thriller was among the top 20 moments as Breeders' Cup Limited released the top vote-getters from its 40th running campaign fan poll, an opportunity for fans to choose their favorites from 40 pre-selected moments in Breeders' Cup history. The 40th running campaign–a multi-month celebration that will culminate in the Breeders' Cup World Championships Nov. 3-4 at Santa Anita Park–kicked off June 6 with the poll. Fans chose their top three moments from the 40 presented, spanning from the first running at Hollywood Park to last year's edition at Keeneland.
Each Wednesday, the Breeders' Cup, in cooperation with FanDuel TV, will release videos online and on social media platforms as several of racing's most prominent participants and Breeders' Cup ambassadors relive the top 20 moments.
The countdown continues to the top three moments, which will be unveiled during the first week of November as the World Championships loom.
Included among the Top 20 moments:
1984: Wild Again's Inaugural Classic Thriller
1988: Personal Ensign Nips Winning Colors in Distaff, Retires Undefeated
1989: Sunday Silence Bests Easy Goer in Horse of the Year Showdown
1991: Arazi's Mind-Blowing Juvenile Rally
1993: The 133-1 Classic Upset of Arcangues
1995: Cigar Wraps Perfect Season With Classic Score
I guess the whole point is that ours is a world apart, a sanctuary from the cares of the “real” one. But it still feels unnerving, to see a new cycle of the sales calendar open with such blithe indifference to a wider consensus that the global economy is scrabbling along the top of a precipice.
Both Saratoga and Deauville benefit from a heady atmosphere that might easily induce a perilous incaution when a yearling stands there shimmering on a sale rostrum. But it was ever thus, and the market at both Fasig-Tipton and Arqana exhibited remarkable buoyancy when measured against historic standards.
We know that bloodstock tends to lag somewhat behind other indices of recession, and conceivably this will prove to be some final, decadent flourish before the bulls start to draw in their horns. But it may also turn out, as when bloodstock showed such startling resilience during the pandemic, that the outlook simply looks different to the affluent elite on whom our industry so candidly depends. Inflation may be a bolting mustang; there may be wars and rumors of wars; political discourse may be ever more acrimoniously polarized. None of it seems to matter to these guys.
To be fair, in certain states American investors can increasingly entertain the possibility that their racetrack programs can aspire to something vaguely resembling viability–even if some benighted horsemen appear masochistically determined to erode that equation with their stubborn litigations. But the parallel strength of the market over the water suggests that a lot of people must also be animated by less tangible dividends.
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That being so, we must always remember how destructive to our sport is the contamination of bad publicity. No shortage of that, of course, in an average week–and this one has been no different. Equally, however, we must acknowledge our debt to those priceless horses and horsemen that do succeed in capturing the public imagination; to those that intrigue outsiders, and inspire them to enter and contribute to our community, whether as fans and handicappers or as buyers of seven-figure yearlings. And it's also been a week, either side of the ocean, that has magnified those positives.
First and foremost, we have had a fresh reminder of the captivating grandeur within the compass of the Thoroughbred. Raised in distance for the first time, Baaeed (GB) (Sea The Stars {Ire}) also raised his game anew to reach a pantheon lately shared, on European turf, perhaps only by his sire and Frankel (GB) (Galileo {Ire}).
Someone as tediously insistent as me, on the importance of a transatlantic cross-pollination, is hardly going to neglect the opportunity to highlight the way Baaeed's pedigree combines gene pools that have since become disastrously bisected. No fewer than 11 of the 16 contributors to this grass titan's fourth generation were bred in North America. Mr. Prospector is sire not only of Baaeed's fourth dam; but also of his damsire, Kingmambo; and of Miswaki, whose daughter Urban Sea gave us Sea The Stars. And look who's here, as sire of the third dam: the great enigma himself, Arazi!
Galileo, half-brother of Sea the Stars, sire of leading stallion Frankel (GB) | Emma Berry
Sea The Stars, specifically, combines two transatlantic cocktails. Start with his sire Cape Cross (Ire). He's by Green Desert, himself a son of Danzig out of a daughter of Sir Ivor and Courtly Dee; and out of Park Appeal (Ire), whose genes (by Ahonoora (GB) out of a Balidar (GB) mare) are no less evocative of a completely different world. As for Urban Sea, the epoch-making dam of Sea The Stars (and Galileo, of course), she similarly blends a classic American brand (Miswaki was by Mr. Prospector out of a Buckpasser mare) with a mare whose parents both channelled doughty German blood.
