Derby trail | Horse Racing Free Tips

West Coasters Breeze Towards Next Preps

Edited Press Release

Both National Treasure (Quality Road) and Skinner (Curlin) worked five furlongs Sunday in preparation for the GI Santa Anita Derby that also serves as a final west coast prep for the GI Kentucky Derby. A day earlier, Geaux Rocket Ride (Candy Ride {Arg}) had his first work since finishing second in the GII San Felipe S.

National Treasure, the morning-line favorite in the San Felipe before scratching due to a bruised foot, worked five furlongs in 1:00 for trainer Tim Yakteen. Stablemates Practical Move (Practical Joke) and Reincarnate (Good Magic) each worked. Following the drills, Yakteen said Practical Move, last-out winner of the San Felipe, would most likely stay and run in the GI Santa Anita Derby. In turn, Reincarnate would probably return to Oaklawn Park where he finished third in the GII Rebel S. to run in the GI Arkansas Derby April 1.

Yakteen said National Treasure would run in either the Santa Anita Derby or GI Blue Grass S. at Keeneland April 8.

“He had a very nice work this morning, very happy,” Yakteen added.

Skinner's five-furlong work was completed in 1:01.60 for trainer John Shirreffs who confirmed Skinner was on track for the Santa Anita Derby.

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This Side Up: Run to Win, Not Win to Run

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We live in a world where change is routinely mistaken for progress, draped in the cheap frills of “modernization”–a word that needs treating with extreme suspicion, implying as it does that any who challenge innovation are obstructing our species in some otherwise inexorable journey to fulfilment.

Nobody can sensibly deny that a great deal of change has indeed been for the better. Few who honor her memory at Keeneland on Saturday, I'm sure, would like to have been with Jenny Wiley in her pioneer cabin, that bloody day in 1789. But nor should we ever be vapidly impulsive in our stewardship of the Thoroughbred, that beautiful time capsule for generations of toil and reflection by stockmen whose lore has long faded from all other record.

In my homeland of England, they actually have ended up having to use heritage as a substitute for decent purses. Even in that environment, however, vigilance is constantly required against well-intentioned but crass unstitching of the pageant.

On both sides of the water, admittedly, we must tolerate such pragmatic change as will preserve what has become known as “the social license” to persist in our way of life, in an era when a largely urban world can grossly amplify its misapprehensions on social media.

That's a context we can't afford to neglect in any of the scandals, actual or perceived, that undermine our claims to scrupulous regard for equine welfare. At one end of the spectrum, you may this week have glimpsed some nightmarish images from the Quarter Horse world. Be in no doubt, however: we absolutely invite outsiders to place us on the same continuum even in what too many people in our community consider our marginal complicities–when indulging the alchemy apparently practised in certain barns, for instance, or arguably when harnessing ideological lobbies to litigate against meaningful regulation.

And I do feel that some of the decisions we make as breeders show inadequate consideration for the breed's long-term welfare. Everyone talks a good game about turf stallions, for instance, but they won't actually give them commercial oxygen. And the odds are stacked even against dirt stallions if perceived as “slow burners”, whether in terms of maturity or stamina.

With far too many horses brought into the world to walk, not run, I recently took the tragic cue of Get Stormy's loss to celebrate the exemplary approach of Crestwood, where the roster majors in competitive longevity, often combined with turf acceleration and/or an aristocratic maternal line. But the suspicion must be that a family farm, with relatively limited resources, can only have created this heroic niche in the Bluegrass because of market contempt for precisely those assets that would best sustain the breed.

Thankfully Crestwood is not alone in understanding how the viability of our sport depends on the physical competence of the model we hand over to the next generation. Few grasp this more ardently than Airdrie–where Divisidero, for instance, built five campaigns on a maternal line extending to Cosmah herself; and Preservationist, who pairs up the King Ranch icons Courtly Dee and Too Chic, must somehow get people to see past the fact that he was six when he broke two minutes in the GII Suburban.

That pair will need a lot of far-sighted support to emulate the breakout of their buddy Upstart, who–multiple Grade I-placed at two, three and four, and tracing to a Federico Tesio champion–has genuine prospects, with only his second crop, of a first Kentucky Derby-Oaks double since Native Dancer.

Whatever happens at Churchill, Upstart has done something pretty phenomenal just to put himself in this position as a $10,000 start-up. Remember this is the 50th anniversary of Airdrie's foundation; and also that Zandon's first three dams were all mated in support of resident stallions. Typically of this farm, moreover, the family traces to a great matriarch in Boudoir II (GB), whose foals included the dam of Flower Bowl, granddam of Majestic Prince and sire of Kelso. Any neutral whose Derby pick will be determined by a due sense of heritage and class, then, will have had goosebumps watching Zandon put it all together in his hometown trial last weekend.

