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This Side Up: If the Hardboot Fits…

Don't know about you, but I'm not really looking for a Hall of Fame horse out there. I would gladly settle for the one of those blurred snapshots of the adolescent sophomore crop, with plenty left to play for in the Preakness. Just so long as we can guarantee an evening of uncomplicated euphoria for connections of the fated horse among 20 who have already confounded the odds even to enter the gate for the GI Kentucky Derby (presented by Woodford Reserve).

Because they will be able to tell you, Saturday evening, that there's no such thing as an ordinary Derby winner. Okay, so this is not quite the race we pictured a few weeks ago, when Life Is Good (Into Mischief) and Greatest Honour (Tapit) and Concert Tour (Street Sense) seemed to be trapping champion Essential Quality (Tapit) in an asphyxiating triangle of brilliance. But nothing makes a backstretch professional madder than pundits announcing, even as the winner is hosed down, that this looks like it must have been an “average” Derby. If you think a Grade I race of any description can ever be easy, just try winning one. And then come back to us.

That said, personally I would welcome like an old friend a fairly nondescript Derby this time. Because the strands embroidered into the fabric of the race over the past couple of years could really do with some support stitching that offers a little less color, and maybe a little more durability.

To many of us, it felt more important last year to stage the Triple Crown races on their usual dates than at their usual venues. As it was, Churchill's three priorities at the time appeared to be Churchill, Churchill and Churchill, and their unilateral postponement to September (ultimately unavailing, with the turnstiles still locked) rendered the series a nonsense, with a nine-furlong Belmont in June, and a Preakness shoehorned into October.

As for the melodrama of the previous year, and everything that has since happened to one of the central characters, I get a headache just thinking about it. And you know what, whatever the race may owe the owners of its first disqualified winner, connections of Country House (Lookin At Lucky) would probably find someday winning the damned thing “properly” no less cathartic.

Actually there was nothing too ordinary about the year before, either, albeit at the opposite end of the spectrum of edification. For Justify (Scat Daddy) performed a vital service for the breed in underscoring the recent rebuke of American Pharoah (Pioneerof the Nile) to those who had spent a generation peddling the heresy that a five-week Triple Crown had become obsolete. In fact, one of the incidental drawbacks of 2020 was that some, celebrating the intervals between races, were so quick to renew their complicity with the commercial erosion of the breed.

Somehow, then, this race finds itself on a streak of sensationalism. On the one hand, anything and everything that contributes to the Derby tapestry can only heighten the historic sense in both aspiration and achievement come the first Saturday in May. But right now it would feel great just to showcase some of the abiding virtues that have underpinned the breed, through good times and bad: above all, a fidelity to those attributes in the Thoroughbred that make this stampede–20 horses going flat out at the same, critical stage of their development, balancing speed and stamina on the fulcrum of the two-minute mark–the ultimate measure of its sustainability.

In other words, give me a hardboot winner.

This week our community grieved the loss of John T. Ward, Jr., 20 years after he saddled Monarchos to become the only Derby winner bar Secretariat to break two minutes. That was an old-school masterpiece, built on lore inculcated by two preceding generations: father, uncle, grandfather. Uncle Sherrill, for instance, had saddled his first winner at Kenney Park when just 18 and ended up ushering himself and Forego into the Hall of Fame.

Incidentally, colleague T.D. Thornton reminded us this week that Monarchos was followed by Giacomo four years later as the eighth gray winner. To say that Essential Quality would be ending a gray “drought” since, however, slightly overstates the matter from an English point of view. The Epsom Derby, first run in 1780, has been won by just FOUR grays–and none since 1946!

Arguably Ward's most significant legacy is Sky Mesa, as consistent a stakes sire as he is bred to be, Monarchos being one of many modern Derby winners to have disappointed at stud. Let's hope that promising starts by American Pharoah and Nyquist will help stop the rot, because we certainly we haven't had too many recent races like 2007, with a podium of Street Sense, Hard Spun and Curlin (not to mention Scat Daddy down the field).

