This Side Up: Back to the Future on Lecomte Day

Fastest two minutes in sport? You'll excuse us a bitter laugh here. By the time Mandaloun (Into Mischief) leaves the gate Saturday for the GIII Louisiana S., he'll be 382,968 minutes into a GI Kentucky Derby without end. And, with no sign of anyone putting their attorneys back in the holster, it's plainly going to be a while yet before we know whether Mandaloun will finally be anointed the 147th winner of a race that drives so many millions of dollars of investment in our industry.

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As things stand, we're potentially looking at one of the luckiest animals in Turf history: a dual Grade I winner who has yet to pass the post first in a Grade I race. He was last seen, of course, in that dramatic Haskell S., which fell into his lap after Hot Rod Charlie (Oxbow) was disqualified for his tangle with Midnight Bourbon (Tiznow). The latter, conversely, has accumulated a dispiriting sequence of near-misses since his last visit to the winner's circle, on this card last year, in the GIII Lecomte S.

Given our ongoing travails, and the resulting perceptions among the wider public, our community owes a great debt to Midnight Bourbon for his balletic recovery from the brink of catastrophe at Monmouth Park. As a potential lifeline for the precarious Man o' War line, moreover, he should in due course offer another valuable service in the replication, at stud, of that extraordinary athleticism.

We're not going to run out of sons of Into Mischief any time soon, after all. One way or another, then, a lot of neutrals will be heading to Midnight Bourbon's corner as the two rivals each attempt a personal reset in what will, on the anniversary of their first, be their sixth showdown.

But you have to feel sympathy for Mandaloun, too. At the best of times, finishing second in the Derby is a bittersweet distinction. It's one that has been shared by some great names, for instance Native Dancer and Nashua within a couple of years of each other, as well as by many that can only make you scratch your head. And nobody, regardless, would want to satisfy a lifetime quest in quite this way, as connections of Country House (Lookin At Lucky) will doubtless attest.

On the day, their horse proved better equipped for the defining challenge of the American Thoroughbred than all bar one of 20,000-odd other foals in his crop. Country House was desperately unlucky to be denied any further opportunity of wresting attention from that ever-distracting horse, Maximum Security (New Year's Day). Set for a relaunch at four, only to be derailed by laminitis in February, he duly finds himself standing on most generous terms (despite being inbred to the matriarch No Class) at Darby Dan. If there's any justice, someday one of his sons will secure him overdue respect in the Derby.

Midnight Bourbon's last visit to the winner's circle was in the 2021 Lecomte | Hodges Photography

If that happens, it won't be through a superior preparation. Country House was a Bill Mott masterpiece. It was only in this equivalent week that he broke his maiden; he then contested the second and third legs of the New Orleans trial series, catching the eye of many a wiseguy handicapper with the promise of better yet in the extreme test awaiting at Churchill.

In the process he contributed to the striking vigor of the Fair Grounds sophomores, in recent times. Last year the GII Louisiana Derby produced four of the first six on the first Saturday in May. True, these included a Californian shipper, but the overall strength of the Crescent City cohort certainly heightens interest in the return of Proxy (Tapit), who went missing after being sandwiched between Midnight Bourbon and Mandaloun in both the Lecomte and the GII Risen Star. Some really heartening breezes this winter allow us to hope that Proxy might yet live up to his name, and plug a gap for the Mystic Guide (Ghostzapper) barn.

But no graduate of the Fair Grounds Classic rehearsals has lately made a greater impact than Gun Runner–for whom the Lecomte, through Pappacap and Cyberknife, now represents the first big test of the theory that his stud debut was especially spectacular because his stock will emulate the way he thrived with maturity himself.

Pappacap prior to his second in the 2021 Breeders' Cup Juvenile | Horsephotos

As his second-ever winner, Pappacap was among the most precocious of the surprisingly precocious gang that secured Gun Runner the freshman title; but the Rustlewood Farm homebred can be expected to consolidate on both sides of his pedigree. His mother achieved her only graded stakes placing at the end of her third campaign; his second and third dams, unusually enough, are both by sons of that doughty influence Roberto; while his fourth is by another in Pleasant Colony. In other words, this is a horse bred to stick around. (He also has the honor of starting out No. 1 on colleague T.D. Thornton's TDN Derby Top 12.)

