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Rich Strike Looks to Complete Derby/Travers Double

SARATOGA SPRINGS, NY – Trainer Eric Reed is looking back and ahead as he prepares GI Kentucky Derby winner Rich Strike (Keen Ice) for the GI Runhappy Travers S.

With a firm opinion of what went wrong in the Rich Strike's sixth-place finish in the GI Belmont S. June 11, Reed is expecting a much better performance in the $1.25-million signature race of the Saratoga Race Course meet Aug. 27. He will be the first Derby winner to run in the Travers since Always Dreaming (Bodemeister) finished ninth in 2017. The last horse to complete the Derby-Travers double was Street Sense (Street Cry) in 2007.

Rich Strike was the sensational and shocking winner of the Derby May 7 at odds of 80-1. Under little-known jockey Sonny Leon, he benefitted from a torrid early pace, made a run from far back and wove around a bunch of horses without checking in the stretch. Approaching the wire, he zipped past the dueling leaders, Epicenter (Not This Time) and Zandon (Upstart), on the inside to complete a storybook performance. His connections decided to skip the GI Preakness S. two weeks later and focused on the Belmont, where he turned up as an also-ran.

Reed shipped his colt from Kentucky to Saratoga Sunday and said he has him ready to start the second half of his season in America's oldest race for 3-year-olds.

“He's going to show up and run his race and if he can beat Epicenter and those horses again, good for us,” Reed said. “I know he can. He's done it once before.”

The journey to Saratoga by van was uneventful and Reed said that Rich Strike seems comfortable in his new surroundings at Dale Romans's barn. Reed and Romans have known each other since they were young trainers sharing the same barn at the old Latonia track, now Turfway Park.

“He shipped really good,” Reed said. “When he got here he was bucking and playing in the shedrow as soon as we unloaded him, so the trip didn't seem to take too much out of him.”

Though it's only been a couple of days, Reed said that Rich Strike looks to be smoothly getting over the main track, which is about 200 yards from his stall.

“He seems happier on the track,” Reed said. “He trained great at Belmont, but it seemed to me watching him that he was really putting a lot into it. Up here, he's training as hard but he's not having to put as much into it. I don't know if that's just the difference in surface or what it is, but really in the 10 weeks off he's matured a lot. He's calmed down He's just seemed like he's more relaxed about doing this and not so swelled up trying to show off so much. He's trained great.”

In the 1 1/2-mile Belmont, Reed asked Leon to keep the colt on the outside and away from traffic in the field of eight. He said he realized by the time the field reached the first turn that it was the wrong strategy. Reed said that even though the colt comes from off the pace, he is at his best when he is surrounded by the competition.

“The race was not the right race anyway, for his style,” Reed said. “I think if I hadn't given Sonny those instructions, he could have been down where he wanted to be and he would have tried a lot harder. We'd never, ever had him out in the middle of the track in any race. He's run in the center of the track in the Derby, but he had horses all around him on both sides. And we just learned that if he doesn't have a horse to the right, he just gets too aggressive with the horse beside him. But if they're on each side, he just wants to fight all of them and he'll run through them. I didn't know that. My God, we had one speed horse, we were the deep closer and six gallopers. I said 'the worst, you're going to be two or three wide when you got to run by them. Don't get in trouble.' It was a bad decision. You could see he had his head cocked the whole way around the turn trying to get to the inside.”

While he understands the error, Reed said he hasn't gotten past the disappointment of how the Belmont played out.

“It still haunts me,” he said. “Not because of me, but because everybody starts saying 'I told you so.' But every race that horse ran all year he ran great. The competition got better every race. The races were tougher, every race, and he kept getting better and better and better. The only bad race, or anomaly, wasn't the Derby, it was the Belmont.

Reed looks at the 1 1/4-mile Travers as a fresh start. He hopes he will get his colt to the GI Breeders' Cup Classic and the division title. The veteran trainer said he was never tempted to give Rich Strike a prep for the Travers.

“No, we were going to give him a mid-summer break,” Reed said. “He needs a little bit more time between races than most horses so there was no way we could hit the [GI] Haskell S. or the [GII] Jim Dandy S. because of the timing. The Haskell was on the wrong track anyway, another track for speed horses, and it's 1 1/8 miles. We knew we wanted to give him a little break. He had come off five races, the Derby, the Belmont and then he's had six breezes. He got 30 days of light training, which to him is still pretty hard training. I think we're right where we always wanted to be.”

Reed will work Rich Strike a half-mile early Friday morning.

“'I'm not going to go fast,” Reed said. “He had a really hard work at Churchill [5f in :59.40 on Aug. 10], so I know we were fit. I'd like :49 or :50 and maybe a 1:02 gallop out.”

