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This Side Up: Iron Legacy Will Never Rust

He's a rebel with a Causeway. But he is a rebel, all the same; or a maverick, at least; an outlier. Certainly we can't expect everyone to train horses like Kenny McPeek, nor indeed to buy them the same way. Apart from anything else, most people simply wouldn't be good enough.

McPeek's 10 millionaires to date have been sired by the likes of Cuvee, Louis Quatorze, Daredevil, Hit It a Bomb and Tejano–and he signed for most of them himself. As one who marches to his own drum, his style obviously wouldn't work for everyone. Think outside the box, and you'll have to manage without the many investors who feel nervous straying beyond the comforting confines of convention. They will seek sanctuary in the kind of strike rates available with trainers who start horses about as often as Halley does his Comet. Nonetheless, there are some pretty universal lessons to be drawn from the success of Classic Causeway (Giant's Causeway) in the big race at Belmont last weekend, just two weeks after his barn debut.

Because if McPeek is too much of a one-off to be categorized simply as “old school”, there's no doubting the throwback element in Classic Causeway himself, famously one of just three foals from the final crop of the Iron Horse. And if McPeek is to some degree a victim of his own success, in that you tend not to be sent too many yards of silk if you can contrive such fine purses of a relative sow's ear, let's not forget that one of the world's most lavishly resourced stables is supervised by another who believes that Thoroughbreds actually thrive on competition.

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Very few elite trainers in Europe, nevermind America, would have drawn out the reserves of Giant's Causeway as boldly as Aidan O'Brien. Already a Group 1 winner at two, Giant's Causeway started his sophomore campaign by fending off a battle-hardened, race-fit 6-year-old in April. Between May 6 and Sept. 23, he then finished first or second in eight Group 1 races, constantly switching distance. After that, as nobody will need reminding, he shipped to run the dirt monster Tiznow to a neck in the GI Breeders' Cup Classic.

The 'Iron Horse,' Giant's Causeway | Coolmore

We're talking about an exceptional specimen here, clearly, but O'Brien has always operated on the basis that his patrons at Coolmore require reliable exposure of genes they might wish to replicate. And like his mentor Jim Bolger, who last year ran 2,000 Guineas winner Poetic Flare (Ire) (Dawn Approach {Ire}) in two other Classics over the next three weeks, he additionally believes that maturing horses flourish for racetrack experience. Peeping Fawn (Danehill) had an aristocratic pedigree, nothing to prove there, but O'Brien still worked her like a stevedore. She had already been beaten three times in April when breaking her maiden on May 16. Eleven days later she ran third in a Classic over a mile. FIVE days later she was beaten half a length in the G1 Oaks at Epsom, over a mile and a half. Did she recoil from this dazing sequence of examinations? She did not. Instead, going up and down in distance every time, she won four Group 1 prizes in 54 days.

As it happens, Peeping Fawn has proved a fairly disappointing producer, albeit unlucky that her best daughter derailed. Giant's Causeway, however, has emulated his sire Storm Cat as a hugely important crossover influence. That's unsurprising, after his own slick transfer to the American racing environment, and he stands as a withering rebuke to the prescriptive approach we see, both sides of the water, to racing surfaces. He came up with a worthy heir in Europe at the first attempt in Shamardal, whose maternal pedigree was shaded very green, but has book-ended his career with an outstanding young Kentucky sire in Not This Time, whose own family obviously contains no less resonant dirt names.

Interestingly, Classic Causeway is out of a mare by Thunder Gulch, whose breeder Peter Brant has always been so far-sighted in this regard. Thunder Gulch himself, of course, combined a sire who had won benchmark races for the recycling of dirt speed–the GI Hopeful S., the GI Met Mile H. twice, the GI Breeders' Cup Sprint–with a turf mare whose dam had finished second in the G1 Gold Cup at Ascot over two and a half miles.

Most horses are more versatile than we will ever know. We should always start with the animal in front of us, and how it all fits together, rather than meekly obey herd presumptions. Sure enough, having only recently taken Classic Causeway into his care (after Brian Lynch laid some excellent foundations), McPeek urged a switch to turf because “the horse has a foot like a pancake”.

But often it's simply a question of opportunity. It was only the search for outcross blood at Coolmore, for instance, that allowed War Front and Scat Daddy to penetrate European myopia as coveted “turf” influences. And while John Magnier and his partners seem to be doing pretty well without my advice, I will just dust off my plea that they might indulge European mare owners by allowing American Pharoah at least one spring in Co Tipperary. (Especially as I keep reading that the home farm may apparently be a little short of fresh blood just now.)