Now it's true that Zandon has himself participated in radical change; in a process, indeed, that many trainers would doubtless hail as “modernization”. Having been so lightly campaigned, by the standards of the past, last week he needed things to go right just to reserve himself a Derby gate.

It's a world away from 1941, when Whirlaway (seven-for-16 at two) was beaten in a Blue Grass nine days before the Derby, and again in the Churchill Derby Trial five days later, only to convert that sharpening into an eight-length win in the first leg of his Triple Crown. On its nine-day turnaround the Blue Grass produced the Derby winner nine times in 14 runnings from 1959. In 1990, however, it was pushed back to three weeks before the Derby, and in 2015 to four. That leaves the GIII Stonestreet Lexington S. as the last chance saloon for those still needing gate points and, despite its relative proximity to the Derby, as the ultimate example of how trials have become treated principally as a means to get into the race, rather than actually to win it.

Lexington contender Ethereal Road with D. Wayne Lukas | Coady

Except that maybe D. Wayne Lukas is trying to do both, in backing up Ethereal Road (Quality Road) a week after the Blue Grass–where patience seems finally to have been exhausted with his jockey, now replaced both here and on Secret Oath (Arrogate) in the Oaks.

Remember how Lukas brought a son of Summer Squall to this race in 1999, a couple of weeks after he'd made some late ground into fourth of eight as an outsider in the GI Santa Anita Derby? Charismatic had needed six attempts to win a maiden, and both his wins had come under a tag, but all that groundwork suddenly came together in the Lexington. And 13 days later he went into the Derby–with 12 more races under his belt than will Taiba (Gun Runner)!

The only rule, with Thoroughbreds, is that there are no rules. If Taiba can win off that prep, then I will have to acknowledge myself not just a traditionalist but a culpable reactionary. Actually, as we've indicated already, there is one immutable rule: that whatever we do with these horses, their welfare comes first. But if they are not being “proved”, the way they once were, then I don't know that anyone gains.

If trainers don't trust the resilience of the genetic material they're being given, then that's a poor reflection on the breeders of today. And equally it's no help to the breeders of tomorrow if stock perfectly equal to a tougher schedule never gets a chance to demonstrate those wares. So, no, not all change is good–any more than all change is bad.

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A Small Stable with Big Dreams, Eddie Barker Eyeing Derby

Since he ran his first horse in 1994, Eddie Barker's routine has never changed. Every day, he gets up at an ungodly hour and heads to his work, which is his barn on the NYRA backstretch. The reward has been some winners here and there, but never more than 23 in a single year and not one of them a graded stakes winner. The GI Kentucky Derby? It's a race he watches on television.

In a sport dominated by the likes of the Bob Baffert, Todd Pletcher, Chad Brown, Steve Asmussen mega-stables, the Eddie Barkers of the profession don't get many chances to show what they can do if ever getting their hands on a quality horse. But that may change this year. In New York-bred Shipsational (Midshipman), the runner-up in the GIII Sam F. Davis S. last Saturday at Tampa Bay Downs, the 76-year-old veteran trainer has a horse who can hold his own in graded company and appears to be a legitimate threat for the Derby. Barker has been waiting his entire career for such a horse.

“A guy like myself, we don't get that many horses that come along with the ability to run the kind of numbers you need to get into the Derby,” Barker said. “It makes all that getting up every morning at three o'clock over the last 30 years worth it.”

Barker became a trainer by accident. He had a feed store and a customer was unable to pay the bills. In order to satisfy the debt, Barker was offered a mare in foal. He accepted and rather than hiring a trainer, he decided to do it himself.

He won five races his first year and 17 over the first three years. His numbers would improve some in subsequent years, but he was having to make do mostly with claimers and horses he would pluck out of the sales for $15,000, $20,000. Along the way, he never lost confidence in his own abilities.

“It's a challenge, I can tell you that,” he said. “You're trying to compete against guys who get access to the best horses in the world. Where I have one, they have 25 or 30. You have to believe in your horse and you have to believe in yourself.”

Barker said it's only become harder over the years for the “little guy” to compete. When he started, a trainer in New York was limited to about 35 stalls. Today, a trainer might have 80 at Belmont, 50 at Saratoga and another division at a place like Monmouth.

“Sometimes you were fortunate enough to get some horses that the larger stables couldn't take,” he said. “With a little personal care and attention they did very well. That does not happen anymore.”

