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This Side Up: First Among Equals

They talk about the glass ceiling, though back in 1992 Shelley Riley ran into something more like a glass wall. For a few strides, it looked as though she was going to make history as she watched Casual Lies–a Lear Fan colt she had found as a short yearling for $7,500–lead into the stretch with most of the Kentucky Derby field in trouble. But then that invisible barrier came down, and Lil E. Tee ran by to win by a length.

Her reward? Later that year, somebody claiming to represent a movie star approached Riley offering to buy into the horse, in the same breath mentioning the gentleman whose barn Casual Lies would then be joining. Naturally, the horse stayed where he was. And, whatever the progress meanwhile made by wider society, so did horse racing.

As has been pretty universally recognized, our community could not have been more fortunate in where fate finally found a female trainer to win a Triple Crown race. Jena Antonucci knows that her gender should be as irrelevant to everyone else as it is to Arcangelo (Arrogate), and it feels somewhat disrespectful that she should be constantly required to interpret such a momentous personal milestone as though she has arrived in our midst as some kind of gender token. But she has generously reconciled herself to that particular indignity, in order to help articulate and address those shared by all women.

And while it's embarrassing that the American sport had to wait until 2023 for this moment, actually the situation is still more flagrant in my homeland. With the likes of Criquette Head-Maarek and Jessica Harrington having won so many big races in Europe, guess how many women currently feature among the top 30 of the British trainers' championship? Two, maybe? (As is the case, thanks to Linda Rice and Brittany Russell, in the American standings.) Surely not just one?

Well, close, but the answer is one fewer than that.

That deplorable state of affairs suggests that the people investing in British stables, along with their management teams, are an even more stubborn crew than the handicappers. For the latter have grasped that Rachel Blackmore, who has raised the bar so high in jump racing, is not just the best female jockey but the best jockey, period.

If I had to confess to a candidly sexist generalization, simply from the demographics prevailing in a particular culture in a particular time, it would be that women, if anything, might have a more natural engagement with horses. Be that as it may, it would plainly be impossible for anyone to maintain the slightest coherence in proposing that they might, in any way, be less qualified to train racehorses.

Historically, admittedly, women trainers may have had to meet additional challenges, in terms of asserting the kind of authority they were chronically denied in so many other workplaces. And it is not as though those battles have been definitively won elsewhere, for instance in politics or business. But their current profile in this profession suggests a culpable failure, in our community, to match even such progress as has been painfully achieved in other walks of life.

Jena Antonucci with Arcangelo the day before the Belmont S. | Sarah Andrew

So much so, that arguably it should be incumbent on those in a position to influence behaviors to exercise some positive discrimination. Given the gender ratio among licensees, after all, that's nothing like as tough as it should be. But perhaps these billionaires should be saying to themselves: “Right, my team is about to hit the sales. At the end, I'm going to ensure that at least [for instance] two of my eight new yearlings go to female trainers.” Is that so much to ask in a world containing, say, Josie Carroll and Cherie DeVaux?

We know the chicken-and-egg element in any trainer's reputation: get some good material, win some good races, get better material. Of course, I'm not saying that all trainers would do equally well with the same material. But if we truly believe in merit, then the only way for the training profession to become a true meritocracy-and to achieve the requisite volume of female entry-is for the role models to have proper respect and opportunity. As it is, Antonucci had to seize her moment with a $35,000 yearling, hardly an exponential leap from the $7,500 Casual Lies.

Out of nowhere, and in its hour of need, Antonucci has stepped up to the plate not just for her sex but also for her sport. This is a person who had already shown exemplary ambition in terms of a more holistic, acorn-to-oak approach to the Thoroughbred's career. But even her uninhibited exhibition of excitement and joy, during the race last Saturday, offered us something valuable. This was not female joy; it was human joy. It was something that anybody would aspire to share.

A year before a woman named Jena found her platform in the Belmont, the same race had allowed one named Jana to share her experiences in a world dominated by men. Jana Barbe and her husband Roy had raised a Belmont contender, We the People (Constitution), despite being relative newcomers to the game.

She acknowledged the Turf to have proved a conservative environment, in need of more diversity in every way. But this is a corporate highflier who used to come home from work “picking shards out of my head” from that notorious glass ceiling. When she graduated law school, in 1987, the percentage of female equity partners at big law firms was 15 to 18 percent, and the goal was 20 percent. The goal today? Still 20 percent.