Reed acknowledged that the arrival of the Derby winner–the 27th in history to try the Travers–has attracted a lot of interest in Saratoga.

“They've got to come see him,” Reed said. “I guess they're all waiting to see if he's going to back the Derby race up, which I don't blame him. I'm pretty sure he'll run better than in the Belmont.”

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The Week in Review: For Epicenter, the More Things Stay the Same…

To twist an old saying so it best describes rock-steady GII Jim Dandy S. winner Epicenter (Not This Time), “The more things stay the same, the more they change.”

This is annually the time of the season when we start hearing from trainers of Triple Crown contenders how markedly their sophomores have improved and matured over the past couple of months. So it was a bit of a surprise when Steve Asmussen told DRF.com last week that he hasn't seen much change in the colt who ran second as the beaten favorite in both the GI Kentucky Derby and GI Preakness S.

“What difference do I see? Nothing, which is perfect,” Asmussen said, noting Epicenter's ultra-consistency in training, which has now powered a 5-3-0 record from nine lifetime starts. “His numbers were faster than any 3-year-old I had going into the Derby, so incremental improvement will be harder to sustain because of how fast he was going early.”

We can bemoan the short-field graded stakes that have been served up at Saratoga so far this meet, but the Dandy's four-horse offering was as intriguing as it gets for handicapping races in which you can count the number of entrants on one hand.

Epicenter and Zandon (Upstart) were both kicking for home strongly and each had a blanket of roses within their grasp before they got blindsided by impossible longshot Rich Strike (Keen Ice) in the Derby, finishing two-three across the wire. While Zandon got rested to await Saratoga, Epicenter marched on to Baltimore, where he chased home the fresh, speed-centric Early Voting (Gun Runner) in the Preakness. Now 2 1/2 months later, those three lined up to headline the Dandy, with wild-card underdog Tawny Port (Pioneerof the Nile) making it a foursome after his Kentucky Derby seventh (beaten only 4 3/4 lengths at 80-1) and a favored win in the GIII Ohio Derby.

Early Voting loomed on paper as the obvious pacemaker, but the issue of who might force the issue was up for grabs. Zandon generally takes a while to unwind and Tawny Port has off-the-pace tendencies. Epicenter, who primarily relied on applying up-tempo pace pressure through his first six races, had switched to coming from farther back in both the Derby and the Preakness. But it was unclear if making one sustained run was really his preferred running style.

Epicenter got bet down to 6-5, again bearing the burden of favoritism he couldn't carry to victory in the first two legs of the Triple Crown. He came away last at the break under Joel Rosario, and briefly ran up into a tight spot on the heels of Tawny Port, who had crossed over and claimed the rail in third. Early Voting assumed command with ease, and his uncoupled stablemate, Zandon, seemed a touch out of his element in having to adopt the stalker's role by default–he'd only been 1 1/2 lengths off the lead down the backstretch once in five career races.

Early Voting cranked out opening quarters in :24.22 and :24.06, and the cadence seemed sustainable. Zandon and Tawny Port maintained their positions right behind the leader, while Epicenter, still last, was into the bit and edging up incrementally.

Jose Ortiz looked over his left shoulder a half mile from home and again over his right shoulder a furlong later, perhaps wondering why the favorite wasn't closer on both occasions. He began riding with greater urgency five-sixteenths from the finish, which is when Rosario, barely nudging his mount for guidance, swooped out to the five path, giving up ground in exchange for unimpeded passage while the front three converged under full-out drives down near the inside in upper stretch.

The quartet lined up four across the track at the eighth pole after third and fourth quarters in :23.98 and:24.29. But Epicenter clearly had superior momentum, and he came over the top with only a brisk hand ride for encouragement through a final eighth in :12.44 before being wrapped up under the wire to win by 1 1/2 lengths in 1:48.99 for nine furlongs.

That translates to a 102 Beyer Speed Figure. Underscoring Epicenter's reliability, that's the third time he's replicated that exact same number in his last four stats.

Exterminator would like a word with you…

Hats off to the record established by Jackie's Warrior (Maclean's Music) for winning Grade I stakes in three straight seasons at Saratoga with his romp in the GI Vanderbilt H. Saturday.

No disrespect to the accomplishment, but when I first heard that news, I was surprised no other horse from a bygone era had accomplished that feat, considering the Spa's history goes all the way back to 1864.

But keep in mind the graded stakes system in America dates to only 1974. That leaves 110 years of great horses out of the mix.

A racing historian who goes by the nostalgically clever Twitter handle @rileygrannan alerted TDN to the fact that, “'Grade 1' is the key distinction here. Busanda won Alabama in 1950 & Saratoga Cup in 1951 & 1952. Exterminator won four straight Saratoga Cups from 1919 to 1922. All before graded stakes system went into effect.”