Bleecker Street | Sarah Andrew

After last week's glimpse of how a more wholesome future might look, we revert to business as usual in the first Grade I of the Saratoga meet, with Chad Brown having to generate his own competition on grass. In fact, just one other American trainer has mustered a runner in the Diana S. It's striking, however, that most exciting member of the field is also the only one bred in America.

Bleecker Street was hardly a blatant turf prospect the day Brant purchased her as a yearling, down the road at Fasig-Tipton, but her sire Quality Road has a very flexible genetic background. (Just his first two dams will tell you that, as daughters of Strawberry Road and Alydar–and there's plenty more when you get down in the wheat.) Even Chad Brown has been prepared to start Bleecker Street in four graded stakes already this year, so presumably McPeek or O'Brien would by this stage have sent her to the moon and back.

Just as surface aptitude tends to be self-fulfilling, so you have to wonder to what extent pessimism about the constitution of the modern racehorse would stand up to horsemen actually going out there and testing it properly. But if we won't train them like McPeek, then the least we can do is breed them like Classic Causeway. As it was, no farm in Europe or Kentucky offered Bolger enough for Poetic Flare. And that's why, when so much of our commercial glister washes out the moment a horse has to break sweat, it will be the Japanese who end up with the horses of iron.

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This Side Up: Desert Turns Up Heat On Parched Calendar

In the end, things work because they work. We try stuff, often if not always with the best intentions, and see whether it gains our trust. Lived experience, among horsemen and fans, will eventually tell us whether an experiment has failed or whether, once every generation or so, we might have struck a game-changing seam of gold. The Breeders' Cup was one such; and, who knows, maybe a similar hostility from vested interests will ultimately prove the furnace in which HISA can be forged into another.

That may seem a long way off, from both sides of the fence. But someday we'll look back and know whether or not this was a moment when enough people, recognizing the steepening gradient of viability, began to embrace the kind of duties that must accompany the privileges of a life with Thoroughbreds in 2022.

Both in terms of the cost of doing something, and the risk in doing nothing, the stakes are pretty enormous. In this era of bitter polemics, it's unsurprising that people are harnessing broader ideologies to their respective positions. As a result, however, there's a tendency to become so consumed by means that we lose sight of the ends. Things work because they work–not because they are assembled by federal factories or state artisans.

One good example is the piecemeal evolution, over the years, of the racing calendar. In my homeland of England, what has come to feel like a sacrosanct cycle actually obeys the social routine of Victorian aristocracy: Royal Ascot dovetailed with the London “season” of debutantes' balls; the imminent garden party of Goodwood is followed, just down the road, by the Cowes sailing regatta; while the Ebor and St Leger meetings at York and Doncaster were sited conveniently for grouse shoots on the northern moors. In the same way, Saratoga only became the addictive ritual it is today because the capitalist barons had found sanctuary, at an upstate spa, from the broiling city summer.

These have become cherished staging posts in our sporting year by achieving an organic connection not just with us, but also with each other. In its understated way, for instance, you could say that last weekend's GIII Ohio Derby embarked us on the second half of the sophomore campaign. Regrouping Classic protagonists like Zandon (Upstart) and latecomers like Jack Christopher (Munnings) will soon be converging along such roads as the one leading through the GII Jim Dandy and GI Travers.

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This schedule has matured in the habits of professionals and public alike. And I have yet to hear anything remotely coherent, among those who renewed their tiresome complaints about the Triple Crown schedule because a freak Derby winner did not risk exposure in the Preakness, about how they would avoid instead butting right into races like the GI Haskell. If you stretch out the Triple Crown, you instead create a logjam in these barely less storied races, which allow both precocious and later-developing sophomores to circle back together.

And, actually, what we see this weekend shows us what happens when you start pulling at the ball of wool. Because two of the biggest names around, both sons of Into Mischief, resume Saturday after a prolonged absence occasioned by pursuit of the winter riches nowadays available in faraway deserts.

His disappointing performance in the G1 Saudi Cup leaves Mandaloun still in the curious position of having two Grade I wins on his resumé without ever passing the post first in a Grade I race. It has also required him to take a long break before the GII Stephen Foster S., a likely stepping stone to the GI Whitney–in which race he might well encounter Life Is Good, who has similarly been stuck in the workshop since his derailment in the G1 Dubai World Cup, and now resurfaces in the GII John A. Nerud S.

Now nobody could sensibly object to the growth of international racing, a transparent boon to our sport. But the people putting up these huge prizes halfway round the world, in what always used to be a period of rest and recuperation for elite American horses, plainly have an agenda of their own. And we've seen the dismal consequences for some of those venerable spring races in California, in particular.