So, what Jena did last Saturday was what Jana urged last year, when discussing the only way to achieve change. “One person at a time, one foot in front of the other, and being really smart in how we go about it,” she said. “We will get there. Because we have to. In the end the sport will become integrated because it can't not.”

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This Side Up: Tapping At The Door Of History

So, what's next? The plague of locusts? The only surprise is that the smoke filling the air at Belmont Park has drifted across the continent from Canadian forests, and didn't actually emerge from a widening fissure in the crust, crumbling daily, that appears to divide horsemen and their horses from the inferno.

Hopefully a reprieve of the GI Belmont S. might yet be extended to some other elements in what has become too relentlessly apocalyptic a narrative. In terms of what has been definitively established, our sport's macabre run of misfortune in recent weeks may owe as much to sulphurs exhaled from hell as to the difference between dirt and synthetic surfaces.

As a community, we obviously have a major challenge on our hands. But that's precisely why we need to avoid panicked, impulsive solutions in favor of calmly diligent, far-sighted leadership. Just because social media has empowered some pretty deranged minorities, we can't allow their disproportionate reach to pervert whole societal agendas.

It would seem pretty unarguable that American racing can benefit from a greater role for synthetics but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Horsemen and handicappers alike have a legitimate stake in dirt racing–and, to be clear, that stake is not just financial but a matter of cultural identity–and there its long history can surely be extended by discovering and addressing any practices that undermine its sustainability. I suspect there's probably quite a crossover between those who are resisting HISA and those who can't abide synthetics–and these are the guys who really need to smell the coffee. If you want to keep dirt racing, then call your dogs off HISA.

Tapit | Sarah Andrew

You couldn't ask for a better context to ponder these issues than the 155th running of a race designed to showcase precisely those genetic assets that equip the Thoroughbred to deal safely with tasks set before an increasingly (and, for the most part, properly) vigilant audience. And that's not just because it asks for the robustness to carry speed for a distance that is nearly freakish, in the American theatre, but also because historically many runners would already have contested two demanding races in the preceding five weeks.

Though it is the trainers who are driving corrosion of the Triple Crown, they implicitly transfer the culpability to the breeders. Hopefully our collective endeavors to identify and resolve vulnerabilities in the Thoroughbred will include analysis of the relative incidence of breakdowns (and not just catastrophic ones) in the stock of different stallions. If so, we might learn whether there's any scientific substance to our nervousness about horses today being “too fast to last.” For now, however, we can only follow our instincts and conscience. But it's certainly striking that Germany should have achieved such a sensational impact with its bloodlines–far outrunning its troubles as a racing economy–by paternalist strictures in favor of soundness and competitive longevity. And even the most stubborn commercial breeders in Europe and America must acknowledge that Japan isn't doing too badly, either, in prizing the same assets.

Happily, the 50th anniversary of Secretariat's Belmont has drawn a perfectly presentable field in both quality and intrigue. With four other Kentucky Derby graduates meanwhile siphoned to the GIII Matt Winn S., it's clear that the Classic taking all the punishment from trainers right now is the Preakness. But how edifying that the Belmont–such an outlier, in the numbly repeating wheelhouse of most American trainers–should retain sufficient prestige to tempt a juvenile champion who'd be well within his rights to find a more obviously congenial way of regrouping from his recent vexations.

Quite a leap of imagination is required to picture a speed brand like Violence siring a Belmont winner, but his grandsire El Prado (Ire) sits comfortingly opposite Arch (behind damsire Blame) in the pedigree of Forte. So you never know, and clearly the runner-up has meanwhile upgraded his white-knuckle GI Florida Derby.

But his second dam was fast (stakes winner at 6f) and will need to have smuggled through some stamina from her own mother. That's by no means impossible, as she was by Seattle Slew and her half-sister by a speedier agency (Storm Cat) unites the pedigrees of 12-furlong Classic winners Contrail (Jpn) (Deep Impact {Jpn}) and Essential Quality (Tapit), as third and second dam respectively.

Essential Quality, of course, was his sire's fourth Belmont winner, a unique distinction in the modern era. The only precedent, Lexington, had emerged from a forgotten era of four-mile heats and matches to prove an ideal influence for what was then a newfangled type of sprinting in a single, congested dash. The dial has since turned so far that the Belmont stands out as a curio, a positive marathon. Breeders of the 21st Century must count themselves blessed, then, to retain access to such a wholesome influence in the evening of his career.

