Chris McGrath | Horse Racing Free Tips

This Side Up: Mandaloun Seeks to Gild New Crown

In the long story of the breed, there has never been a week's work remotely approaching the one Mandaloun (Into Mischief) bids to complete in the desert on Saturday. It opened with his formal elevation as winner of America's most prestigious race; and could conclude with him banking the biggest prize anywhere on planet Turf.

As has come to seem wearyingly inevitable, nobody imagines that the first leg of this dazing double was necessarily concluded by the disqualification of Medina Spirit (Protonico). We proudly advertise the GI Kentucky Derby as sport's fastest two minutes, but after nine months the crucible has long since boiled over and extinguished the fires of excitement beneath. However fortunate Mandaloun has been, you have to feel a little sorry for the way his inherent merits are set in constant relief by the anger and then grief felt on behalf of another horse. The G1 Saudi Cup presents a pretty literal opportunity for his day in the sun.

That said, some of us sense a rather greater collective obligation to his old rival Midnight Bourbon (Tiznow), the athleticism of whose recovery in the GI Haskell S. last summer preserved not just his own limbs but our whole community from calamity. To this point, in fact, you could argue that Midnight Bourbon has been as inadequately rewarded for his level of ability, at two-for-14, as Mandaloun has disproportionately profited from his, remarkably having two Grade Is to his name without ever having passed the post first in a Grade I race.

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Be that as it may, the Midnight Bourbon camp would doubtless settle for levelling things out when there happen to be $10,000,000 on the line, rather than the $90,000 they contested at Fair Grounds last month. Whatever happens, Midnight Bourbon has already shown enough to merit support in his next career, when he'll be charged with two precious legacies. For not only does he give fresh hope to the tenuous Man o' War line; he also, on the other side of his pedigree, carries a dual imprint of the Louisiana legend, 15-time stakes winner Monique Rene (Prince of Ascot)–both as his own fourth dam, and as granddam of his mother's damsire Yes It's True.

In just three years, the Saudi Cup has already managed to draw two horses with little or no precedent in Kentucky Derby history, in a promoted runner-up and a winner disqualified for interference. And once again it has drawn a field commensurate with the purse, in spectacular vindication of the kind of ambition we have long learned to expect from the hosts' neighbors on the Gulf shore. In surpassing even the G1 Dubai World Cup, this race has offered horsemen around the world a pretty unanswerable imperative to embrace the same, latent agenda of cultural outreach.

Midnight Bourbon | Jockey Club of Saudi Arabia

That's not always a straightforward equation, as soccer fans will tell you. In their recent acquisition of a Premier League club, Newcastle United, Saudi interests doubtless hoped to diversify a news agenda uncomfortably focused on human rights. Whatever the rights and wrongs of such strategies, at least sport keeps open lines of communication; and perhaps it can also assist those trying to direct a very different society toward wider engagement, often in contention with more insular voices. Certainly it feels a little unfair to expect delicate dilemmas of this kind to be resolved by people whose whole lives are immersed in the simple but all-consuming challenge of running brown quadrupeds in circles. Do we seriously expect rural stockmen to turn down the money, when corporate and political leaders with Ivy League educations often spend so long counting it that they forget all the questions they were originally going to ask?

Not that participation comes without cost even to the fabric of our own, introspective little world. Reverting to soccer for an analogy, the allocation of its most precious showcase to Qatar–to the scandalized indignation of millions–will this year require the World Cup to be moved from summer to winter, causing huge disruption to those domestic leagues that most nourish the passion of fans. In our own sport, similarly, these winter megaprizes (Pegasus/Saudi/Dubai) have not only caused great damage to such cherished heirlooms as the GI Santa Anita H. but also, with trainers today putting their horses on ever lighter schedules, diluted other storied races later in the year.

Bob Baffert | Coady

Human nature is such that all of us, however great or limited our competence and power, will sometimes fail the test when offered material gain for some compromise. But the whole point of sport, remember, is that it holds up the mirror to life. If the prize is big enough, there will always be people out there prepared to win at any price.

And actually that's why we have regulation. That's why, for instance, we need rigorous control of the spectrum where medication, ostensibly devised and prescribed on welfare grounds, drifts into the pharmaceutical stimulation of performance.

That drift can be so gradual, so barely perceptible, that the protagonists often maintain absolute conviction of their innocence. Quite where poor Medina Spirit fell, on this spectrum, will doubtless remain subject to indefatigable litigation. In the meantime his trainer has a chance to take Mandaloun down a peg or two with Country Grammer (Tonalist).