Much the same kind of thing happens along Baaeed's bottom line. That Mr. Prospector fourth dam we just mentioned, for instance, is actually out of the British matriarch Height Of Fashion (GB), who was by Bustino (GB) and saturated with other indigenous influences. So, really, can anyone look at Baaeed's pedigree and still understand why most breeders, either side of the Atlantic, no longer want to mix turf and dirt lines?
So much for Baaeed's past. As far as his future is concerned, we must naturally yield to the judgement of those who have brought him this far with such skill. But it must be said that the horse stands in danger of leaving us with the same wistfulness as did Frankel, who similarly spent most of his career beating up proven inferiors at a mile before stepping up in trip only in his penultimate start–and in the same York race that Baaeed won this week. The plan has long been to remain in step with Frankel by also bowing out over 10 furlongs at Ascot, but the door is apparently still ajar to going to the Arc instead.
In declining to run either at Longchamp or at the Breeders' Cup, Frankel was left exposed to the charge that he never went looking for trouble. Suspecting him to be one of the best of all time, everyone was comparing him to specters past–yet he never measured himself against plenty of good ones then alive and well, and available for racetrack competition.
The fact is that Baaeed finished the new trip at York ravenously, and is a full-brother to a Group 1 winner at 12f (and Group winner at 14f). So let's hope that the desire to preserve his immaculate record does not discourage connections of another great horse from exploring the full range of his brilliance.
If a sporting gamble happened to misfire, it wouldn't take a cent off his value. In terms of his legacy, he has nothing to lose and much to gain. And, as we've been saying, there's a wider consideration–one might almost say, a wider obligation–to make this game as engrossing as we can; to showcase charisma, and retrieve the news agenda from the bad guys.
Happily, that is just what is happening at Saratoga this summer, with D. Wayne Lukas back on center stage Saturday with his latest Classic winner squaring up for her decider with Nest (Curlin). Last week we highlighted the way Lukas appears to be reversing the ageing process, as a rejuvenated force in the sales ring as well as on the racetrack. He promptly produced another exciting juvenile in Bourbon Bash (City Of Light), who won his second start by eight lengths and looks eligible to extend his trainer's record of eight wins in the GI Hopeful S.
This is the first foal out of a stakes-winning Violence mare named Buy Sell Hold. Sell or hold is an adequate conundrum for most people right now, trying to read the alarming runes in less singular markets. How long our own marketplace can remain insulated by such unquantifiable factors as horses like Baaeed, and horsemen like Lukas, remains to be seen. But history tells us that we will find out soon enough.
In general, American dirt racing is dominated by horses with a high turn of early speed. Relatively few winners come from far back, especially in the most prestigious races. As a result, those who do make a greater impression. Few would forget Secretariat's run from last in the first quarter of the 1973 Kentucky Derby to winning in record time.
Likewise, those of us who were there at the Breeders' Cup races at Churchill Downs in 1991 won't forget the Grade 1 Juvenile victory by Arazi (by Blushing Groom). The first trans-Atlantic juvenile champion, Arazi had come into the race with a grand reputation.
Second on his debut at Chantilly on May 30, Arazi had won all six of his subsequent starts, all stakes, including the G1 Prix Morny, Prix de la Salamandre, and Grand Criterium. The acknowledged juvenile champion of Europe, Arazi was untested and untried on dirt, but he was the favorite for the race at slightly more than 2-to-1 over the quick California colt Bertrando (Skywalker).
The latter sped the first two quarters in :23 and change for a half in :46.63, and he ran a remarkably brave race to finish second, beaten five lengths. All the other horses who had attended the early pace were more than 10 lengths behind Arazi, and the colts who were 12th (Snappy Landing) 13th (Arazi), and 14th (Offbeat) at the first quarter-mile finished 1st (Arazi), 3rd (Snappy Landing), and 4th (Offbeat).
