This Side Up | Horse Racing Free Tips

This Side Up: Too Much Heart for Most, Too Much Head for the Rest

So long, old big head.

Most who fit that description are good; just not quite as good as they think. But you showed an indomitability rooted, not in arrogance, but in an awareness that the odds of life are seldom easy; that the crown must be earned, not just ceremonially conferred. In your case, it just needed a little extra by way of circumference.

The retirement from stud of Tiznow (Cee’s Tizzy), announced this week, is poignantly timed. In a few days’ time, a fresh name will be carved on the roll of honor for the GI Breeders’ Cup Classic, on which Tiznow remains the only one to recur. It looks a vintage edition, but for many of us it will be difficult to suppress an inner hollowness to match the empty stands.

Tiznow was a monster of a racehorse–starting, of course, pretty literally with his daunting physique. His unique double in the Classic, in fact, was secured by an aggregate roughly commensurate with that triceratops skull of his: a neck verdict over Giant’s Causeway (Storm Cat) in 2000 and a nose over Sakhee (Bahri) the following year. Either of those duels would qualify among the most stirring you’ll ever witness; to share authorship of both makes Tiznow one of the most memorable Thoroughbreds of the modern era.

Most runnings of the Classic, naturally enough, will not measure up to those two years. Yet simple iteration, the renewal of a ritual in our calendar, makes every Breeders’ Cup an authentic milestone on the road of life; and a true pilgrim of us mere railbirds.

I will never forget watching the 2000 Classic alongside one of the nicest people I know, another Englishman, who had bet Tiznow to win; halfway down the stretch, he suddenly started hollering for Giant’s Causeway. Here, wonderfully, was someone renouncing financial gain for the sheer excitement he would have discovered in a success as bold as the one that so nearly fell within the reach of the Iron Horse.

For it was to the Europeans that Tiznow was most truly monstrous. By a desperate margin, his ogre’s snout consecutively confounded two of the most audacious adventures undertaken by the rival powerhouses of racing in Europe. Giant’s Causeway admittedly carried some versatile influences, but Sakhee, who had won the Arc by six lengths 20 days previously, was saturated with staying grass blood. Yet the connections of both understood the essential transferability, between different surfaces, of class.

Tiznow (right) prevails over Europe’s Giant’s Causeway in his first of two Breeders’ Cup Classics | Horsephotos

Nonetheless I soon found myself borrowing and reversing my friend’s generosity of spirit. Who could begrudge a horse as lion-hearted as this? After all, when he went to WinStar, Tiznow invited the whole business to see the bigger picture.

Because the whole package demanded a fresh look at what makes a Hall of Fame dirt runner: this hulking Cal-bred, offering to extend the perilously attenuating Man o’ War line through a mare whose frankly peculiar antecedents (first four dams by Seattle Song, Nice Dancer, Pia Star and Tompion) would meanwhile coalesce into something quite remarkable.

At the time, even such a terrific record on the track could not qualify a son of Cee’s Tizzy, who had himself stood for $1,500, for a higher opening fee than $30,000. And nor could the success of Tiznow’s stock, including 14 Grade I winners and many bombshell sales yearlings, ever get him into the six-figure club. Though he landed running, with first-crop champion Folklore sealing the freshman’s championship, his rugged and rangy foals had the ostensibly uncommercial virtue of thriving with maturity. Tiznow himself was unraced at two and Well Armed, for instance, waited until six to gild that debut crop with the G1 Dubai World Cup.

But as Tiznow began to replicate his sterling attributes (often through fairly mediocre mares), so we all grew in admiration for the work of Cecilia “Cee” Straub-Rubens, who had purchased both his sire and dam as yearlings.

Cee’s Tizzy (Relaunch) ended a light career with third in the GI Super Derby, in which runner-up Unbridled would also achieve a more enduring distinction than winner Home At Last. Besides Tiznow, his serial matings with Cee’s Song (Seattle Song) also yielded Grade II winners Budroyale and Tizdubai; Grade II-placed Tizbud; the unraced dam of GI Preakness winner Oxbow (Awesome Again); and the unplaced dam of GI Haskell scorer Paynter (also by Awesome Again).