O Besos training this week at Churchill | Horsephotos

The only horse in this whole field by a Derby winner is O Besos–and his sire, Orb, has just been sold to Uruguay, having been discarded virtually overnight by the market. From the family of Ruffian, I would love to see him have the last laugh on the fast-buck commercial breeders.

Hometown trainer Greg Foley certainly fits the hardboot bill. His late father Dravo, who started out as a jockey and then trained for 48 years, saddled 1,123 winners as a stalwart of River Downs and Hazel Park. He never did turn up an elite performer, but Greg's sister Vickie won the GI Woody Stephens S. a couple of years ago, with Saturday's GI Churchill Downs S. entrantHog Creek Hustle (Overanalyze), and Greg has also raised the bar: his 1,429 winners since 1981 are now headed by Sconsin (Include), in the GII Eight Belles S. at the “Derby” meet eventually staged last September and set to face Gamine (Into Mischief) in Saturday's GI Derby City Distaff.

O Besos has to buck the Derby speed trend, established since his sire came from the clouds, but looked made for a test like this when closing through the final three-sixteenths in the GII Louisiana Derby in :18 2/5. Okay, the six-week lay-off isn't exactly old-school, but O Besos has been working like a horse sitting on a breakout. And if you think a horse like this could only win an ordinary Derby, well, suits me: Cinderella had to be measured for a slipper, but a hardboot would do just fine.

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This Side Up: A Super Lesson for Racing

Sure, it's a very different game from our own. On the face of it, horse racing and soccer appear to have little more in common than the same generic umbrella as sports. But then it turns out that “soccer” is itself a very different game–or a very different industry, at least–from what the British know as “football.” And if you happen to have followed an extraordinary week for its European elite, then it would be remiss not to ask whether there might actually be one or two highly pertinent lessons for the Turf.

It's hard to convey to Americans quite how the launch and overnight collapse of the European Super League saturated not just the airwaves, but ordinary conversation wherever and however it can happen these days–from families round their kitchen tables, to friends shivering in pub gardens, to colleagues on Zoom calls. Pandemic, what pandemic? Hadn't you heard, the 12 richest clubs in Europe were going to start a breakaway franchise?

If you were taken aback by the uproar, then so were the owners of “the Dirty Dozen.” They knew to expect a furious, panicked reaction from UEFA and FIFA, whose tawdry supervision of the established set-up was doubtless assumed to have so alienated fans as to disable its defense. But they were clearly not expecting to see lifelong obsessives–whose tribal loyalty is so feverish that the Italian word tifosi traces to the word for typhus–burning replica shirts outside the stadiums to which they have been longing to return. In Britain the entire political spectrum, from government to opposition, united in immediately exploring a legislative response to challenge the viability of the project. Club legends, former players and managers, gave vociferous vent to their rage and disgust; and there were even some among those lucratively contracted to serve the present squads who had the moral courage to express alarm or distaste over their employers' plans.

The key to all this, and it turns out the key to fan engagement, was jeopardy. In principle, if you marshal adequate resources on and off the field, the present structure permits a team to play its way from the bottom of the pyramid to the apex. And, critically, you can also make the reverse journey. That makes business planning difficult, but also gives meaning to what happens when you send your players, hired at staggering expense on the back of fans' television subscriptions, over those white lines.

Three of the six English Premier League clubs who formed the core of the rebellion have American owners, long familiar with franchises where membership is secured. In European leagues, however, the system is meritocratic: underperform sufficiently, and you will be replaced by those who have earned promotion. Of course, the wealth of Manchester United or Liverpool makes their squads invulnerable to relegation; but only the top four league finishers qualify for the European Champions' League, the world's most glamorous and lucrative club competition. The Super League would have relieved them of this tiresome hurdle.