It's a big day, then, for the Winchell family, who stand Gun Runner with Three Chimneys and will be hoping to see Midnight Bourbon elaborate his own stud credentials. Because they also present the most obvious danger to Gun Runner's Lecomte pair in Epicenter (Not This Time), whose apt emergence in the Gun Runner S. over Christmas showed him to be very comfortable with pouring the speed coals into this hot surface.

Throw into the mix Trafalgar (Lord Nelson), a promising flagship for his classy hometown barn, and this looks another instructive edition of the Lecomte S. I love the cyclical nature of the Classic trail, with all its familiar staging points, coast to coast; and the return to the same card of two of the 2021 protagonists marks another ring through the trunk of the great old Triple Crown tree.

Because it's never really just about those two breathless minutes in Louisville. Those are the tiny apex of a huge pyramid that spreads out through the patient dreams of so many different people, past and present.

With everything that's going on–condensed by the tragedy of the horse that held off Mandaloun in the Derby–we must always conduct ourselves with due respect for the generations of predecessors who made our sport what it is. This race, remember, is named for the only horse ever to beat Lexington. And if we don't prove worthy of our heritage, in the perennial quest for a Derby colt, someday we will suddenly find that it's two minutes to midnight.

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This Side Up: The Heart of the Matter

You would think the heart has enough on its plate. It literally never gets a break, not for one second, never mind a vacation. Never a morning's fishing, a bourbon after dinner. Yet somehow we have ended up charging this most vital of our organs with a second burden, figurative but scarcely less momentous, as the vessel of love.

So when the tireless engine of life finally fails, in one we cherish, we speak of our own hearts as being “broken.” And there were many such, in Lexington on Friday, when mourners bade farewell to the distinguished veterinarian Dr. Thomas Swerczek.

We reserve to their private grief the tribute that Dr. Swerczek was evidently no less exceptional in his dedication, as a family man, than in his professional accomplishments through decades of service at the local university. For those of us outside the reach of his own heart, however, the professor's name will always evoke the epic proportions of another.

For it was Dr. Swerczek who famously conducted the necropsy, in 1989, on perhaps the greatest Thoroughbred in the story of the breed. He estimated Secretariat's heart to be twice the average size, maybe over 20 pounds. This discovery conformed so obligingly with the horse's overall prowess, with his physical magnificence and almost supernatural running power, that it nourished some pretty excitable extrapolations.

Secretariat's heart is literally the stuff of legend. It places him in the same register as warrior heroes of Norse mythology, with their limbs like cedar trees. But legend is not even history, never mind science. And the perennial quest for an edge, in our business, has allowed a whole ancillary industry of theory and analysis to be energized by the freakish heart of a freak among racehorses.

On some level, no doubt, this can only have been encouraged by the very cultural duality we just noted in the human heart. In a racehorse, of course, the metaphorical dimension is not love, but courage. But it's obviously tempting, if only subliminally, to conflate the “heart” we celebrate in a horse that gives everything in a finish with the sheer physical proportions of the organ housed in its chest. We literally describe such animals as “big-hearted”.

After all, the same intangibility unites “heart,” in the sense of competitive ardor under the whip, and the physical organ that we can only ever see for ourselves at a post-mortem. Sure, nowadays we have technology that allows external estimation of cardiac capacity. But as is axiomatic in a less decorous context, there's a limit to the satisfactions available in size alone.

Another man of science recently mourned in Kentucky, Dr. David Richardson, once cautioned me that data available across the horse population does not permit pronouncement on the specimen in front of you. And cardiac physiology, being so complex, was his chosen example.

“They talk about heart size,” he said. “But the real question is: how does it squeeze? (What's called the ejection fraction.) How fast can it pump blood? How efficiently, in terms of oxygen use? So it's not just heart, but lungs. So people try to assess that, too, on a treadmill. But that's still not like running a race at distance. But even if you could get the cardiovascular bit right, then how about the legs? And the mind? You can gauge some of those things, sometimes–but it's very hard to say how the whole package will stand up to raceday pressures.”

As it happens, Dr. Swerczek also performed the necropsy on Bold Ruler. Though he would have been one of the greatest stallions in history even without Secretariat, apparently he did not have a large heart. But you know who did? The second largest one Dr. Swerczek ever saw, at 19 pounds, belonged to none other than Secretariat's hapless punchbag, Sham.