A real dynasty, then, blossomed unfeasibly in the strips of sunlight cast between the steel-girder limbs that supported the raking stride of its principal scion. Who knows which layers of soil have been most fertile?

Some credit, perhaps, can go to the second dam of Cee’s Tizzy: the prolific Chilean import Tizna was not only still operating at a high level at age seven, but apparently also set a template with a blaze and four white feet. Cee’s Tizzy fractured a knee in the Super Derby but standing opposite Tizna in his pedigree is Relaunch’s very influential dam Foggy Note, also familiar in the pedigree of Tapit; between them, these mares made 88 starts.

Behind Cee’s Song, equally, you find conspicuous durability in her Argentinian roots. Her fourth dam, for instance, made 133 starts across seven years; and her half-brother was none other than Crimson Satan, whose footprint we recently noted in the family of the flourishing Dialed In. He, too, had teak qualities as a champion juvenile who proceeded to win 18 of 58 starts. Other siblings raced 92, 89 and 72 times respectively.

Tiznow, pensioned at age 23 | PM Photos/Mary Ellet

Such are the goods filtering into the 21st Century through Tiznow. Obviously the stakes are pretty high for one of his sons to maintain the viability of a sire line ultimately tracing to the Godolphin Arabian–soon, perhaps, in as much danger of asphyxiation by the Darley Arabian hegemony as that of the Byerley Turk. In Kentucky, Tourist and Strong Mandate still retain every chance; and of course another heir may yet emerge from Tiznow’s final crops, conceivably even Dennis’ Moment (back on the worktab and eyeing the GI Pegasus World Cup) if he retrieves his juvenile promise. In the meantime Tiznow is advancing his reputation as a broodmare sire, the 37 stakes winners already out of his daughters including a leading candidate for his Classic mantle in Tiz The Law (Constitution).

One way or another, there’s a legacy here worth preserving. Because Tiznow, in both build and background, reminds us always to resist lazy assumptions.

The skittish domestic market of today didn’t give much of a chance to another Cal-bred, California Chrome, before exporting him to Japan. His Breeders’ Cup duel with Arrogate was right up there with those won by Tiznow, and I’ll never tire of remarking that his conqueror’s sire Unbridled’s Song was out of a three-parts sister to the dam of his own father, Lucky Pulpit. Yet one was deemed commercially impossible, and the other a bona fide Classic influence.

Much like Ride the Rails and Indian Charlie, respectively sires of Candy Ride (Arg) and Uncle Mo, Cee’s Tizzy gave us all a rebuke along with his greatest gift. No less than with mares like Leslie’s Lady (Tricky Creek), we can’t just declare “exceptions to the rule.” We can’t pick and choose when pedigrees are relevant. If anything, we should always be more interested in the ones that are hardest to explain.

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This Side Up: Fee Cuts Can Reboot the System

As we have come to expect, in a trading environment that nowadays owes so much to their boss, it was the guys at Spendthrift who first put their heads over the parapet.

This week, anyway. To be fair, the original lead actually came from Chuck Fipke–a match for the unorthodoxy and initiative even of B. Wayne Hughes, and prepared way back in the spring to waive his 2020 stallion fees altogether.

Fipke reasoned that his entire pitch was to small breeders, who were already looking down the barrel as the pandemic took hold; and also that he owned his stallions outright, duly having no responsibilities to shareholders. This week, however, Spendthrift became the first in a rapid series of big farms to grasp the nettle with some extremely purposeful fee cuts, at every level, for 2021.

It’s a fascinating situation, because you could argue that stallion fees have in recent years ceased to make sense from either side. For those breeders who must retrieve costs in the sales ring, the commercial imperative to use only new sires tends to require them to spend far too much on unproven potential. For farm accountants, equally, the window of opportunity is so narrow that corralling adequate books even into years two and three is becoming harder and harder; so much so, that even exorbitant opening fees may not square the ledger.