So this became a vivid public exercise in how capitalism functions. The fans stood up for the free market against cartels and rentier exploitation. Whether they now sit up and take notice of the equivalent processes in the global economy, similarly built on debt and megabrands buying out all competition, must be doubted. But for those of us who had bleakly assumed that the cynical agendas of globalisation were now inexorable, it was as edifying as it was astonishing to see how quickly the whole thing was unravelled by sheer grass-roots passion.

Yes, the 12 clubs and their fundraisers and analysts (take a bow, J.P. Morgan) made a valuable contribution in their scarcely credible ineptitude, and amply deserve the damage they have done to their own brands. But I do think their crass example has done our own world an inadvertent service.

Fan engagement and passion–in many forms–are key | Horsephotos

Because we have been reminded that we are nothing without the fans. And that the day we take their engagement and passion for granted is also the day when the lifeblood of our business begins to harden in the arteries of commercialism.

“Now, wait a minute,” you might say. “That's nuts. You can't compare us with these avaricious tycoons who can already rely on fans in Thailand to keep uncertainty within manageable bounds. All we have, all day every day, is jeopardy. We're just trying to squeeze some kind of living out of the most unpredictable investment vehicle in all sport. And everything we stake depends, if ultimately on luck, first and foremost on our own skill.”

All true. Nonetheless all of us who depend on the Thoroughbred for a living must never forget the only reason we have an industry at all; must never forget that all we are doing, every day, is commercializing the passion of the fans.

There were 1,200 juveniles catalogued at OBS this week. Yes, each one represents a precarious, flesh-and-blood project. But that doesn't alter the fact that every crop is processed on an industrial scale, so that a horse making his track debut may have changed hands four times already: sometimes in utero, and very often pinhooked twice over: weanling to yearling to breeze show.

As result, we are candidly breeding for the sales ring rather than the track. As I've often said, that is ultimately the fault of those who direct the spending of the end-user: the agents and trainers complicit with mass breeding to new stallions, most of which will soon be standing somewhere like Peru or Oklahoma. If pinhookers knew that “racehorse” stallions would get due commercial recognition at ringside, then that's exactly where they would invest.

As it is, it's not just the breed that suffers when the commercial market recycles so much genetic junk every year. How can we expect affluent people to indulge themselves with a horse in training if we are flooding the market with mediocre stock with scarcely any premium on the things they would ideally want: a naturally sound, durable animal that will last the course, will keep giving you a day out, will keep finding in the stretch? Not, in other words, one whose job is done the moment the hammer comes down.

In fairness to the American breeder, many of these assets remain more commercial than in the home of soccer. Investors in the American Thoroughbred do still aspire, above anything else, to be involved at Churchill next Saturday; they just don't support enough of the proven stallions who would improve their chances of making it there. But here, too, it is often speed that drives spending–not least on bullet breezers at OBS this week.

The OBS grounds | Photos by Z

Professionals in Ocala may have been too busy meanwhile to notice a staggering juvenile sale on the other side of the ocean. The Goffs UK Sale at Doncaster on Thursday bounced back from an excruciating spring for the sector last year to register record-breaking returns across the board. But this amazing boost to morale measured two things that are not easy to reconcile. On the one hand, this is actually an auction that prizes exactly the kind of ostensibly “commercial” precocity that is killing off those European stallions that have most to offer the breed in the long term, and racehorse owners here and now. At the same time, however, you couldn't ask for better evidence of the validity of the overall product. This amazing evidence of pent-up demand suggests that people who have survived the economic carnage of the pandemic can't wait to get back onto the racetrack and, blessed by a renewed sense that life is for living, it seems they don't even mind if the odds of reward are steeper than ever in Britain.

The type of horses we breed is just one dimension, of course. It just happens to be most relevant to our line of work. But there is much else for the sport to think about, in terms of its priorities. Because the bottom line is that owners are just fans with money. If we think about what works best for owners, we will also come up with something that will work for the fans. The success of micro-syndication confirms the personal stake of the ordinary fan in horses. Virtually all of us, after all, even if born on a horse farm, started out as fans: hooked by a particular horse or two, developing a remote but ardent bond. Maybe a Secretariat or a Kelso, but it could just as well have been some prolific old gelding who gained a cult following in claimers at your local leaky-roof.