Forte | Coady Photography

Astoundingly, this time Tapit himself accounts for two of the nine runners, while no fewer than FOUR others are out of his daughters.

The Gainesway patriarch's Belmont record, including in a couple of desperate finishes, is all about the ability to carry speed under duress. That is supposed to be a dirt hallmark, though it was exported to revolutionary effect by Northern Dancer's sons in Europe, where the dynasty's principal heir Frankel (GB)-having himself always run just like a dirt horse-is now siring stock that similarly just keep going.

Actually, there's a case for saying that Tapit is a far more effective turf sire than his stats might imply, given that only his most disappointing foals would even try the weeds. He's certainly been disgracefully untested in Europe. Of just nine Tapits started by British trainers over the last decade, seven are winners and three stakes performers. But whatever the future may hold, in terms of racing surfaces, it looks as though he will just have to settle for being the richest sire in the history of the American sport.

Into Mischief is almost certainly going to run him down, in time, but Tapit started Belmont weekend on a statistical brink–$198 million in progeny earnings, from 999 winners and 99 graded stakes winners–that surely beckons him towards another date with Belmont destiny. And if he's going to make history, then he's also the type of horse that can give us a future.

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This Side Up: Plus Ca Change….

At a time when so many people seem to be allowing a duty of vigilance to crumble into morbid defeatism, it seems a little unfair that our sport should be going through such a hard time even as we approach the 50th anniversary of the most luminous tour de force in the story of the modern breed.

Of course, as some powerful evocations of the time have lately reminded us, Secretariat arrived as a sunbeam into a wider world darkened by Vietnam and civic unrest. And nor should we deceive ourselves that even our own, notoriously insular community was back then immune to some of the things that vex us in 2023.

For instance, without reprising what have doubtless become tiresomely familiar objections to tinkering with the Classic schedule, let's not forget that Secretariat faced down a Triple Crown drought stretching to Citation in 1948. Obviously a still longer wait followed Seattle Slew and Affirmed, but we've found two horses equal to the task in the last eight years. Even so, the trainers are somehow trying to bully us into reconciling the paradox that they want more time between the races and therefore (assuming this indeed renders those races more competitive) to extend the intervals between precisely those Triple Crown winners that supposedly represent our best route to wider engagement.

Well, the world moves on. And it's not as though the Thoroughbred has ever permitted hard and fast rules anyway.

On the one hand, it's pretty unarguable that the old school, by exposing their horses more, helped the public to develop a rooting interest. If Flightline (Tapit) was perhaps as talented as we've seen since Secretariat, in making just six starts he barely scratched the surfaced of national attention.
And I do like to think there were other, incidental gains in the aggressive campaigning of horses, whether in terms of educating the animal or showcasing the type of genes that breeders should wish to replicate. But if Mage (Good Magic) is only the latest proof that modern trainers can prepare a raw horse even for a challenge as notoriously exacting as the Kentucky Derby, then let's roll back to that summer of '73.

Okay, so Secretariat himself had made nine juvenile starts from July 4. But if you would presume experience to be an asset at Churchill on the first Saturday in May, then how much more crucial should it be for the template itself, the most venerable race of all: the Derby at Epsom, that crazy rollercoaster with its twisting hill? Yet half a century ago, in a field of 25, the race was won on only his second career start by Morston (GB).

He was bred for Classic stamina, at any rate: by St Leger winner Ragusa (Ire) out of an Oaks runner-up (herself by a St Leger runner-up) who had already produced the 1969 Derby winner Blakeney (GB). Ragusa, incidentally, was out of a mare imported from a very old American family that had earlier produced Hard Tack, the sire of Seabiscuit. The St Leger, remember, is run over 14 furlongs. As the Japanese have reminded us, the lifeblood of the Thoroughbred is not brute speed but class: the ability not just to go fast, but to keep going fast.