But now they have no alternative but to lead their stallions out to the crossroads and help the breeder save on gas. Our business operates in unalterable cycles, initiated by the choice of a stallion. His fee sets the bar of viability for every project. Add keep and labor–which, in contrast, scarcely vary whatever the value of your mare–and you’ll have your break-even number.

That’s how organically everyone is connected. And that’s why the guy setting the fee must read the marketplace for young stock, and give all parties the chance to come out ahead. Because he or she will need them to retain the funds and morale to do it all again. That’s why John Sikura, who views the big picture as dynamically as anyone in the business, was at such pains in pricing the Hill ‘n’ Dale roster to stress that “we are all in this together.”

And let’s not forget how slowly the wheel turns. At a time like this, that’s actually a comfort. Following a bereavement, I haven’t been ringside at the Tattersalls October Yearling Sale until the past couple of days, but the staggering resilience of the market there has been most instructive. Everyone, pending the promised land of vaccines and cures, shares the same misery over COVID and its indefinite span. But the breeding and trading of Thoroughbreds tends to develop in our insular, eccentric community–even in the pinhooker, fluttering from flower to flower–a patience and perspective that could, for once, be usefully emulated out there in the “real” world.

The reality is that plenty of horsemen made good money out of a bull run extending a decade since the last big market shock. If they can now tough out a couple of lean years, they will surely keep faith in a system that has served them so well. After all, they can’t just leave those horses chewing grass out there. And they have been broadsided, out of nowhere, by something completely unaccountable and extraneous. As and when they get back on an even keel, they know they have the maps and compasses to chart a sustainable course.

And that’s without admitting to ourselves that our business is exceptionally well positioned, should economic recovery be neither V- nor U-shaped but, as we increasingly hear, K-shaped. Trading in luxury goods, horsemen rely on “trickledown” from the most affluent in society. Among that class, even so, perhaps at least the old-school paternalists–a type of conservative often drawn to the Turf–will seek nothing more precious from the next four years, tax breaks included, than a little more political and social stability. Because we are, indeed, all in this together.

At every level of the industry, these fee cuts can trigger a communal reset. It boils down to a single word: opportunity. As I keep saying, the great harvests of capitalism are often sown in the thinnest soil. This winter, once again, we’ll be running a value check across all Kentucky stallions–and already we’re salivating over some of the fees announced this week.

Some prospectors may even resolve to invest in mares to take advantage. No sector of the market demands more patience, of course, than breeding stock. But you can guarantee that we’ll look back, a few years hence, and discover that many a top-class racehorse was bred from mares more or less “stolen” from the forthcoming sales.

Ah, racehorses! Remember them? There could be no more wholesome corrective, out of this crisis, than restoring our focus to the racetrack; than renouncing this addiction to the self-fulfilling, artificial values that begin and end on a sales rostrum.

In fact, whisper it, but it might be no bad thing for the commercial market to falter long enough for breeders to abandon these fast-buck stallions, scarcely any of which will ever again command so high a fee, for the kind of yeoman achievers that might build up a family with a few rosettes on the track instead. We will all have our different favorites, but already know that many will be priced to make that a very far-sighted strategy.

Hindsight may also show us, of course, that one or two weanling colts selling this November will eventually figure among the first stallions confined to 140 mares. That will certainly set a new puzzle to those careworn farm accountants. On the other hand, perhaps by then people will have grasped that breeding animals that can actually run ultimately makes more sense than wiping out families in pursuit of fleeting commercial gain.

It’s an ill wind, as they say, that blows no good–and that applies even to the tempests of 2020.

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This Side Up: Arc of Achievement Unites Brant and Mellon

When Ettore Sottsass was asked which of his many diverse achievements had given him most satisfaction, he gave a shrug. “I don’t know,” he said. “Life is a permanent project. It’s a passage from one thing to another.”

The Italian designer and architect transcended disciplines in a fashion not dissimilar to his compatriot Federico Tesio, whose singular genius was as stimulated by his furniture workshop as by his breed-shaping stud farm.