If you're a pinhooker, you too need those fans. Apart from anything else, one of them will just have bought a pizza oven, or rented a cabin to sell a couple of used automobiles, and in 15 years' time will be wealthy enough to roll up at Saratoga or Book 1 at Keeneland.

But more fundamental are the $1 pickers of six, and the narratives that sustain their passion. That's the lesson of the European Super League. It's not a question of how fast is the fastest buck we can make, but how we keep those turnstiles clicking. That's our real bank vault, the true foundation of our sport. If we only remember that, then everything else will fall into place.

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This Side Up: A Wise Example for Every Horseman

Nobody was paying a great deal of attention to him back then, either. But before ceding the weekend headlines to those storied Oaklawn handicaps, the GI Apple Blossom and GII Oaklawn, perhaps we can all take a step back and pay an overdue tribute to a novice who came to Hot Springs in the winter of 1977. Charlie LoPresti had just turned 20 and, learning the ropes under trainer Joe Cantey, was able to count Cox's Ridge and Miss Raja among the first Thoroughbreds to stimulate the skill and devotion that would find their ultimate measure in one of the most accomplished turf runners of modern times.

Cox's Ridge won the Oaklawn H. the following spring, and Miss Raja the Apple Blossom a year later. LoPresti was hooked. He had not had a conventional grounding, his passion first ignited by an uncle's carriage horses stabled in the basement of the family brownstone in Brooklyn. But he turned out to be one of those people whose innate qualities–patience, application, acuity, more patience–dovetail ideally with the needs of a Thoroughbred. Long before he steered Wise Dan (Wiseman's Ferry) toward the Hall of Fame, LoPresti had in various farm roles already contributed to the making of Arazi, Carr de Naskra and Blushing John.

The hardboots knew how good he was. Just about the best Kentucky horseman of my acquaintance chose LoPresti not only to break his yearlings but also to educate his own son. Further afield, however, people clearly decided that Wise Dan must be a freak. In the year he made his debut, the barn housed 14 other starters. By 2020, five years after bidding farewell to a dual Horse of the Year, LoPresti found he had taken one step forward and two steps back. In the fall, having started just a dozen horses, he quietly disbanded his stable.

So quietly, in fact, that his exit only reached the press this week, after LoPresti surfaced on the Keeneland backstretch for the first time since. Marty McGee of Daily Racing Form found him visiting the barn of his nephew and former assistant Reeve McGaughey, who had taken on most of his staff and horses. “Didn't want to make a big deal about it,” LoPresti said of the way he had slipped away.

As such, the last thing he will want is anyone making a fuss now. Like so many horsemen of the old school, he saw that there was no turning back for an industry that nowadays builds its dominant brands on volume rather than nuance. For a long time Hall of Fame trainers, no less than breed-shaping stallions, reached their ceiling at 30 to 40 horses for any given campaign. But LoPresti, who began training in 1993, had to contend not only with the new “super trainers,” but also with some whose stats are harder to explain. And as we saw from his unobtrusive departure, he was never the type to shout even his deeds with Wise Dan from the rooftops.

A familiar sight: LoPresti at Wise Dan's side | Horsephotos

A lot of horsemen feel this way. They are humbled by their fortune in stumbling across an animal that amplifies their skills in a way that requires no embroidery: in this case, 23 wins in 31 starts through five campaigns, for over $7.5 million earnings. Because they invest precisely the same devotion and skill to the meekest claiming horses. And you know what? They not only hate the idea of blaring “great job” to themselves on social media; they don't even want to clutter up the shedrow with the kind of owners who go for that stuff. As a mutual friend remarks of LoPresti: “He's quiet because he's always listening.”