Everybody is perfectly within their rights to go after all that eye-watering desert bounty. But let's not lose sight of the connection between the welfare protocols at Santa Anita, which we celebrated last week, and the competence of the breed to service the program. Because we will not be meeting the standards we inherited from our predecessors, if modern champions are either campaigned like Flightline (Tapit), who is being widely credited with “greatness” after racing for an aggregate 5 minutes and 12 seconds; or disappear to the desert in the winter, then needing months to recover before tentatively contesting only a couple of races before the Breeders' Cup. (That's if they recover at all: Arrogate, for instance, plainly reached the bottom of the barrel in Dubai.)

Life Is Good | Dubai Racing Club

Arguably all those dirhams caused Life Is Good to overreach, in terms of his stamina potential, earlier than would have been the case had he stayed home for a campaign that reserved that test for the Breeders' Cup. One way or another, a single performance in Dubai has prompted a pretty abrupt relegation, by most observers, below Flightline. For now, however, I'd resist the idea that Speaker's Corner (Street Sense) will offer Life Is Good a reliable line on the relative merit of Flightline. For Speaker's Corner to be rolling up his sleeves again, just three weeks after meeting that horse in the GI Met Mile, suggests that he can't possibly have left everything out on the track that day.

Two races in three weeks! Whatever next? And both against authentic monsters, in an era where the graded stakes program has become so diluted that you really have to go looking for trouble to find it.

To all the familiar reasons for that syndrome–the foal crop, the super-trainers, the training in cotton wool–we must add the fact that many of our very best horses are taken right out of the game, for several months, by a shattering winter migration.

There's nothing inherently wrong with these desert races. On the contrary, they provide a fascinating melting pot. They're bringing together horses from radically different racing environments, arguably more successfully than the Breeders' Cup or Royal Ascot. Being wholly extraneous, however, they are unraveling a domestic calendar that had over the decades achieved a wonderful national coherence and dynamism from the accretion of local habits and loyalties.

We're seeing now, in a different context, how very hard it is to try and do something like that overnight. We can't turn back the clock on international racing, and nor should we want to–any more than we should stem the tide of progress with HISA. But we should remember that the pageant woven by so many generations past, in the domestic calendar, isn't just a cultural heritage. It is a parallel legacy to that of the breed itself, as a trusted means of testing its physical competence.

We have to retrieve that functionality: streamline racing capacity, in terms of the program; and expand equine capacity, whether as breeders or trainers or both. Otherwise the horses we send out to the desert will bring back with them a drought to wither some of the Turf's most fertile acres.

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This Side Up: Back to Arcadia

So we get another day of sun, after all, out in La La Land. It was not so long ago that a night without end appeared to have descended on Santa Anita. Like Ryan Gosling's character in the film, fighting his quixotic rearguard action on behalf of jazz, we were clinging to the wreckage of a culture renounced by 21st Century society. “I'm letting life hit me till it gets tired,” he protests to his sister. “Then I'm going to hit back. It's a classic rope-a-dope.”

If we're honest, that's pretty much the way a lot of us reacted to what felt uncomfortably like an existential crisis in 2019. If the storm clouds could blot out the sun even over a racetrack most of us would have chosen as our proudest showcase, then nowhere was safe. Steeled by the nobility of the animal with whom we share our daily lives, we professed indignation over our alienation by an ever more urban society. Nobody could love these animals more than we did, nor tend their needs more lavishly. Yet all these people, having apparently failed to give much thought to the viability of horses as house pets, were presuming to question our idea of acceptable risk.

Luckily, there were some in our community who could see where that stubborn approach was going to take us. And that was to the sporting equivalent of a dive bar at the bottom of dingy staircase, with a few diehards leaning against the bar, listening to some unappreciated genius improvising mournfully at an old piano.

Those diehards are not always immune to a certain complacency. They elevate themselves from the herd not just by superior discernment, but also by sheer fidelity to a lost cause. But those who have rescued our sport from the brink did not want to reduce it some arrogant cult. They knew that we still had something very special to offer a mass audience. We just had to clean out the house before inviting anybody in.

The collective job they've done in California can't be praised enough, but that shouldn't stop us trying. Just cast your mind back to where we were after that harrowing spate of breakdowns at Santa Anita. Perhaps the most dismal moment came when the field turned for home in the final race of a Breeders' Cup staged with all those painstaking protocols. Just as the veterinary team must have been turning to each other to exchange high fives, the Mongolian Groom tragedy brought the vultures back overhead.