Surely those stakes would have been considered Grade I equivalents back in the day.

Speaking of obscure records…

Quick: Can you name the only horse to earn over a million dollars while starting 29 times and never once going off as the favorite?

That would be Long Range Toddy (Take Charge Indy), who brought up the rear behind Jackie's Warrior in the public workout known as the Vanderbilt H.

I don't know if that's really a record. But it's a safe enough guess I'd bet a beer on it (corrections welcomed from actual database researchers).

The other oddball item within Long Range Toddy's past performance block is that despite a lifetime bankroll of $1,107,572, he hasn't won a race in more than three years, since before his notorious brush with fate coming off the far turn of the 2019 Kentucky Derby.

That was the Derby in which first-across-the-wire Maximum Security shifted outward while on the lead just prior to the five-sixteenths pole. Long Range Toddy was already spent from pressing the pace, but he had to check sharply as the result of chain-reaction crowding.

Long Range Toddy crossed the wire 17th but was elevated one position when the stewards disqualified Max for fouling him after an agonizingly long 22-minute review in front of a global audience.

It's debatable whether the incident was a true momentum-stopper for Long Range Toddy (next-out Preakness winner War of Will actually took the worst of it). But as far as history is concerned–the DQ was even litigated in federal court by Max's owners but the result stood–Long Range Toddy was judged the aggrieved party.

He's been an asterisk to infamy ever since. Still, there are worse ways to earn seven figures.

Since his score in the 2019 GII Rebel S., Long Range Toddy is 0-for-22, with a career mark of 4-4-4. The 6-year-old transitioned to sprinting after switching from Asmussen's barn to Dallas Stewart's for owner/breeder Willis Horton, and new owner Zenith Racing acquired him just prior to a 45-1 second in the GIII Commonwealth S. at Keeneland this past April.

In no-nonsense workmanlike fashion, Long Range Toddy continues to pick up black-type stakes checks and makes occasional forays into the graded ranks. A diet of six-figure allowance opportunities at Churchill and Oaklawn has also been good for his financial health.

Long Range Toddy isn't even the only remaining active participant out of what would come to be known as the first in a spate of “Dysfunctional Derbies” (we've since had a pandemic-necessitated September running, a drug DQ of the winner, and an 80-1 shocker by a colt who drew in off the also-eligible list).

In fact, four of the last five horses across the finish in that '19 Derby are still active. The other three are:

Tax (Arch), who ran 14th in the Derby, and recently returned off a nearly 1 1/2-year layoff to win the $100,000 Battery Park S. at Delaware July 9.

Roadster (Quality Road), 15th, who, like Long Range Toddy, has also not won a race since prior to the '19 Derby. The GI Santa Anita Derby victor is now training in the mid-Atlantic (scratched from a Colonial turf allowance July 19).

Gray Magician (Graydar), 19th in the Derby, subsequently won the Ellis Park Derby and a Keeneland allowance that season, but has been winless since. He ran fourth in a $16,000 claimer at Del Mar on opening day.

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Why Have Standardbreds Gotten Faster and Thoroughbreds Have Not?

It's been almost 55 years since Dr. Fager set a world record for the mile distance when winning the 1968 Washington Park Handicap at Arlington Park in 1:32 1/5, a record that has yet to be broken. In 1973, Secretariat won the GI Kentucky Derby, covering the 1 1/4 miles in 1:59 2/5, a record that still stands 49 years later. There are other examples, all leading to the same conclusion–the Thoroughbred racehorse is not getting any faster.

Some believe that horses have gotten as fast as they can get, have reached their physical limits and that there's no room for improvement. That was the conclusion reached by Stanford University biologist Dr. Mark Denny, whose 2008 study looked at the evolution of racehorses, greyhounds and human runners.

“While all such extrapolations must be used cautiously, these data suggest that there are limits to the ability of either natural or artificial selection to produce ever faster dogs, horses and humans,” Denny wrote.

But Denny failed to take into account that the Standardbred is doing exactly what he concluded could no longer be done. When Dr. Fager set his record, the fastest time ever by a Standardbred in a one-mile race was the 1:55 clocking turned in by pacer Bret Hanover in 1966. (Trotters are a few seconds slower than pacers).

Today, a 1:55 time would barely get it done in a mid-level race at a mid-level track as there doesn't seem to be any slowing down of this breed. Earlier this month, the record for the fastest mile ever by a Standardbred was set again as Bulldog Hanover won the William Haughton Memorial at the Meadowlands in 1:45 4/5. Since 1968, Dr. Fager's one-mile record has not been surpassed. (In 2003, Najran essentially equaled Dr. Fager's record, going a mile in 1:32.24 while winning the GIII Westchester H.). During that same time frame, starting in 1968, the record mile for a Standardbred has come down by 9 1/5 seconds.