Nor was Wise Dan a meteor across an empty sky. Despite those limited numbers, LoPresti had other Grade I winners in Here Comes Ben (Street Cry {Ire}) and Turallure (Wando), while Wise Dan's half-brother Successful Dan (Successful Appeal) was only taken down by the stewards at that level and so had to settle for multiple Grade II success. But every single one of LoPresti's graded stakes winners was homebred. He never pumped commercial patrons and, besides, he views the evolution of a young horses as a continuous, holistic project. He thinks that any ugly creases in a horse's temperament are put there by human clumsiness, and duly preferred to break in himself the horses entering his barn. His name was on the racecard and if they couldn't run, well, he didn't want to blame anyone else. “When he trains your horses,” says one patron, “he eats breakfast, lunch and dinner with them.”

At home with Successful Dan | Christie DeBernardis

It was good to read LoPresti assuring McGee that he has resisted resentment and, still only 63, is instead enjoying the release from an unequal fight, “happy and healthy and doing things I want to do.” That includes still breaking in babies with wife Amy at Forest Lane Farm, where Wise Dan, now 14, is also enjoying his retirement from the track. I am assured that this extraordinary horse might never have achieved the same fulfilment in other hands. Both LoPresti and owner-breeder Morton Fink gave him all the time he needed. But Fink died in 2019, just months before Wise Dan acceded to the Hall of Fame, and LoPresti evidently sensed his cue.

Hopefully he will derive much pleasure from future success for his nephew, who can of course benefit from the same, exemplary template of horsemanship through his father Shug. In the end, after all, LoPresti's story is actually one of hope. Our business is full of people who just need a break. This week Luis Miranda put his life on the line to run into a smoke-filled barn at Belmont and help save another trainer from catastrophe. Miranda was on hand because, well, he's there up to 18 hours a day tending a handful of horses. The hero of the hour has had 13 winners since he started training in 2012, and none since a claimer at Saratoga in August 2019. He acknowledges himself to be “in a big hole,” professionally. But it's all he wants to do.

You know what keeps Miranda going; him, and countless other horsemen, struggling from coast to coast. Someday he hopes that his Wise Dan will walk through the door. Thanks to Charlie LoPresti, he knows that need not be an idle dream. It does happen. And therefore it still could.

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This Side Up: Still Amending the Derby Agenda

We should have known better. The moment we deceived ourselves that we had a crossroads of perfect symmetry, with four standout colts converging inexorably on the first Saturday in May, one promptly limped off the trail and then last weekend another was beaten at odds-on. Nobody, then, will be making any assumptions when the other two complete their GI Kentucky Derby preparations, Concert Tour (Street Sense) in the GI Arkansas Derby next week and Essential Quality (Tapit) as the geographical and narrative pivot of three rehearsals staged coast to coast Saturday.

That said, the juvenile champion gets a home game, round a circuit where he has already won two Grade Is. It will be on the margins of East and West, then, that we seem more likely to see a breakout after the manner of Known Agenda (Curlin) last week. Not that anyone in the Greatest Honour (Tapit) camp is too downbeat after he had to settle for third behind that old rival in the GI Florida Derby. I was heartened by the fidelity of colleague T.D. Thornton to Greatest Honour, who retained the No. 1 spot in his Derby Top 12 this week. Because these adolescent horses seldom crown a curve of relentless improvement under the Twin Spires: very often, they will need to have soaked up some adversity on the way, to have absorbed a tough lesson or two before regrouping. Greatest Honour has been on the punchbag all winter and was entitled to drop a glove this once, especially with such a messy trip. We know that his trainer will always have been working back from one date, and one date only.

With that date now looming so large, however, there's a kind of exquisite tension for all these horsemen, trying to achieve an equilibrium between their own restraint, and the fitness and seasoning of their charges. Remember that's exactly what they do every day, with horses at every level. It's just that the whole process is so much more visible here, because of the extremity of the test and the depth of the associated lore.