The transformation then already underway, however, has since proved quite incredible. The marathon winter-spring meet just concluded at Santa Anita did not feature a single musculoskeletal racing fatality on the main track, with just three in all from 4,800 starters. Right now this is operating as the safest high-volume racetrack in the land. I've no idea how the credit should be distributed, between Belinda Stronach, track superintendent Dennis Moore, and many others in between. But I do know that our community owes them a debt of gratitude; and also that there are a couple of ways of discharging it.

One, as we approach the deadline for HISA registration, is for everyone to acknowledge the bigger picture. Purposeful regulation should not be resented as draconian intrusion, but embraced as essential to the sustainability of our way of life. Remember it's not just horsemen who are making short-term sacrifices for longer-term gain. The stringent policing of medication, now so conspicuous in California, incidentally exacerbates what has come to feel like a chronic local deficiency, in field sizes. But where some racetracks in other states are prepared to turn a blind eye, in order to fill stalls and fields, here they appear willing to grasp a few nettles.

And that brings me to the other way we can repay California. Yes, the big investors now have lucrative opportunity virtually year-round in and around Kentucky, while for many Saratoga is just up the road from their Wall Street lairs. But somebody out there, surely, won't be averse to spreading a few good horses back west. California has a beautiful climate, after all; quite a few beautiful people, and not always just skin deep; perhaps the most beautiful racetrack in the world; and, importantly, Hall of Fame-eligible trainers like John Shirreffs who are only going to thrive on a level playing field.

When it was all going wrong, there seemed to be something apt about the fact that Santa Anita should be sited in the suburb of Arcadia, named for the pastoral idyll of the ancient Greeks. In many traditions, notably that of Eden, these places are poignantly unattainable owing to the culpability of humankind. Marvelously, however, our community has proved to contain men and women to lead us back along the stony path of redemption.

Or perhaps that should be the Ethereal Road of redemption? I always had a hunch that this son of Quality Road might take an unexpected role in the Triple Crown, but not in the way he did–stepping aside from the Derby at the 11th hour, creating a vacancy for a winner who has since remained curiously resistant to the assistance of hindsight. In the event, Ethereal Road was confined to an appearance on the Preakness undercard, where he suggested that he might yet join barnmate Secret Oath (Arrogate) in the top tier of the crop. Having again been scratched from the third leg of the series, with a quarter crack, he instead resurfaces in the GIII Ohio Derby on Saturday. If he can confirm that he is now really beginning to blossom, we may yet extend our reach to a wider public through a trainer who, just like California, has persevered through dark times with an undiminished faith that we have a story worth telling.

Don't forget the way Gosling's character calls after to his sister, as she leaves his apartment in despair over his “rope-a-dope” line. “I'm a phoenix rising from the ashes!”

Wayne Lukas has done it; Santa Anita is doing it. See you at the jazz club.

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This Side Up: Past Specters, Present Ghosts

How poignant that, in this of all weeks, the two most breathtaking winners on Belmont day should both have prompted comparisons with Ghostzapper, whose GI Breeders' Cup Classic at Lone Star Park in 2004 was surely the greatest Thoroughbred performance ever on Texan soil. Because while the whole racing world came to Dallas that day, it appears that there will be no reciprocal embrace when it comes to the standards sought—not just federally, but internationally—to give American horseracing credibility in the contest for public engagement in the 21st Century.

It's precisely because some individual states, obdurately or cynically indifferent to the bigger picture, can prove so undeserving of their precious autonomy that we need to find a better way. As it is, one that has produced many great horsemen and women, not to mention a Triple Crown winner in Assault, is now menaced by strangulation as regulation. It feels like the political equivalent of some reckless sadomasochistic excess that turns into a tragic accident.

Anyway, to more cheerful subjects. Or maybe not, because while it's gratifying that the original, at 22, is still recycling his genetic prowess at Hill 'N Dale, the idea that we might have not one new Ghostzapper, but two, feels too far-fetched a coincidence given how rarely we are favored by so freakish a talent.

It's pretty clear what both Flightline (Tapit) and Jack Christopher (Munnings) have to do, if they are to sustain comparisons so far stimulated by the sheer exhilaration with which they've been dominating all comers. And that's eventually to stretch out the way Ghostzapper did, that day at Lone Star.

As things stand, there does at least appear to be a tantalizing possibility that they could end up doing so together, and in the same race as their great template. Until they do, however, it feels a little premature for that contentious adjective, “great”, to have been applied as liberally as it already has to Flightline, in particular.