As it happens, this horse is an East Coast migrant to the Bob Baffert barn. There's no sign yet of any of his sophomore barnmates, being prohibited from earning Derby points, making that journey in reverse. As a result, Newgrange (Violence) will pass up 50 points if he wins the GII Rebel S., back at Oaklawn on Saturday, which is beginning to feel pretty serious.

Now nobody could sensibly pretend that Medina Spirit's positive test revealed a trainer prepared to win at any price. And it's absolutely his prerogative to fight his corner. But if Baffert is implicitly prepared to encourage his patrons to sit out the Derby, as though to pass some public test of character and fidelity, then he should think about the wider consequences.

It's not as though he would never again be sent a million-dollar yearling if he decided, for the good of the game, to take his 90 days on the chin and let everyone reset. Who knows, the break might even do him good, after all the stress he has undoubtedly endured over the last year.

As it is, in holding out so grimly, maybe he thinks he can diminish the Derby if two or three of the likely favorites are instead standing idle in their stalls in California on the first Saturday in May. Especially if he can pounce on the winner in the Preakness with a fresh horse.

The trouble with that mindset is that it makes Baffert bigger than the Derby. It would imply that he would rather come out of all this in front, even if all the mainstream coverage in Derby week, such vital oxygen for our sport, is consumed by the guy who isn't there, rather than those horses that enter the gate bearing the hopes and dreams of so many others in his community; even if the sport continues to be dragged through months and years of damaging courtroom headlines; even if each of “his” horses represent not just the investment of his wealthy patrons, but the life's work of their breeders and various others who have contributed to their development.

But you know what that looks like? That looks like someone who wants to win at any price. And I don't say that because he used some damned ointment.

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Duncan Taylor: With Him, You’ve Been Family

He always says that had he been born in Detroit, he would have gone into the automobile trade. In other words, whatever kind of horseman he might allow us to credit him, first and foremost he came into the world a businessman. Now that Duncan Taylor is stepping down from the helm of one of its most remarkable family concerns, then, the Bluegrass can count itself fortunate that fate instead applied his flair to a more literal type of horsepower.

True, the old school can't have been enamored by his every flourish. There was the famous occasion at the Keeneland November Sale, for instance, when a mare had been prematurely scratched by the veterinarians. Taylor, thinking fast as always, got onto the airfield across the street to see if anyone could trail a banner announcing that she had been reinstated in the sale. But he had tried a similar stunt a few years previously, at the Woodbine Breeders' Cup, when he was repatriating A. P Jet from Japan.

“That horse didn't run well on the grass but he ran, like, 1:08 for six furlongs on dirt,” Taylor recalls. “So I hired this plane to fly a banner saying 'A. P Jet 1:08-and-change' over the crowd. Well, the guy flew so high you could hardly see it. I paid him his money, but I'd learned my lesson. So this time I sat down with this pilot and said: 'Now I don't want you flying up there where nobody can read it, you need people to be able to see what the hell all this is about.' Well, I don't know what kind of plane he had, but it sounded like a 1955 tractor. It was popping and spewing and sputtering, and he was swooping over the barns, back and forth, and everybody's horses were going crazy. And Mike Cline from Lane's End ran over and said: 'Duncan take that damned plane down! I'll buy your damned horse from you before you kill all mine!'”

Nor was that the only time Taylor reached for the stars in his publicity. With an important dispersal going through his barn, another November, he rented a plane to get the big spenders back from the Breeders' Cup at Gulfstream, dressing up in a pilot's uniform to record a video wishing everyone a comfortable flight.

Mark, Ben, Frank and Duncan Taylor | Jon Siegel photo

It's not as though such literal flights of fancy directly account for the giddy evolution of Taylor Made, from its unobtrusive foundation in 1976 when Taylor was still only 19, into so dominant a force that its consignment has ranked No 1 in a staggering 26 years of the past 28, while processing $2.7 billion of bloodstock. But his receptivity to innovation and experiment–undiminished even as he hands over to his brother Mark, as CEO, and embraces a new role as Senior Thoroughbred Consultant–has pioneered many of the services nowadays taken for granted on the sales ground.