That is certainly the hallmark of Galileo (Ire), whose legacy saturates the 244th running of the Derby on Saturday. With 93 juveniles and just a dozen yearlings still to come, he is represented by a single son, Artistic Star (Ire), unbeaten for one of the outstanding trainers in Europe yet available at tempting odds. Of the remaining 13 starters, eight are by sons of Galileo (including two by principal heir Frankel {GB}); two are out of his daughters; and one is out of a mare by another of his sons. That leaves just two runners to have bobbed to the surface of a European bloodstock industry that squanders mares, by the thousand, on stallions that cannot remotely satisfy the definition of class given above.

But, yes, the world moves on. Sometimes it just moves on in the wrong direction. It's a pretty dismal reflection on where our sport stands today that its greatest race has been shoehorned into the middle of lunch to avoid the F.A. Cup Final. Because what American readers may not realize is that this particular soccer match, in its heyday, also once brought England to a standstill—but has in recent years, even as the game has boomed, also lost much of its popular traction. With many managers resting star players for this tournament, you might even say that the F.A. Cup has shared the same decline in popular culture as the Derby (for which Parliament itself used to take the day off).

Fixed television schedules are also a thing of the past, with the young especially expecting to do most of their viewing “on demand.” That puts live events at a premium. In Britain, however, broadcasting rights for the most prestigious sporting events—including both the F.A. Cup Final and the Derby—are ringfenced for free channels. (Which obviously invites the paradox that the most coveted events, with no competition from channels with subscription revenue, are least likely to achieve their true market value.) Unusually, the F.A. Cup Final is broadcast simultaneously by both the BBC and ITV. And since the latter also has the rights to the Derby, racing has been unceremoniously shown its place.

By an unmissable irony, the match that has elbowed the Derby aside is being contested by Manchester City and Manchester United. As such, it is what the soccer world knows as a “derby” match between local rivals. The origin of this usage is tenuous, but some have ascribed it to the Epsom race. Horseracing, after all, long precedes football (in all its variations) in popular culture.
Yet now we find the Jockey Club taking out injunctions in anticipation of animal rights protests, even for a race in such innocuous contrast to, for instance, the Grand National. And that is without the current traumas of Churchill Downs having remotely penetrated wider consciousness on that side of the pond.

But let's resist adding another “basso profundo” to the prevailing chorus of miserabilism. Let's hope for another infectiously exciting chapter in the Epsom epic: maybe a final Derby for Dettori, who has already won two of three British Classics on his farewell tour; or perhaps one more for another old master, Sir Michael Stoute.

His runner hadn't even seen a racetrack before Apr. 20. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Mage! Passenger (Ulysses {Ire}) is actually out of a War Front mare. Fifty years on from Morston, then, perhaps Passenger would be an apt reminder that the more the world changes, the more it stays the same.

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This Side Up: Why The Long Face?

As and when he finally quits riding the kids to sleep, at least John Velazquez doesn't have to worry about a next career. Because what he did in Baltimore last week showed him to have everything it takes to lead a cortege. Not just the restrained tempo, but also the way he reliably maintained all dignity and decorum while Irad Ortiz Jr. came lurching out of the procession in his usual unruly fashion.

True, Velazquez wouldn't last the first week if he were to lead a funeral at the same kind of lick as he did the GI Kentucky Derby field on Reincarnate (Good Magic), quite a contrast to the way he has previously hypnotized his pursuers in that race. But Johnny V. amply redressed that aberration with a masterly ride in the GI Preakness S. to confirm himself, for our community, as apt a companion as might be found for a horse bearing a name like National Treasure (Quality Road).

But we won't dwell on the cortege analogy, which will be far too morbid for some tastes in the prevailing atmosphere. This I must admit to viewing with some ambivalence. Because however troubled our relationship with Main Street, unrelieved “sackcloth and ashes” may yet cause us additionally to fail in the more straightforward priority of retaining our existing audience.

(Click the arrow below to hear this column as a podcast.)

Alongside a wholesome determination to keep improving, I do feel that we should stand up for the many glories of our sport with rather more pride than we seem able to find in our hearts just now. (It's like the old joke. Horse walks into a bar. Barman says, “Why the long face?”) We have so much to celebrate, so many stories to discourage mainstream complicity in the kind of extremist agenda that will tolerate zero risk; that would candidly prefer no horses at all, rather than expose them even to the most conscionable and scrupulously-managed risk. That position is invulnerable to the reminder that Thoroughbreds don't make terribly good house pets, so really, we need to concentrate on the far larger numbers who might share the aspiration of giving these noble creatures not just life but the best life possible.