There's no denying his extraordinary natural ability, and it's exciting that he's bred to be at least as good round a second turn. Thankfully we may be able to test that hope pretty soon, or as soon as will be allowed by a career schedule that promises to make him a poster boy for the notorious diffidence of modern horsemen, compared with their predecessors. You would think that a son of Tapit, with a second dam by Dynaformer, might be equal to more old-fashioned campaigning, but at least those influences will be squarely behind him once his stamina is examined.

From a European perspective, the rise of Flightline attests to a different way of measuring things over here. After clocking those monster Beyers in maiden and optional allowance sprints, no American horseplayer was surprised to see him separate himself from Grade I rivals with equal contempt—and he's now averaging 112 through four starts.

In a racing environment less beholden to the stopwatch, however, you might still hear one or two caveats that in the GI Met Mile he beat one horse that really needs 10 furlongs; another that put in a conspicuous backward step; and a pure sprinter. Nor would such a trifling loss of rhythm, in some light early traffic, be taken terribly seriously. On the other hand, nobody could fail to be dazzled that he could do this off a long lay-off, shipping for the first time, and at a new trip.

What should really sharpen European antennae, however, is the other “F”-word in the room. When it comes to greatness, no modern horse on the other side of the water has achieved more consensus than Frankel (GB) (Galileo {Ire}). So much so, that at the time it took some nerve to dare question the conservatism with which he was campaigned, beating up the same guys in the same discipline until his penultimate start, and never leaving his stall for a single night. While there were admittedly tragically extenuating circumstances, the fact is there had never been a time when his late trainer Sir Henry Cecil would have been comfortable about risking his champion's immaculate record in, say, the Breeders' Cup Classic or Arc.

An unbeaten record does tend to become a burden that stays the hand of adventure. Frankel was always being measured against specters of the past, but never went looking for trouble even against his contemporaries. It's wonderful that connections of Flightline are disposed to explore the range of his brilliance. But having relaunched him on the same day that the Kentucky Derby winner bombed out in the third leg of the Triple Crown, after spurning the second, let's hope they remember our collective mission—already mentioned, in a different context—of public engagement.

Flightline is proving one of those paragons that the bloodstock business needs to work out, just every so often, as a seven-figure yearling from a noble maternal line who is going to repay those stakes, big time, as a stallion. But potentially exposing his wares across no more than half a dozen starts wouldn't just short-change breeders of the future, who need evidence that he's a reliable vessel of the kind of toughness latent in his page. It also gives him little chance of reaching the kind of public so much more accessible in the era, for instance, of his 10-for-47 ancestress Lady Pitt (Sword Dancer).

As for Jack Christopher, while we naturally respect Chad Brown's direct experience of Ghostzapper, you would think that Munnings is going to need quite a bit of help from the mare, if he is to get their son home in the Breeders' Cup Classic. Jack Christopher's dam is by Half Ours, hardly a stamina brand, and is also a half-sister to Street Boss, an unusually fast horse for a son of Street Cry (Ire).

Their mother, incidentally, was by Ogygian—and so contributes to the redemption of Damascus, as a distaff influence, after failing to establish a sire-line. Daughters of Damascus himself produced Red Ransom, Boundary and Coronado's Quest, plus the granddam of Maclean's Music. Among his “failed” sons, meanwhile, Bailjumper is damsire of Medaglia d'Oro; Accipiter gave us the second dam of Cairo Prince; and Ogygian, above all, has secured a lasting foothold as damsire of Johannesburg.
Johannesburg's son Scat Daddy, of course, managed to come up with a Triple Crown winner from a mare by none other than Ghostzapper. So we do know that the most brilliant horses can carry their speed farther on dirt than on paper.

Certainly Jack Christopher for now looks the most charismatic member of a crop that remains a long way short of resolving its hierarchy. Actually all it may take is for one barn to establish its own pecking order, and the rest may follow, with Jack Christopher on nodding terms with Zandon (Upstart) and Early Voting (Gun Runner).

Between Early Voting and Mo Donegal (Uncle Mo), the GII Wood Memorial has now furnished two Classic winners. If Mo Donegal could win the GI Travers, too, he would emulate Damascus as one of five horses to have won an “Empire State” Triple Crown of Wood, Belmont and Travers.

Damascus, to be fair, raced 16 times at three. He lost out by half a length in the Gotham in a tooth-and-nail duel with Dr. Fager, and came out six days later to win the Wood by half a dozen lengths. Okay, maybe we have to accept that most horsemen nowadays consider it unreasonable to campaign a modern racehorse the way Frank Whiteley Jr. did Damascus, who won from six furlongs to two miles. But if we cede that point, however reluctantly, then let's hope that some others in our industry can recognize the need for a more obviously wholesome form of modernization.

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