And there’s a corresponding breadth of engagement to the man who wrote to the widow of Sottsass, asking permission to honor his memory with a Siyouni (Fr) yearling he had bought at Deauville in 2017. Peter Brant has assembled his stable with the same curator’s eye as he has his art collection; and the same quixotic awareness that no masterpiece can ever achieve perfection, can ever fully requite the yearnings that sustain his twin passions.

The success of Sottsass (Fr) in the G1 Qatar Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe on Sunday was certainly a masterpiece, in the technical craft of his trainer Jean-Claude Rouget. And it belongs in the same gallery as Brant’s unique achievement in breeding a GI Kentucky Derby winner, Thunder Gulch (Gulch), as well as his sire and dam. Already, however, the project has its next passage, with Sottsass now starting a new career at Coolmore.

For just as the work of Renaissance masters has far outlasted the span of any human life–creators, preservers, collectors–so our own humble endeavors, from one generation of horsemen to the next, will endure in the genetic complexion of the breed, as recorded across the centuries in the Stud Book.

Brant is rightly proud that Thunder Gulch, winner of the definitive test in dirt racing, was delivered by a mare imported from Europe. The obvious, reciprocal challenge would now be to breed a dirt champion by his Arc winner.

Asked this week whether that is something he’d like to attempt, someday, Brant gave a chuckle.

“Someday?” he said. “Try, like, three or four months from now. I mean, sure. That doesn’t mean I have to be right. I was right once, doesn’t mean I’ll be right doing it again. But I’m certainly going to try.”

With the far-sightedness that has sustained his business empire–not least in adapting to the wild societal changes eroding demand for its original base, newsprint–Brant absolutely grasps the vitality available in dismantling perceived barriers between the transatlantic gene pools. It’s often been done before, after all, not least in the transformative impact of Northern Dancer’s speed-carrying dirt blood on European Classic racing.

Brant bought Shoot a Line (GB) (High Line {GB}) after seeing her finish a plucky second to the great Ardross (Ire) in the 1981 Gold Cup at Royal Ascot, over two and a half miles, and had her covered by Northern Dancer’s son Storm Bird. The resulting filly, Line of Thunder, was sent to Luca Cumani in Newmarket.

“She was a classic-looking, old Thoroughbred type,” Brant recalled. “And what happened is history. I bred her to Gulch, who won the Met Mile twice and the Breeders’ Cup Sprint. He could carry his speed, he was third in the Belmont Stakes and ran second to Personal Ensign in the Whitney, but going a mile-and-a-quarter, mile-and-a-half, was really not his thing. He was a very fast, very sturdy horse. And from Line of Thunder he got Thunder Gulch.”

On the same basis, Brant made sure that his White Birch Farm recruited staying females from the Weinstock dispersal and also the Wildenstein sale.

“A lot of times you’ll go to sales in Kentucky and they’ll say: ‘That’s a grass horse, you don’t want that, we want to win dirt races,'” he remarked. “But I believe that staying blood is very important, if you want to win any of those Classic-type races, from a mile up to a mile-and-a-half. You definitely need speed as well, because often they are a product of pace: sometimes no pace, sometimes too great a pace. It’s the ability to quicken that is so important.

“But so many stallions had great speed–horses like War Front, maybe a horse like Constitution–and if you breed speed to them you’re going to have trouble in those middle-distance races. I believe you need to get some Classic blood in there with it. Yes, a lot of times you’ll breed to a stayer, and the progeny goes more towards the female and you’re out of luck. But you do need a combination. Especially over two or three generations, you need that classy staying blood somewhere.”

Sottsass himself, of course, is by a fast horse in Siyouni (Fr) out of a Galileo (Ire) mare. Up until Sunday, Brant confesses, he had wondered whether the colt’s optimal range might fall short of the Arc distance. But the demands of the race on the day–not especially strongly run, perhaps, but calling for unyielding dynamism through heavy ground–actually showcased assets that may combine well with dirt-bred mares; and, someday, give Sottsass some traction as a crossover influence.