An obvious problem for Barker, who has a 17-horse stable, was that none of his owners had particularly deep pockets. That changed somewhat when Iris Smith decided to give Barker a chance. While she was never going to spend $1 million at the sales for a horse, she did have the means to pay in the low six figures.

With Smith's backing, Barker headed to the 2021 OBS March sale and fell in love with a Midshipman colt bred by Mr. and Mrs. Bertram Firestone.

“We picked (Shipsational) out off his breeze,” he said. “He looked so efficient and had such a long stride on him. His gallop-out was sensational. The other plus was he was a New York-bred. We thought we could get him for $150,000, but I don't think I would have left the sale without him. He really impressed me.”

Shipsational closed out 2021 with a Sleepy Hollow win | Coglianese

Shipsational, who sold for $210,000, broke his maiden in his first start, drawing off to win by 6 3/4 lengths. After finishing fourth in the Funny Cide S., he won the Bertram Bongard S. and the Sleepy Hollow S. to conclude his 2-year-old year. All of his 2-year-old starts came against New York-breds.

Some trainers may have kept Shipsational in New York to face statebred company, but Barker wasn't about to miss out on the chance to test his colt against top open company to see if he had a Derby horse. He shipped Shipsational to Tampa and circled the Sam F. Davis on his calendar.

“These horses don't come around that often. I was going to take a shot,” he said.

Shipsational was clearly second-best in the Sam F. Davis, losing by 3 3/4 lengths to top Derby hopeful Classic Causeway (Giant's Causeway). But Barker said he did not have the horse ready for his best effort and estimated that he was about 80% fit.

“I kind of thought he was a Derby horse, but he had to answer a lot of questions,” Barker said. “Could he run around two turns? He had been running against New York-breds. Could he run against open stakes company? He answered all of my questions and I feel that he's going to go forward off this race. He got a lot out of it.”

There will be more questions to answer when Shipsational returns for the GII Tampa Bay Derby on March 12, where he's scheduled to have a rematch with Classic Causeway. Barker will have a lot of people rooting for him, all those trainers who have kept plugging away without ever getting a break or an opportunity to show what they can do with a good horse.

“Even if I come in 10th in the Derby it would be a victory for the little guy,” Barker said. “I'm getting close to the end of my career. I would like to see some of the smaller trainers around New York and around the country get a better shot. They are all doing the same thing. They work hard, are there early in the morning, they put their time in and have a modest amount of success. You put a good horse in their hands they will do just as well as Todd Pletcher or Chad Brown or anyone else. They just need a chance.”

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This Side Up: Another Fine Messier

Red Smith put it well; of course he did. So well, in fact, that he said it all over again. In 1975, writing one of the pieces that won a Pulitzer Prize the following year, Smith declared that Kentucky Derby week was “the only one in 52 when the instrument of Satan known as horse racing becomes a showpiece of the American sports scene.” Four years later, back at the same point in the cycle, he wrote that little old ladies in Wisconsin would this week be glad to learn that Spectacular Bid and Flying Paster are Thoroughbred racehorses–though there were “vast and sinless areas in this country where they and their like are regarded as instruments of Satan for the rest of the year.” In both pieces, he then quoted Johnny Rotz recalling his Illinois boyhood: “The only time the Decatur paper mentioned racing was to tell who won the Derby and how much money Eddie Arcaro had.”

This kind of thing, to be clear, is a precious prerogative of the fourth estate. We generally feel safe in assuming that nobody out there can be paying undue attention to our hasty scribblings. (Most of the time, candidly, we're banking on it.) And maybe Smith, in 1979, was facing one of those deadlines that loom with a disproportionate burden upon the first syllable. If so, he did well then to refine his theme in a characteristically picturesque formula: come Derby week, “sinless newspapers that wouldn't mention a horse any other time unless he kicked the mayor to death are suddenly full of information about steeds that will run and the people they will run for at Churchill Downs on the first Saturday of May.”

On the day we honor one of sport's great chroniclers, in the GII Red Smith S. at Aqueduct, we should perhaps be keeping this yearly pass from Main Street in mind. Because it is now clearly open season, when it comes to inflicting the benefit of our wisdom on the hapless owners of Corniche (Quality Road), along with others in the same barn now embarking on a GI Kentucky Derby trail that remains blocked, at a crossing up ahead, by a stranded locomotive.

For the time being, there's no sign of any engineers to get the thing moving again; just a bunch of lawyers prodding each other in the chest about who's to blame. And actually, unless I've missed something, none of the ongoing litigation concerns Bob Baffert's prohibition from the home of the Derby anyway. So something has to give–just not, please, the single week of the year when we get the indulgence of “sinless” America. Because if we're not careful, we're going to find ourselves shoving 20 “instruments of Satan” into the Derby starting gate.