Many of us profess a sentimental attachment to the old school, with an emphasis on grounding, but modern trainers make their own rules. Obviously last year's race was an outlier, its postponement as ruinous to other horses as it was helpful to the raw Authentic (Into Mischief). But in 2018 we had a Triple Crown winner unraced before February 18; and the following year the first past the post had started off in midwinter under a $16,000 tag, and his works might have been as usefully clocked with a sundial as a stopwatch.

Medina Spirit has only been beaten by Life Is Good | Benoit

Bob Baffert's mastery of the definitive challenge of his calling now puts him within reach of a seventh Derby, and an outright record, even after losing the services of Life Is Good (Into Mischief). In that colt's lamentable absence from the GI Runhappy Santa Anita Derby, we have a twist in the astonishing tale of Medina Spirit (Protonico), the $1,000 short yearling who somehow found his way into the most lavishly stocked barn in the land. But nothing should surprise us with the genius of his trainer. Remember that Medina Spirit, having been pinhooked to a giddy $35,000, was actually twice as expensive as Real Quiet (Quiet American)!

He would be unbeaten but for Life Is Good and he's been working the house down since a minor throat procedure. Baffert plus Medina Spirit is like Goliath teaming up with David, but this race does offer romantics the option of Rock Your World (Candy Ride {Arg}), bred by Hall of Famer Ron McAnally.

Undefeated Rock Your World switches to dirt | Benoit

You imagine John Sadler has not been short of humorous counsel on the backside, especially as the veteran McAnally, who nowadays supervises just with a handful of animals, managed a graded stakes placing for Rock Your World's older sister She's Our Charm during the winter. McAnally trained both the parents, namely Candy Ride (Arg) and dual Grade I-placed juvenile Charm the Maker (Empire Maker); and actually McAnally and wife Deborah bred the first three dams. But Sadler is certainly rewriting Derby rules with this colt, switching from turf after teaching him about dirt with some pretty heavy duty drills.

The last four runnings have been divided between Baffert and John Shirreffs, who intriguingly perseveres with Parnelli (Quality Road) as though he has more ability than we've been seeing of late. Recent works suggest that the blinkers are helping, much as they did Hot Rod Charlie (Oxbow) when Parnelli ran the GII Louisiana Derby winner to a neck in the fall.

Interesting to see a Californian shipper taking on Essential Quality, in Rombauer (Twirling Candy), though the most feasible GII Toyota Blue Grass S. wildcard is surely Known Agenda's raw but devastating barnmate Untreated (Nyquist). In the GII Wood Memorial (presented by Resorts World Casino), meanwhile, a similarly late play from Prevalance (Medaglia d'Oro) will help Godolphin decide whether he's progressing fast enough to join their champion in Louisville. If not, then they will hope that at least Risk Taking (Medaglia d'Oro) can go forward on behalf of their big stallion, who joins Tapit and Curlin in craving the Derby as a seal on all their other success.

A playful Weyburn last month at Belmont | Susie Raisher

Pioneerof the Nile beat those big hitters to that distinction before his premature loss, which would be felt all the more keenly if Weyburn were to emerge as a new Derby force from this race. I can definitely see that happening, the Chiefswood homebred being born for this second turn with first three dams by A.P. Indy, Sunday Silence and Nijinsky. The third dam, indeed, is Maplejinsky, dam of Sky Beauty (Blushing Groom {Fr})–so seeing the name Jerkens on the card gives us that warm glow, too. This is an April 21 foal, paradoxically just the kind of thing we like for the Derby, and I love the gutsy way this horse carried his speed through a demanding mile after a lay-off.

So forget that neat and orderly crossroads. On the day itself, we know it will be chaos out there; and the same applies to the four weeks in between. Some engines stalling, others suddenly roaring into life; lights turning red, lights turning green. And with horsemen like Jerkens, Shirreffs and Sadler trying to weave into the traffic, with all their skill and experience, for now it still feels like we don't even know which way round to hold the Derby map.

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