As is well known, this is Brant’s “second time round” on the Turf. But his ardour for the Arc traces back to his earliest enthusiasm. His heart was first won by weight-carrying New York stalwarts like Kelso and Carry Back, so he knew of the latter’s fish-out-of-water bid for the 1962 Arc. What really brings things full circle, however, is that his first personal experience of the race came nine years later, when Paul Mellon–whose aesthetic sensibilities similarly found a common margin between art and the Thoroughbred–became the first American to own the winner.

Though still in his early 20s at the time, Brant was in Paris to produce “L’Amour,” a minor cult movie by Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey. (He collaborated with Warhol on many projects and his publishing stable still includes Interview, a magazine founded by the pioneering artist in 1969.) Finding himself in a café one Saturday afternoon, Brant noticed the racing from Longchamp on a television in the corner. He realized that the Arc was the next day, and resolved to head out to the Bois de Boulogne.

So it was that he saw Mill Reef beat the wonderful French filly, Pistol Packer, with Caro (Ire)–subsequently such an important stallion at Spendthrift–fourth.

Europe’s championship race, then, is woven into some of the defining strands of his life: some tracing to those heady years in the vortex of the Beat Generation; others, to the Parisian fashion community that long worshipped his wife, the model Stephanie Seymour.

“‘L’Amour’ was a great, low-budget film that did very well, and is still kind of a classic today,” Brant said. “And, yes, we had a lot of fun. It was wonderful moment. As a matter of fact, one of the stars in that movie was Karl Lagerfeld, who became the big designer for Chanel. At that time he was working for Chloé, the Paris fashion house, so there were a lot of fashion people in the film.”

Not that Brant could ever get Warhol interested in the Turf. His cousin, Joe Allen, who bred War Front, was also friendly with Warhol and commissioned him to do a portrait of his very first racehorse, an ex-claimer. And the Wertheimer family asked him to depict Ivanjica, their 1976 Arc winner–a work you will today find in the office of a certain Kentucky farm owner, of similarly rare discernment.

“I’m not sure how thrilled the Wertheimers might have been, at the time, with his Ivanjica,” Brant noted wryly. “Andy’s way of doing those portraits was to take a polaroid, and then silk-screen it, and paint over that. Now even the new book about President Carter has Andy’s portrait on the front. He was always way ahead of his time.”

Brant has always tried to be one step ahead, too, having seen repeatedly how the establishment eventually adopts the avant-garde. But he rebukes any assumption that Mellon–whose foundation of the Yale Center of British Art accommodated much sporting art of the old school–was merely anglophile and conservative in his tastes.

“He might have been interested in Stubbs, but that would have been because of his interest in horses,” Brant explained. “But he was a great collector, of all periods; all the way through the 20th Century from Cezanne to abstract expressionists like Mark Rothko.”

In Mellon, with whom he served on the board of the racing museum in Saratoga, Brant could admire an exemplar of philanthropic capitalism. Like Mellon, of course, Brant has also stabled horses with master horsemen on both sides of the Atlantic; and Sottsass has now made a significant new contribution to the tradition, long associated with Mellon, of Americans embracing European grass racing and its bloodlines. Both on and off the Turf, then, there is a very direct cultural succession between the owners of Mill Reef and Sottsass.

Certainly last weekend was a vivid consummation of Brant’s return to the sport and, while there was a bittersweet element in not being able to travel to Paris, that did not diminish the delirium as he watched the race with his wife at their Connecticut home.

“You know something, I can’t say I would have had any better a time anywhere else,” he said. “We were yelling and screaming so much, it felt like the house was shaking. I just couldn’t believe this dream had come true.”

Brant says that he never goes into any race with confidence, but Ger Lyons had given him plenty of hope after taking responsibility for the horse, with Rouget confined to France by COVID restrictions, for his prep run in Ireland.