John Velazquez wins the GI Preakness S. | Horsephotos

As Californian horsemen, veterinarians and administrators will confirm, that can raise the bar to challenging levels. But their collective efforts have produced such spectacular dividends, turning round an existential crisis virtually overnight, that I feel that the wider community has been inadequately grateful. Major investors in the industry have abandoned the Californian circuit to a pretty vicious circle: small fields, which diminish handle, which restricts purses, which reduces fields. Yet still it keeps coming up with champions, developed by some of the most accomplished horsemen of our time-regardless of where you happen to stand on the one who has just consolidated an incredible resumé with yet another Preakness.

Views of Bob Baffert, in fact, are a good example of all this wringing of hands. It sometimes feels as though you're only allowed to say one of two things: either he exemplifies everything that's wrong, or he's a maligned genius. And whichever camp you find yourself in, get ready for the invective.

All genius is flawed, because all genius is human. We certainly saw a human being last Saturday, but only in circumstances that maintained the bitter polemics. So much of our discourse, above all regarding HISA, is infected with venom; much of it is conveyed, at calamitous expense, by lawyers. But who wants to be invited to a civil war, instead of a garden party?

I do understand that parts of our community will only stir from their complacency if adequately alarmed by the costs of inaction. And yes, too much naïve enthusiasm might blind us to real dangers. It's even arguable that the way the geographical heart of the industry is thriving, in Kentucky, may insulate too much opinion against societal fissures that feel a world away.

Certainly, professional horsemen have their share of culpability in the loss of public traction. As I suggested last week, we're either breeding horses that aren't up to the task; or hiring trainers who won't properly explore the genetic attributes we may wish to replicate. In either scenario, a solution is absolutely within our hands.

But one other thing also needs to be understood by horsemen. You can't have it both ways: you can't refuse synthetic tracks, which are demonstrably safer, and also refuse more exacting regulation. If you won't accept the kind of strictures that redeemed dirt racing in California, then you'll just have to make do with synthetics.

And actually, that whole area is yet another that only tends to disclose division and misunderstanding. One of the main reasons for the perceived failure of the initial synthetics experiment was a prescriptive view of bloodlines, as adapted only to one type of surface. So, whatever our grievances with Churchill Downs, especially regarding Arlington, I'm glad to see them putting their shoulder to the Turfway wheel. Having loaded Turfway with starting points, they were rewarded with a trial winner who ran a brilliant second in the Derby. In the process, remember, Two Phil's precisely emulated his sire Hard Spun. Are we any more likely to take heed, this time round?

National Treasure at Pimlico | Jim McCue

While we're on the subject, I'm intrigued that the sire of the Preakness winner has lately surfaced among those extraneous speed influences sampled by Coolmore for their plethora of staying mares by Galileo (Ire). Quality Road's own track career was all about carrying speed on dirt. But his dam was by Strawberry Road (Aus), out of a half-sister to the dam of Bahri (Riverman); and of course, his sire Elusive Quality adapted very well to the European theater. Quality Road has had a couple of Royal Ascot winners, while his daughter Bleecker Street last year emerged as one of the elite grass talents in America. So, it's unsurprising that he should be looking like a promising experiment for Coolmore, not least through his son Cairo (Ire) who runs in a Classic at the Curragh on Saturday.

Actually, National Treasure himself has plenty of chlorophyll in his maternal family, while his first two dams are respectively by sons of El Prado (Ire) and Blushing Groom (Fr). But he's presumably never going to risk grass, when he's not getting anything like enough respect as it is.

The world outside is understandably aghast at our horrible run of breakdowns. But even those turning their gaze inwards just want to tell us what a terrible Preakness it was, and how we're clinging to the wreckage of an antediluvian Triple Crown. It evidently wasn't a “terrible” enough race for the Derby winner to swat aside horses that finished third and fourth in the crop championship at the Breeders' Cup. Sure, that was largely the work of Johnny V.–and emphatically nothing to do with a two-week turnaround-but if these races are so soft, please feel free to go and win one.

So, let's offer due congratulations to this very game animal; to the people who bred and raised him; and to those who found him, and have now brought out his potential. It was a difficult day, for sure, but life is full of ups and downs and horseracing is no different. In fact, that's exactly why its stories are so compelling; and why we must share not just our grief and guilt, but also our joy and pride.

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