Even allowing that the pace took a serious toll, the move that Arazi made had to be seen to be believed, and one of the joys of the internet is that the race is available for all to see. The dashing chestnut in the red, white, and blue silks of co-owner Allen Paulson captured the imagination of the racing public, including thousands who watched racing only occasionally, and for the next several months, anything that Arazi did was news.
The first bit of news about the lovely colt wasn't good, however. He came out of the race with a chip in a knee. That was operated on, and the winner of seven races from eight starts wintered uneventfully with trainer Francois Boutin in France and made his 1992 debut a winning one in the Prix Omnium.
If Arazi fever had been simmering over the winter, it went to a heady boil immediately. With only a single start since the 1991 Juvenile, Arazi was made the odds-on favorite to win the Kentucky Derby.
In the race, Snappy Landing led the field down the stretch the first time, with an opening quarter in :24; at that point, the Irish-bred Dr. Devious (Ahonoora) and Arazi were 15th and 17th in a field of 18. Going into the far turn, Arazi was moving rapidly outside, his diminutive form visible between horses as he picked off one after another. The chart credits the colt with reaching second, but as the field passed into the stretch, the writing was on the wall. This would not be a coronation. Instead, it was a realization that a miler with an exceptional turn of foot was at a great disadvantage in the American classics.
From the quarter pole home, the big classic colts, Lil E. Tee (At the Threshold) and Casual Lies (Lear Fan) took control of the race, and Arazi faded just a bit to finish eighth, a head behind Dr. Devious. A month later, Dr. Devious finished really well up the rising ground at Epsom Downs to claim the Derby after his good prep in Kentucky.
Arazi likewise went back across the Atlantic, where he was unplaced in the G1 St. James's Palace Stakes over a mile at Royal Ascot, then was third in the G3 Prix du Prince d'Orange at Longchamp on Sept. 20. The colt returned to win the G2 Prix du Rond-Point and crossed the Atlantic again to compete for the G1 Breeders' Cup Mile at Gulfstream.
Sent off as the favorite against some of the top milers in the world, Arazi was inexplicably close up early as Lure (Danzig) set fire to the track, made every pole a winning one, and took the Mile by three lengths in 1:32.90, a new track record. Arazi must have been wondering what they were smoking after three-quarters in 1:09.09, and he backed up to 11th, the worst finish of his career.
That was the end of Arazi's racing, but his long breeding career began in 1993. Sold to Allen Paulson as a foal at the 1989 Keeneland November sale, Arazi had a world-class pedigree to go with his distinguished racing class. As a top-class juvenile who hadn't quite trained on at three, Arazi nonetheless had shown good form, and he was an attractive stallion prospect.
Sheikh Mohammed had purchased a half-interest in the chestnut colt for $9 million prior to the 1991 Grand Criterium and sent the colt to stud in England at his Dalham Hall in 1993. Arazi was a son of the top 2-year-old Blushing Groom, who stood at Gainesway Farm in Kentucky. Bernie Sams recalled the chestnut champion and leading sire, saying, “Blushing Groom had the best temperament you could find in a stallion. You could work with him, and he'd never get aggressive. His favorite treat was watermelon rind.”
Arazi apparently got much of the generous disposition of his sire and was characterized as a gentleman during his term at stud in Kentucky at Three Chimneys Farm. While there he sired his very best racer, the big chestnut Congaree, who was third in the 2001 Kentucky Derby behind Monarchos. In addition, Congaree won Grade 1 races at seven, eight, nine, and 10 furlongs, showing the versatility and durability that is possible with the Thoroughbred.
Out of a daughter of Northern Dancer, Arazi was pedigreed to be an outstanding sire, but the chestnut champion did not consistently sire racers with his own type and talent. His best in Europe was probably America, a filly who won the G2 Prix de Malleret and G3 Prix Vanteaux. At stud, she is best known for producing Americain (Dynaformer), who won the 2010 Melbourne Cup and entered stud at Calumet Farm in Kentucky.
In 1997, Arazi was sold to stand at the Breeders Stallion Station in Japan. From there, the stallion was sent to stand in Australia at Independent Stallion Station in 2003 in Victoria, spent a single covering season in Switzerland, then returned to the Land of the Koala to spend the rest of his life.