“You know, one of the things I've found in business–and in life–is that if you don't start on the course of trying to do something better, then you never get the benefit of other opportunities that emerge along the way,” he reflects. “Opportunities that are often better than the things you originally set out trying to do. And that's about the force of human passion. When people start driving towards something, good things start to happen.”

As is often true of Taylor's perspectives, this one dovetails with his Catholic faith. “Because it's about hope,” he says. “When I was young I understood faith, and I understood charity. But hope? Where did that fit in? It was only as I got older that I understood how hope is really the greatest of the three. Because it's a real blessing if you can get up every morning and think, I need to get this done, that done, because you're always chasing that brighter future.”

Taylor Made has met two extremely delicate challenges during its perennial expansion. One was to maintain due intimacy with customers, even as the scale became ever more industrial, so that their slogan can still credibly remain: “With us, you're family.” The other was to maintain a vital equilibrium between fraternal affection, among Taylor and his brothers Mark, Frank, Ben, and their partner Pat Payne, and the hard-headed administration of what has become such a huge business.

Taylor and Pat Payne | Keeneland photo

Taylor stresses that he has “the best hard-working brothers and a tremendous business partner in Pat Payne.” But to have somehow always made it all work tells you much about their upbringing. Their mother Mary was a woman of iron faith; and “Daddy” Joe commanded respect across the Bluegrass not just for the horsemanship that sustained 40 years as farm manager at Gainesway—on which vocation he literally wrote the book—but also for the probity he demanded of his children. “Don't ever do anything you wouldn't want to read about in the Herald-Leader,” he reproved them.

“He would always try and help the underdog,” Taylor says. “In his early life he experienced the Depression. A lot of those people in that generation, they had really tasted poverty, and they were geared to make work central to their lives. Mom let my dad work as long hours as he needed, and always had a hot meal for him when he came home. And from the time we were just young boys, he was taking us with him and teaching us.

“Like any young kid, we weren't a lot of help at first. But by the time we were 10 years old most of us could drive a tractor; and by the time I was 14 or 15, I was about half a veterinarian for the cattle, I knew how to plow, if the tractor got dirt in the lines I knew how to bleed the lines. I thought, 'Man, I have to work all the time while my buddies are playing ball.' But that was just the way that my father operated.”

Taylor was already the fourth of what became eight children in what he humorously likes to describe as “the Catholic business plan.” But he would lose two of his brothers, in 1968 and 1981.

“And I think that also had something to do with how you can stick together, as a family, even when you have all the pressures of being in business together,” Taylor muses. “Yes, you can still fall out over little piddling stuff, that might not seem piddling at the time when everybody's emotions get high. But if you did get mad, you'd be over it the next day, didn't harbor any grudge.

Joe Taylor at Gainesway | courtesy Taylor Made

“I was 12 years old when my older brother got killed in a car crash. My mother's faith kept her strong, but my dad was just all torn to pieces. I remember going out there with him, where the wreck had been, seeing him walk around saying: 'Oh man, why? Why did it have to happen?' And finally, he realised that he couldn't get it off his mind, so he went out to some old country roads in Jessamine County and bought 170 acres at $600 an acre. From then onwards, my sisters Emily or Mary Joe would haul us out there to work. They helped us greatly, by being the younger boys' transportation. If they didn't take us, then whatever time Daddy Joe clocked off at Gainesway, he came through and picked us up.”

They were set to work on the tangled wire fences, the fallen trees, the dilapidated barn. And that site eventually became the cornerstone of the little operation started by Taylor with his buddy Mike Shannon, a Texas schoolteacher working at Gainesway who had resolved to start a boarding farm.

“At that time of my life, I was just a kid with long hair. I was a hard worker, but if you saw me you'd think me a hippie,” Taylor recalls. “I was in U.K. and majoring in trying to get out. I had nine hours left and I quit. I'd saved up some money. When you worked for other farmers, you got paid! Cutting tobacco and baling hay, stuff like that. Mike and I both had a pick-up truck, and we put in our $10,000 apiece, and we started the farm.”

With Gainesway servicing its world-class stallion roster, Daddy Joe was sending mares to maybe a dozen different farms. The new venture received a couple mares and, between the oversight of the old man and the good work of the kids, gradually more followed. Mike also had a group of southwestern contacts sending us horses that helped us greatly in our early years.