“After that race Ger said: ‘Your horse is going to run terrific in the Arc,'” Brant explained. “The instructions [from Rouget] were to make sure the horse would be tighter for the Arc, and that was the way [jockey Colin] Keane rode. Jean-Claude had really been pointing at the Arc from the beginning of the year. I think that speaks very well of the trainer, and very well of the race. If you really want to win the Arc, you can’t have anything else on your mind. You can’t say, ‘Well, we’ve run well here, let’s go the Arc.’ You can’t go as an afterthought, and if you make a mistake along the road you probably won’t be winning. It’s so gruelling, both in the conditions you might get and the field. That’s why I feel it would be very hard to do better than winning this race.”

But there are always new horizons, with horses no less than in art.

“Winning a race, any race, you figure that you are pretty close to achieving some kind of perfection,” Brant mused. “But you will always get beat more than you win. It’s a great game, and a fantastic passion for a lot of people: these wonderful, noble animals. Like art, it’s all about that passion. Because that’s what you really need, for it to be fun and for it to be successful.

“Right now, I’m feeling very good that I can take the decision to retire Sottsass in one piece, sound in wind and bone, and not looking like he’s come back from the war. He’s going to stud in the way he deserves.”

Breeding, of course, is a long game; and Brant espouses the long view. He urges optimism, even in such disturbed and disturbing times. Yes, he is dismayed to see responsible journalism swamped by the trash-talk of social media, not least from a boyhood friend he can no longer recognize in the Oval Office.

“But I’m very optimistic,” Brant insisted. “I hope we will soon be able to look on all this in retrospect. In the meantime, people have to be vigilant: listen to science; wear masks, isolate, trace. But I think we’re going to have learned a lot, especially about leadership, from this whole experience.”

If the fate of newsprint is one eloquent measure of a changing world, then so is that of typewriter. The classic machines he designed for Olivetti helped to make the name of Ettore Sottsass. But even as the world changes, genius abides. Sottsass urged that various disciplines were only separated by technique; that all design reflects your ideas about life, about individuals and society. It didn’t matter whether you were making a glass vase or a photograph.

So let’s celebrate the fact that an American, in 2020 as in 1971, has seen through artificial distinctions–between dirt and turf, speed and stamina, Europe and America–and reminded us all of the transferable essence of a great Thoroughbred. The “permanent project,” in horses and horsemen alike, is class. And, though our world may constantly be changing, it is surely a better place for the legacy of a man like Mellon; and, likewise, for the one now being cultivated by Peter Brant.

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This Side Up: Whitmore Seeks Fresh Honors For Class of 2013

The seven-year itch, in the current racing herd, represents the best kind of mid-life crisis: reinventing yourself as a champion.

An Eclipse Award would certainly be a credible aspiration for Whitmore (Pleasantly Perfect) should he derail the Volatile (Violence) express in the GI Alfred G. Vanderbilt H. at Saratoga Saturday. Next weekend, another flourishing 7-year-old, Tom’s d’Etat (Smart Strike), will seek to consolidate his ascent to the top of his own division in the GI Whitney S. Over the past two weeks, meanwhile, their contemporaries Zulu Alpha (Street Cry {Ire}) and Aquaphobia (Giant’s Causeway) have won the GII Elkhorn S. and the GI United Nations S., respectively.

All four, remember, belong to the same 2013 crop as Gun Runner (Candy Ride {Arg}) and the lamented Arrogate (Unbridled’s Song). Whitmore, with his feasible pedigree, actually rolled the dice in the GI Kentucky Derby won by Nyquist (Uncle Mo). All praise, then, to the patient horsemanship of their connections, in coaxing off a chrysalis that many others might long ago have mistaken as confining, not the wings of a butterfly, but simply a limited talent.

Mike Maker, Ron Moquett and Al Stall Jr. would have the breed’s lasting gratitude if their endeavors help us think afresh about the proper span of a Thoroughbred’s development. A decade ago, researchers analysed 274 American racehorses and concluded that the typical age for peak performance was 4.45 years. Moreover they found that the rate of improvement to that point exceeded the rate of decline thereafter.