What an amazing coincidence. But what an obvious coincidence, too. Because Dr. Swerczek performed the same procedure thousands of times, including elite athletes from many different crops. And none of them, he said, ever came close to that pair.

So instead of this inadvertent legacy, in all the controversies and occult dogmas stimulated by Secretariat's heart, let's instead celebrate the many years of unsung contribution made by Dr. Swerczek to the welfare of the animal he loved. He made vital advances in several horrible diseases that afflict the Thoroughbred and was always in the frontline trenches in the trauma of Mare Reproductive Loss Syndrome.

He understood how many different factors, notably in environment and nutrition, can erode or assist the fulfilment of a racehorse. He knew that the system of flesh and blood maintained by those miraculous pumps is always too complex to permit glib answers.

Dostoyevsky identified two types of unhappy fool: the one with a heart and no sense, and the one with sense and no heart. By all means, go ahead and find out all you can about the heart. Maybe you can discern something instructive even in those of immature Thoroughbreds. But do keep your sense, all the same, along with their hearts.

Maybe ventricular capacity can indeed tell us something about stamina, caliber even, and heritability. To me, however, anything that remotely smacks of a “system,” any formula that claims to cut right through the mysteries of our vocation, deserves its place somewhere on the spectrum that starts, at one end, with snake-oil.

Science, with its scrupulous standards of evidence, will doubtless keep inching its way forwards through this whole maze. But in a business where the fast buck is never quite fast enough, some people will never want to hang around and wait.

Needless to say, we all know of highly professional horsemen exploring some of these potential edges. The responsible ones, invariably, will stress that the insights they seek can only address a single facet of what will always remain a very jagged diamond. And, actually, even the people who make it all sound very simple tend to be little more than credulous; fanatical, rather than fraudulent. But while it's a free country, and up to you how to spend your money in this very expensive game, I know what I'd suggest if anybody comes to you with a key to the single, secret lock on Thoroughbred potential. Give them your iciest smile, and wish them good day.

Apart from anything else, in claiming to be able to remove the guesswork, such people are inimical to precisely that element of inspiration which feels, to some of us anyway, most essential to the whole romance of what we do. Yes, some will be supported by wonderful gadgets; all, nowadays, by persuasive software. But give me the unadorned instinct of a seasoned horsemen, every time, and we'll see you out on that proving ground. First to the wooden stick.

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This Side Up: Let’s Be the Best of Neighbors in ’22

They say it's an ill wind that blows no good and, sure enough, consoling fragments of human kindness were strewn even among the deadly havoc in Western Kentucky last week.

But besides the substantial gestures of solidarity from the Bluegrass, including the auctioning of a live foal season to a Triple Crown winner, disasters like this also tend to leave glinting in their wake tiny shards of the life force by which our species has achieved viability amidst its volatile habitat.

The tattered photograph of two smiling children, for instance, discovered by Walker Hancock in a paddock at Claiborne and shared on social media and local television. Relatives recognized the kids and contacted the farm, advising them that the family was safe albeit their home in Campbellsville, 100 miles to the south-west, had been destroyed.

None of us can presume anything of this particular family, as a snapshot of so many lives turned literally upside down, out of nowhere. But whatever their story, and whatever awaits them now, those two carefree smiles serve as a legitimate symbol of what drives so much human endeavor; of the way people strive to protect their families, to nurture their children and–in the best cases–to contribute to the communities around them.

Altruism, remember, contains its own rewards. Certainly for those who prioritize self-respect over self-regard, but also in the pragmatic sense that those who give time, energy or expertise to “the common weal” (and Kentucky, after all, is a Commonwealth) will ultimately secure an environment in which they and their families can thrive.

Looking out for each other might seem a trite enough aspiration as we take our seats around the holiday fireside. But it certainly has an extra urgency this Christmas, between the abrupt local crisis of Western Kentucky and the one now painfully prolonged, the world over, to nearly two full years. For it is precisely when our reserves are most fatigued that we most depend on each other for new resilience.

And that is equally pertinent of the walk of life we travel together. For it has felt, for a long time now, as though horse racing is facing an ongoing, parallel emergency; one that shares many of the properties of the pandemic, in that it just keeps dragging out and appears to depend critically on communal effort, and a degree of individual sacrifice, for its resolution.

So as we raise a glass of holiday bourbon, let's ask ourselves how many of our problems reflect a failure to grasp that (to use what has become a bleakly familiar phrase) “we are all in this together”. And whether we can share a resolution, in 2022, to be better neighbors.