Taylor Made at sunset | Taylor Gilkey photo

“Mike taught me a lot,” stresses Taylor. “I was a shy kid, I'd never talked on the phone to an owner, but he just got me in there to finally get used to that. And he was a risk-taker, too: we bought some mares from John Nerud, spent about $125,000 when we didn't have any money. Breaking up that group and selling them gave us a bit more of a nest egg. And meanwhile we basically built up the farm one customer at a time. You know, I don't want to knock any other farm. But being broke and hungry, when I boarded a horse, that customer meant a lot more to me than if Leslie Combs boarded a horse. I didn't have Caro!”

Having initially rented a number of different tracts, they expanded a core for what has become a 1,600-acre footprint around the new land in Jessamine: if Taylor Made had to lease stalls, then they might as well pay their own family. The game-changer, however, was a game-changer for the whole industry.

Tomorrow: Part II: Ideas, and more ideas

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This Side Up: The Cap of Good Hope

As somebody remarked at the time, on seeing B. Wayne Hughes and M.V. Magnier deep in conversation one morning before the 2019 Breeders' Cup: “I'll give you 140 guesses what they're talking about.”

Both men were at Santa Anita representing farms that have had a transformative influence on the commercial breeding landscape, developing a similar system for launching stallions on an industrial scale. We have, of course, since grieved the loss of Hughes–but among his many legacies can now be counted a supporting role in the defeat of The Jockey Club's contentious proposal to cap books at 140 mares.

True, the litigating farms had not yet managed to net that particular whale when a harpoon from the Kentucky state legislature got the job done virtually overnight. That initiative will maintain the 72nd district representative in the esteem of many in his community, as one of their own; and wherever you stand on this divisive issue, you know that Matt Koch, for one, will absolutely buy into the decorous talk of unity with which The Jockey Club sugared the pill they've had to swallow.

And it really does feel incumbent on all who have prevailed here not just to be magnanimous in victory, but also to take that step back and ask whether at least some of the concerns The Jockey Club had sought to address might merit collective attention.

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All parties profess to have the interests of the breed at heart, albeit sometimes perceiving these in a fashion that blatantly coincides with their own. And certainly it can be argued that The Jockey Club's approach was too arbitrary–in both senses of the word–to deal effectively with a challenge as complex as maintaining genetic diversity. To me, however, we only ended up in this pickle because the real need for correction fell beyond the reach of any enforcement: at ringside, that is, and in the behavior of buyers.

As it was, we ended up with a stand-off that could be conveniently conflated with wider polemics. The conservative establishment, for instance, resisting brash, self-made success; or paternalism versus the free market. Following the intervention in Frankfort, it can even be depicted as a test of the kind of state autonomy we are seeing harnessed, as sacrosanct, against federal menaces to the constitutional right to dope your racehorse.

The trouble with all this emotive symbolism is that if you're not careful you end up taking a train that terminates in no regulation at all. And then how would you preserve the integrity of the breed? If there's enough money in it, for enough people, you'll end up with a cookie-cutter racehorse, between artificial insemination and eventually cloning, the only remaining differentiation being what you inject with your needle.

For now, it's well-worth remarking that actually nobody would be better suited by a more even spread of mares than the stallion farms themselves.

Trying to get your money back on a stallion in barely 18 months is a horrible business model for their accountants. But that is pretty much what the market is often asking them to do, in flitting from one rookie to the next like a honeybee in a hothouse. While operations as skillfully adapted as Spendthrift and Ashford still seem able to keep a stallion in the game at least through years two and three, many young sires are being abandoned overnight by breeders terrified of getting stuck with the second or third crop of a sire cooling off in the ring–albeit even then he still won't have had a chance to demonstrate whether he can actually breed runners. Nothing, in the end, should be more commercial for a mare than a bunch of stakes horses under her name. But, if you're breeding to sell, then you'll probably start off by mating to sell, too.

And really, as I've often acknowledged, you can no more blame commercial breeders for the overall situation than you can the farms. Both are trying to put bread on the table through the notoriously precarious agency of an animal prone to countless game-ending mishaps. So, the only reason hundreds of mares are sent to unproven new stallions, many of whose credentials are decidedly marginal anyway, is because of anticipated market demand.

Now, I've been rebuked in the past that proven stallions are so expensive that you have no choice but to roll the dice on a new one. But I won't buy that while some new sire who will probably end up with one stakes winner in Panama, and standing in Oklahoma, continues to draw three times the mares than, for instance, one who produced winners of the two most prestigious dirt races in America, in Lookin At Lucky.