“By far, our horses are just better horses than they were before,” said prominent harness trainer Mark Ford.

Harness racing breeders, owners and trainers say that the Standardbred is still evolving. Bill Solomon owns the Pennsylvania Farm Pin Oak Lane, which breeds both Thoroughbreds and Standardbreds. He says that the trotter or pacer of 2022 looks nothing like their predecessors from 50 or 60 years ago.

“Thoroughbreds have been bred for speed and for racing for a long time, for centuries,” Solomon said. “Don't forget the Standardbred was still used for transportation and commerce into the 1900s. So they evolved a lot later. We're breeding a totally different kind of horse. We used to breed a horse that had more of a Coldblood appearance and now we breed a horse that looks more like a Thoroughbred. Go back and look at a picture of [1951 Little Brown Jug winner] Tar Heel and compare that with sons of Meadow Skipper on to Speedy Crown and today to Somebeachsomewhere and that will answer your question. You will see a horse in Tar Heel that looked like a draft horse and when you get to Speedy Crown you'll start to see horses that look like fashionable Thoroughbreds.”

“I remember when I first got involved, our horses were the proverbial jugheads,” said Murray Brown, the retired general manager and vice president of Standardbred Horse Sales Company. “They were big, they were coarse, they were built more for endurance than they were for speed. It wasn't unusual back then for a horse to go three prep miles before the race. They were bigger and perhaps tougher, but they weren't this fast. They're now being bred predominantly for speed. Look at conformation pictures of the horses by Tar Heel. You got big, coarse, kind of plain horses. Today's horse is so much more streamlined.”

Another factor has been the advances the industry has made when it comes to equipment, primarily the sulky. They have become lighter and more aerodynamic.

“You hear all the time that the bikes are built so much more for speed now,” Brown said. “There's almost no friction and there's more loft and they just go faster because of that.”

The drivers are another part of the equation. Bret Hanover was driven by his trainer, Frank Ervin, typical of the time when the concept of the “catch driver” had yet to take hold. The trainers who drove their own horses might have weighed 200 pounds and weren't particularly skilled as drivers. Today, the vast majority of the horses are driven by individuals who do nothing but drive. The best invariably weigh in the neighborhood of 140 pounds.

“The main factor is probably the evolution of the breed, but there are other extraneous things like the dominance of the catch driver,” Brown said.

It's not that Thoroughbreds have always been this fast. Based on times for the Kentucky Derby, the Thoroughbred breed did evolve and get faster in the early 1900s. Between 1896, the first year the race was run at a 1 1/4 miles, and 1910, the average Derby time was 2:09.8. Over the next 14 years, from 1910 through 1923, the average winning time fell to 2:06.1. By 1962, the record for the Derby had fallen to 2:00.4, the time turned in by Decidedly. Every Derby since 2002 has been run in a slower time. Northern Dancer's time of 2:00 in 1964 has been eclipsed just twice, by Secretariat and by Monarchos in 2001. If there is a way to produce faster species, no one has figured that out.

The Standardbred will never be as fast as the Thoroughbred, but how close can they get? The consensus is that the Standardbred will eventually hit its peak as a breed but that may still be years away.

“When will we see a mile in 1:44?” Ford said. “I don't think we'll have to wait 10 years. The way things are going, it might be 10 weeks.”

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Sonny Leon Moving Tack to Gulfstream Park

Sonny Leon, the winning rider aboard Rich Strike (Keen Ice) in this year's GI Kentucky Derby, is about to relocate to Gulfstream Park. He is listed to ride six horses on the Saturday card, including Easy Come Easy Go (Midnight Storm) in the $75,000 Azalea S.

Leon has been riding at Belterra Park, where he was fourth in the standings with 33 wins entering Thursday's card.

“He's going to move his tack there for now and give it a shot,” said Jeff Perrin, his agent at Belterra. Perrin will not be working with Leon at Gulfstream. “His last day in Ohio will be Friday and then he'll head to Florida. He was friends with Emisael Jaramillo, who was second in the standings, and that jockey got hurt. He will be working with his agent, who has a good book of business. You can't blame Sonny. It's a great opportunity. We won the Kentucky Derby. We shocked the world.”

Leon has flourished at lesser tracks like Belterra and Mahoning Valley, but, aside from the Kentucky Derby, has had few mounts at major tracks. The Derby is his only graded stakes win. Trying to break in against a solid riding colony at Gulftstream will be a big test of his abilities.

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