Bob Baffert | Horsephotos

Now while Baffert may be accustomed to the feeling, for the guys who spent $1.5 million on Corniche this is a once-in-a-lifetime shot at the two-minute Grail that essentially drives the spending of billions on bloodstock every year. Similarly, for the many owners of Messier (Empire Maker), winner of the GIII Bob Hope S. at Del Mar last Sunday. And it is dreadfully unfair to turn their situation into some kind of test of loyalty, or character.

It's certainly no help to urge that there are plenty of other fish in the sea. With all the considerable respect due to its author, the notion that there is the faintest equivalence between this dilemma and Spend a Buck missing the Preakness, because he could earn more elsewhere, is still making my head hurt days after it appeared in these pages.

No two ways about it: if one of the 20,000-odd Thoroughbreds foaled in North America in 2019 combines eligibility and health to claim one of those 20 gates on May 7, 2022, then that's exactly what has to happen. It's atrocious that anyone, typically having spent a fortune enduring countless malicious torments by the racing gods, should finally see that Derby sunbeam break from the clouds, and light on their horse, only to be told that this is just a theatrical device for the measurement of their decency.

In those terms, anyhow, it's a lose-lose scenario. Half the chorus pronounces that a decent person would already have moved his horse from a barn that has, if only by inattention rather than calculation, tainted the reputation of our community among “sinless” Americans. The other half, meanwhile, suggests that a decent fellow would sit out the Derby and stand by their man.

That being so, perhaps the real test of decency faces Baffert himself. He has to fight his corner, naturally. He clearly feels besieged and aggrieved. But however marginal his culpability, he has to accept some responsibility for putting his patrons in such an invidious position. If he truly has the interests of the sport at heart, as he often protests, then there's a way he might win round a lot of sceptics.

He could say: “You know, I really feel that I don't deserve this kind of treatment, relative to the charges against me. You saw how my horses ran at the Breeders' Cup, where I couldn't even break wind in private. But I do understand that I've exasperated a lot of people, especially after telling the world at Keeneland only a year ago that I was henceforth going to run the tightest ship in the game. And I have clearly exhausted the patience of some who are in a position to make that tell.

“As a result, anyhow, I have trapped valued clients and friends in a horrible corner. It simply isn't right for anyone to feel like they should even think about passing on the Derby because they feel sorry for someone who has already won it seven times. Okay, maybe six times. We'll see. But I am going to get these horses on the trail as best I can and, if nothing relieves the stalemate by the time we get to those 100-40-20 trials, then I am going to insist, really insist, that they be transferred to a trainer who can bank those points.

“I know a lot can go wrong with all these horses in the meantime, so I am going to use all my skill to keep them in the game. But then they are going on loan to Todd or whoever. Because that is the only way I can serve the shared interests of these horses; my friends who own them; and the sport I love. Someday I'll be back at Churchill. In the meantime, this is one way I can show that I can see the bigger picture; that I will deserve to be welcomed back.”

Corniche, another 'TDN Rising Star', took the Breeders' Cup Juvenile | Horsephotos

For the guys who own Corniche, after all, it's hardly as though we're talking about Clement L. Hirsch and Warren Stute, whose 48-year relationship we celebrated earlier this week. And nor is this just about the silks that happen to get paired with that blanket of roses. Think, for instance, what it would mean to Sam-Son Farm for Messier to win the Derby for a family cultivated there through five generations.

To a degree, moreover, we all have a stake in what happens next. Hopefully Baffert noticed the latest manoeuvres of those zealots who really do think of us as “instruments of Satan”, now trying to sever slots payments to the New York industry. Meanwhile we, too, manipulate opportunities of political or legal process–against each other. Some people are harnessing ideological lobbies to defend their constitutional right to pump pharmaceuticals into horses. Others, still more barefaced, dare to apply for Illinois wagering rights as reward for a commitment to local horse racing that feels rather elusive in the bulldozing of those beautiful stands at Arlington.

We all have a responsibility toward the future viability of our sport. Remember, we have a lot of enemies out there. Most are vexingly wrong-headed, but that doesn't mean they won't get a hearing in the social media age. So we had better make sure we reach Louisville next spring ready to correct any misapprehensions that might have flourished during the 51 weeks since Medina Spirit (Protonico) gave his contentious sample. Because they would doubtless be gripped, in Decatur, to read that one (or several) of the most talented colts in the crop is barred from the Derby, and why.

In this particular saga, then, we can't afford for both sides simply to keep entrenching their positions, waiting for the lawyers to lean on their spades. Because that's not going to happen any time soon. And a messy situation, meanwhile, could become Messier yet.

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