I do willingly concede two things. One is that the situation is infinitely worse in my homeland Britain, and Ireland. At least commercial breeding in Kentucky remains properly focused on a horse that can run two turns on the first Saturday in May. The other is that there is a self-fulfilling logic to investing in a first crop, in that most stallions will never get a better book than their debut one.

That said, I do think we all need to take our share of responsibility–above all, those who direct investment at ringside. They need to be held account both by their affluent patrons, who want nothing better than a runner; and by the breed itself, which would be far better served by the seeding of commercially unglamorous but demonstrably effective sires. If The Jockey Club's attempt to stem the tide simply wasn't viable, then it's up to all of us to make such contribution to the betterment of the breed that falls within our reach.

So note that while the two big Derby hopes resuming in the GII Risen Star S., Zandon and Smile Happy, each happen to be from only the second crops of their sires, both Upstart and Runhappy stand at farms that keep a voluntary lid on book sizes. This, of course, is partly because they believe they actually look after their clients better that way, by preventing inundation at the sales. And the whole reason I'll be rooting for Zandon is that he was brought into the world by such exemplary people, who scrupulously dovetail their commercial mission with the long-term prosperity of the Thoroughbred itself.

Certainly this, at last, looks like the race to put horses back at the center of the Derby conversation, rather than one particular trainer. True, Smile Happy happens to represent a barn that finds itself with Baffert-like depth, this time round; and his win over the Derby track last fall has now been advertised further still by Classic Causeway (Giant's Causeway). Just like Zandon, however, he comes into a tough field pretty raw. You feel that both horses only need to run well enough to set up a grab for the necessary gate points next time.

If they do make the Derby, mind, they plainly won't have many miles on the clock. Whether such delicate handling, increasingly common among modern trainers, might reflect some perceived or actual dilution in the breed is hard to say. Perhaps a horse like Zandon would have been perfectly equal to an old-school grounding: his sire, after all, was placed at the elite level at two, three and four. But there are plenty of old sages around who will tell you that horses today simply don't have the timber of generations past.

And that's the kind of trend we must keep in mind if tempted to predicate our breeding strategies only on short-term gain. If you didn't like being told what to do by The Jockey Club, that's fair enough. But if, as everyone invariably claims to be the case, your choices are governed primarily by the welfare of the horse, then you shouldn't need telling in the first place.

If there's one thing more sacred than your right to take your own decisions, it's the wellbeing of these noble animals as they pass through our brief stewardship. Rights, remember, are the other side of the exact same coin as duty. If we want to take our own decisions, then we must also accept the accompanying responsibilities.

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This Side Up: Not Yet a Lost Cause

As one of few institutions of American sport to rival its fastest two minutes, the Super Bowl will reopen some painful old wounds among our community. For while many in the Bluegrass presumably feel some allegiance to their nearest NFL team, they owe a deeper loyalty to the very acres on which the game will be contested–to the memories interred below.

Nostalgia for Hollywood Park will be especially piquant now that Arlington Park is in the sickening throes of a similar demise. It's no longer just John Henry, winner of two Arlington Millions and three Hollywood Invitational Handicaps, that unites these two storied venues. In both cases, it's hard to refute the narrative that football has long superseded horseracing in popular culture; that our own sport is like a faded, black-and-white movie, with a script that embarrassingly preserves outdated attitudes, treasured only by an obstinate minority of aficionados soon to be finally inundated by the inexorable tides of the digital age.

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Well, I don't know about that. It wasn't so long ago that everyone was prophesying the demolition of cinemas, outflanked by the domestic miracles of VHS, DVD and streaming. Same with bookshops, which have salvaged a viable market among people who actually feel relieved to drag their eyes from the tyranny of a small screen. But both cinema and publishing first had to be goaded from their complacency. Books were being churned out contemptuously, already halfway to garbage, so cheap was the paper and binding; they had to be made into beautiful objects that you would enjoy handling and possessing. Cinema, similarly, realized that it had to feel like an event, a spectacle, a proper indulgence.

None of us who know the timeless enchantment of the Thoroughbred will ever despair of its ability to captivate new generations of fans; to maintain a glamor once so easily conflated with that of the silver screen, as when founding shareholders of Hollywood Park included the Warner brothers, Walt Disney, Sam Goldwyn, Bing Crosby and Ronald Colman.

But everything depends on our proving equal to the stewardship of these noble animals. And it would be a blithe kind of fellow who congratulated us that we have no need, unlike cinema and publishing when they were in a corner, to raise our game.