The fact is that even the Classic racehorse remains an adolescent. And we have ample evidence, whenever we are prepared to seek it, of the continued progress available through maturity. Without the same commercial prospects at stud, turf horses are often permitted to keep strengthening for years after their dirt cousins. The ultimate evergreen was John Henry, as a 9-year-old Horse of the Year; and, since the turn of the century, the only division to award championships to horses as old as seven is the one that features Miesque’s Approval (With Approval), Big Blue Kitten (Kitten’s Joy) and Flintshire (GB) (Dansili {GB}).

A healthy breeding industry should surely prefer the foundations laid after the manner of Whitmore–a gelding, unfortunately, but averaging $92,540 for the 34 occasions he has left the gate–instead of pretending that every colt that can add a narrow success in one of the Derby trials to a juvenile Grade III is going to end up like Tapit.

Albeit Tom’s d’Etat was held up by one or two issues earlier in his career, as a rule perseverance is about proving soundness as well as class. Some farms, no doubt, would worry about starting a stallion at eight. Well, they might have a point if only they didn’t banish so many horses of that kind of age to Oklahoma or Turkey. If they’re only going to get a narrow window to establish themselves, then what’s the rush? Why not let them build up a resume that genuinely substantiates the kind of genetic assets a breeder should be looking to replicate?

Hats off to WinStar, then, for landing Tom’s d’Etat for their roster. As Elliott Walden remarked, they welcomed Speightstown at seven and Distorted Humor at six. And there won’t be many sires starting out next spring who can match his pedigree: his graded stakes-placed dam is by Giant’s Causeway out of a full-sister to none other than Candy Ride (Arg). And the way he is thriving promises that he can contribute to the legacy of their sire in much the same way as Curlin, Lookin At Lucky and English Channel, all notable for stock that progresses with maturity.

As for Whitmore, his ineligibility for a stud career at least means that fans can continue to enjoy his terrific speed and character. In the process, his trainer is maximizing what remains too rare an opportunity for those barns, across the nation, where skill, industry and honesty are somehow inadequate to tempt enough patrons from either the super-trainers or the pharmacists.

Never mind the small field, this is a wonderfully poised showdown with a much less seasoned but terribly charismatic rival in Volatile. Not that Firenze Fire (Poseidon’s Warrior) can be taken lightly. The way he bounced back for his new barn last time, incidentally, is an encouraging template for the most celebrated refugee from the care of their former trainer. But it’s hard to know where to start with Maximum Security (New Year’s Day), the day he makes his debut for Bob Baffert at Del Mar. So we won’t.

Returning to Whitmore, at least we know he’s at home on the track. Though last seen sealing his status as an Oaklawn legend, his only previous start at Saratoga brought his only Grade I success to date–at the expense of the wonderful City Of Light (Quality Road)–in the Forego two years ago. Forego! At seven, he won the GI Woodward for a fourth year running; and, though finally surrendering his Horse of the Year trophy to Seattle Slew, was named champion older male for the fourth time running. He was another gelding, of course, but the fact is that his sheer bulk warranted plenty of time.

“Prematurity” means exactly what it says. Among our brethren in the steeplechasing world, the foals of 2013 are still viewed as relative youngsters. Yet in Europe a number of precocious juveniles have in recent years been retired, completely sound, to cut to the chase at stud. What is flattered, over there, as “commercial speed and precocity” is storing up a terrible harvest for that particular gene pool. In contrast, as I’m always trying to tell them, North American breeders generally want a chance of carrying speed through a second turn.

One of the things that should aid that process is maturity, both physical and mental. So, however Whitmore fares against the prodigy in this one-turn spectacular, let’s celebrate the whole class of 2013. Let’s remind ourselves that there is no inherent virtue in always trying to get ahead of time.

Remember the psychiatrist in The Seven-Year Itch? “My three o’clock patient jumped out of the window in the middle of his session,” he said. “I have been running 15 minutes ahead of schedule ever since.”

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