At the time of his death on July 1, age 32, Arazi was a pensioner at Stockwell Stud.
Off the top of your head, how many Thoroughbreds can you name who have been immortalized by having their characteristic in-race “move” named after them?
Only three leap to mind for me: The “Silky Sullivan move” was coined in the late 1950s in honor of a California fan favorite who made a career out of lagging far behind and closing with a flourish, sometimes from more than 40 lengths off the pace. This phrase made its way into the lexicon of other sports and even American politics to signify an improbable victory under last-to-first circumstances.
A generation later, Secretariat's audacious seizure of the lead, rocketing from sixth to first through the first turn in the 1973 GI Preakness S., stood out so emphatically as a display of raw-torque dominance that inhaling the field with an outside rush on the clubhouse bend became known as the “Secretariat move.” This tactic is not often attempted, primarily because of how difficult the move is to execute successfully to win a race.
And then there was the “Arazi move” unleashed in the 1991 GI Breeders' Cup Juvenile.
Right up until he died peacefully last week in Australia at age 32, the compact chestnut with the jagged white blaze and offset right knee managed to carry outsized cachet here in the States on the basis of our collective respect for one of the most jaw-dropping, sluice-through-the-pack winning runs ever uncorked in a race for 2-year-olds.
That widespread appreciation wasn't always so. Initially, when the dual-continent juvenile champ fell underwhelmingly short of international Classics expectations at age three, Arazi was roundly criticized as an overhyped flop.
Yet when Arazi retired late in 1992 after finishing well-beaten in his career finale, Joseph Durso of the New York Times hinted at a lasting legacy by writing, “So, they won't have Arazi to kick around anymore as a media superstar. But the mystique and the mystery will linger.”
Phenoms who don't follow through generally don't get remembered kindly–if they get remembered at all–in our sport. Arazi couldn't live up to his premature stamp as the defining Thoroughbred of his era. But he retained iconic status in America almost entirely on the basis of that one sublime, sustained run at Churchill Downs Nov. 2, 1991.
When the France-based colt (who had never before raced on dirt or over a counter-clockwise layout) blasted into contention at the head of the lane in the Juvenile after dropping far back from the undesirable 14 post, even Breeders' Cup announcer Tom Durkin seemed taken aback by the “menacing rush” that left America's top 2-year-olds “stunned…with the move here of Arazi, and he's pouring it on! Just an incredible move as they come to the top of the stretch!”
As Arazi kicked clear, widening by five lengths under wraps, Durkin speculated that the son of Blushing Groom (Fr) out of a Northern Dancer mare could have easily won by 10, exuberantly punctuating the performance by exclaiming, “Here, indeed, is a superstar!”
It's impossible to recall Arazi's aura without placing into proper context the outlandish hype he generated in that pre-internet era. He became the immediate winter-book favorite for the 1992 GI Kentucky Derby (back when you had to actually go to a Las Vegas casino to get down a futures wager on America's most important horse race). His odds were as low as 8-5 even though it was well-reported that Arazi had undergone arthroscopic surgery in Kentucky to remove bone spurs on both knees four days after the Breeders' Cup.
Three weeks later, the colt returned to France, where old-school trainer Francois Boutin was not overly enthused about providing the detailed status reports about Arazi's progress that American turf writers constantly craved.
Prepping his star in private on the wooded trails of Les Aigles, Boutin legged up Arazi by training him five miles a day at differing gaits and speeds. In the weeks prior to Arazi's one and only pre-Derby prep race, Boutin unintentionally created a media frenzy by criticizing the decision by co-owners Allen Paulson and Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum to have Arazi undergo the knee surgeries.
“Personally, I don't think that his knees are any better now than they were before,” Boutin allegedly said (later claiming he was mis-translated). “If anything, they are more of a problem than they were…. At the time of the operation, I didn't think it was necessary…. He does not need to do better to win the Kentucky Derby.”
Then in mid-March, a different controversy broke in the press: Arazi's connections were apparently already looking past a presumed win on the first Saturday in May, and were at odds over whether Arazi would pass up the final two U.S. Triple Crown races to try to become the first winner of both the Kentucky Derby and the Epsom Derby. “This is where we may have a problem,” Boutin said at a press luncheon. “If it was left to me as trainer, if I was to arbitrate, my preference would be for the Epsom Derby.”