As it is, we see a lot of cynics shoehorning high-sounding principles of equity and freedom into the service of their own interests, even when those appear quite blatantly opposed to those of the racehorse and the industry it sustains. Such grubby opportunism is hardly unique to our own walk of life, of course, but you would like to think that even the most self-absorbed and short-sighted members of our community can see how dangerously the stakes have been raised.

Sarah Andrew

Not that these alone need to see the bigger picture. Every time we lose a Hollywood Park, an Arlington, we can't blame only those whose conduct is disfiguring our standing in Main Street. The rest of us need to meet a crisis on this scale with commensurate flair and enterprise. God knows there's no shortage of people in this game with exceptional financial resources and, you know what, maybe some might even owe their wealth to more than hard work and a little luck. Maybe some of them are actually pretty smart, too. In which case, it seems inexcusable if enough of them can't get together and head off the next storied track closure. Just imagine the virtuous circle within their not-for-profit compass: low takeouts stimulating handle, handle stimulating prizemoney and facilities, in turn stimulating field sizes, further stimulating handle.

Coming from a little country like England, I am unqualified to say (though I might guess) why some American horsemen should prefer an existential crisis to fester under the sacrosanct purview of states, rather than tolerate the kind of national solution it plainly requires. As it is, however, that mosaic of fractured interests might well create an opportunity for exactly the kind of dynamism we might sooner hope to see applied to the repair of a dysfunctional system.

Say the current impasse between Bob Baffert and Churchill stays just as it is. Say his attorneys can't prise open the door to the Derby; and Baffert isn't big-hearted enough to absolve his patrons of an invidious sense that their fidelity is being tested in public; and those patrons, for their part, overlook that they are themselves only custodians of a dream for many others, from the breeder to the farrier, who will only ever get one shot at the Derby.

Well, if that remains the case, then what would you expect to be going through the head of any bold racetrack impresario out there right now? He or she will be musing over a first Saturday in May bereft of Messier (Empire Maker), Newgrange (Violence), potentially Corniche (Quality Road), and a whole bunch of other talents being developed by the most powerful barn in the country, maybe Blackadder (Quality Road) if he wins the El Camino Real Derby on Saturday; and not forgetting the fillies, like Adare Manor (Uncle Mo) and Eda (Munnings). How about lining up that lot for a million bucks over 10 furlongs, sometime at the beginning of May? You'd get eyeballs, and you might very well find yourself with a horse that outvotes the Derby winner at the Eclipse Awards this time next year.

Now there's a notion that might concentrate a few minds. And it would certainly conform with the spirit of the age–which is to say, it would bring together two different entities by offering the same answer to the question: “Screw everyone else, how do I gain most?”

Classic Causeway on debut last summer | Sarah Andrew

If that were to happen, then the GIII Sam F. Davis S. will doubtless come to seem so much shadowboxing. I hope not, because it would be wonderful to see Classic Causeway (Giant's Causeway) emulate White Abarrio (Race Day) in boosting the form of the GII Kentucky Jockey Club S.

This is one of only three colts eked from the final coverings of the great Giant's Causeway before his death in the spring of 2018, and I'm glad to see Brian Lynch laying down such business-like works over six and seven furlongs at Palm Meadows. I'm not sure what the masters of the past might say about modern trainers getting horses fit 48 seconds at a time, but I do know that Lynch will be playing to the genetic strengths of this particular colt.

After Giant Game bombed out in the GIII Holy Bull S., the onus is on Classic Causeway to carve a fitting memorial to their sire, who recently brought up a posthumous landmark with his 100th graded stakes winner. Classic Causeway did have the raw class to dash clear on debut at Saratoga last summer, but as a son of a Thunder Gulch mare he's entitled to the improvement he needs, with maturity and distance, to claw back the McPeek pair who had too much “foot” for him last fall.

Certainly a breakout performance from Classic Causeway would feel like a wholesome development in this whole Derby nightmare, as an evocation of old school principles among horses and horsemen alike. Because it's not just the rebels who have a cause. Don't forget that Mariah's Storm (Rahy), the dam of Giant's Causeway, won four graded stakes round Arlington; and his sire's mother Terlingua (Secretariat) won her first three starts all at Hollywood Park. Everything we do, every single thing we do, is built on the work of those who went before us; and everything we do, accordingly, should be undertaken with a view to handing on their legacy in the best possible shape.

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