On Apr. 7, 1992, Arazi easily won the listed Prix Omnium at Saint-Cloud. With 25 days to the Kentucky Derby, the fervor intensified, with Arazi drawing rave comparisons to Secretariat. Bear in mind that even though Secretariat was followed in the late 1970s by a string of elite Triple Crown aspirants like Seattle Slew, Affirmed, Alydar, and Spectacular Bid, none of them had been seriously or widely compared to him. Arazi was different, though.
Even Daily Racing Form's Joe Hirsch, the ultra-conservative dean of American turf scribes, couldn't resist the hyperbole.
“[Arazi] is such an extraordinary animal that he makes other great horses look like hacks,” Hirsch wrote. On the eve of the Derby, sports media columnist Richard Sandomir of the New York Times previewed ABC's Derby broadcast as a “90-minute Arazi Show” that would use 24 cameras and 164 microphones “to show Arazi's expected coronation.”
Arazi, though, was essentially a no-show for his own Derby party.
Trying to mimic his move in the Breeders' Cup, jockey Patrick Valenzuela parked the 9-10 favorite at the back of the pack. The colt began to unwind approaching the far turn, with announcer Dave Johnson intoning that “Arazi is flying…gaining ground with every stride!” He ranged up to challenge the leaders off the far turn, then suddenly had nothing left to give. Arazi backpedaled to eighth through the stretch, weakening behind 16-1 upsetter Lil E. Tee.
Deflated, Arazi flew back to France. He lost at Ascot in June and at Longchamp in September prior to winning the Oct. 4 G2 Prix du Rond-Point at Longchamp. He was aimed for another stateside run in the Breeders' Cup, with his European-based rider, Steve Cauthen, angling for the mount in the GI Mile on the grass at Gulfstream Park.
Valenzuela, who had absorbed more than his fair share of flak for Arazi's Derby defeat, ended up retaining the ride in the Mile, with Paulson promising him the gift of a Rolls-Royce if he won with all four of Paulson's Breeders' Cup entrants (P-Val won with two and presumably did not get half a Rolls). He tried to put Arazi closer to the early action, but the phenom faded to 11th as the 3-2 favorite. “No excuse, no rally” was the chart caller's comment. Three weeks later, Arazi was retired to stud in Newmarket with nine wins from 14 starts and earnings of $1.2 million.
While Arazi spent the next several decades traveling the globe in a workmanlike stallion career that took him from England to Three Chimneys Farm in Kentucky and later Japan, Switzerland and Australia, his human connections spiraled off in different directions.
Boutin was diagnosed with liver cancer around the time Arazi retired. He died in 1995 and always maintained that Arazi was the best horse he had ever seen.
Paulson, incredibly, got a rare second chance at a “horse of a lifetime” two years after Arazi's last start when Cigar captivated America with his 16-race winning streak. Paulson died in 2000.
Sheikh Mohammed is still chasing that elusive first Derby win. His Godolphin racing operation is now 0-for-12 in the Run for the Roses. In 2021, 29 years after Arazi's odds-on loss, another Godolphin color-bearer, 'TDN Rising Star' Essential Quality (Tapit), also went down in defeat as the Derby favorite.
Valenzuela, considered one of the continent's premier riders at age 30 when he piloted Arazi, never sustained long-term success in the saddle because of a decades-long litany of substance-abuse problems. But P-Val has repeatedly said Arazi was the best horse he ever rode.
Arazi himself never was able to leap that grand chasm of hype between his stellar juvenile season and a puzzling, physically compromised sophomore campaign.
But the “Arazi move” has stood the test of time for nearly 30 years.
In fact, Independence Day weekend came to a close Sunday night with a 6-year-old gelding named–believe it or not–Arazi Like Move (Graydar) entered in the seventh race at Mountaineer Park in West Virginia.
The ambitiously named 7-for-38 sprinter has a seemingly impossible moniker to live up to (the 9:30 p.m. post time for that allowance/optional claimer was scheduled too late for the results to be included in this column).
But you can bet Arazi Like Move always has fans rooting for that spark of sensation that was once so boldly embodied by his namesake.