That means, for example, recognizing exactly what you're doing if you send a horse to a trainer whose record, realistically, can only support a pretty sinister interpretation. Because even if cynical enough to serve your own interests that way, you better not have a plan that extends anywhere beyond the medium term. Whatever your guy might be putting into your horse, you are yourself sticking a syringe of poison into the sustainability of our entire industry.

It also means that those horsemen trying to derail HISA had better be relatively advanced in years. Because their pursuit of what they narrowly perceive to be their own interests will, similarly, ensure that in the end they won't have a barn, farm, even an industry to hand over to their kids.

Too much of what has been going wrong is transparently the result of barefaced avarice. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry when Churchill Downs this week requested to continue off-track betting in Illinois, despite cashing in one of the jewels of the global Turf. Apparently they are now “looking for an alternate racing solution in Illinois”. Unfortunately “competitive information” meant that they could not divulge how or where, but I'll believe it when I see it. In the meantime, even after the nauseating saga of disingenuousness that has brought bulldozers to the gates of Arlington Park, the Racing Board was split five-five and only rejected the application because a majority was required. (Actually some people will only believe the Bears are going to Arlington when they see that, too, but by now most of us have adopted the sportsfan's axiom that “it's the hope that kills you.”)

It tells you what kind of year we have endured that, for many, even the closure of Arlington was not quite the nadir. As we've often noted before, the tragic story of Medina Spirit has become too convenient a shorthand for ills far more grievous than can be laid at the door of his trainer. But it has certainly reminded us how unpredictable are the tides on which our whole sport must drift.

None can say what kind of doom or redemption may now be latent in another of these beautiful animals, for the time being as anonymous as the unraced $1,000 Protonico colt caught 21st of 47 by the Santa Anita clockers on December 6, 2020, precisely a year before a similarly innocuous breeze over the same track would unaccountably renew our infamy in the wider world.

There's obviously an extremely wide spectrum of self-interest, with that pair of “Juice Man” slippers nestling at one end. All we can do is remember that individual success, nowadays, will only be lasting if we have first observed our responsibilities to each other. That may not always have appeared the case. In the Damon Runyon era, indeed, the opposite view may even have had a little glamor. But I guess that's pretty much how we've ended up where we are today.

So as each of these sudden moral tornados make matchsticks of our collective reputation, one after the other, the only way we can rebuild is side by side, the best of neighbors.

Good neighbors are big-hearted and vigilant. They won't allow the alleys to be piled with syringes; they won't allow developers to put a wrecking ball through the community hall. Every smiling kid is theirs to protect: whether their own, or those being raised by neighbors or colleagues, or even by strangers 100 miles away.

And, you know what, it's exactly the same with the Thoroughbred itself. We bring horses into the world in all their innocence, with a temporary but momentous duty of stewardship. So if our kids are to grow up proud of where they come from, and secure in their community's future, then they'll want us to show the same, selfless devotion to our horses as they are entitled to expect themselves.

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This Side Up: Faults On All Sides Require Fairness All Round

Ever get the feeling that somebody up there doesn't like us very much? Of all of the horses, in all of the world… But really it doesn't make any difference, however you interpret the tragedy of Medina Spirit (Protonico). The net result, for our community, is the same–whether you think the whole melodrama unfolded, entirely and lucklessly, at random; or was somehow determined by our own culpable behaviors. Whoever is writing these scripts, we have been cast in the same role. We are being tested. And if we don't get our lines right, we shouldn't be surprised if they turn out the lights and board up the theater.

It's a test that demands courage. That's not the same as fearlessness. Without fear, in fact, there can be no courage. And we should certainly be scared. With so many enemies out there, ever louder and better resourced, this increasingly feels like an existential crisis. That makes hysteria hard to resist, whether it takes the form of confrontation or surrender. But the kind of bravery we require now is all about staying calm, thinking clearly and, ultimately, doing the right thing.

There are no easy answers. Instinctively, however, I feel that our twin imperatives are not to yield to mob rule, on the one hand; while also, for once, not just circling our wagons.

The challenges we face reflect two endemic vices of social media: conspiracy and conflation. Conspiracy theory is rabidly resistant to rational engagement: every sheep is perceived as a slavering wolf under a bloodily stolen fleece. The habit of conflating unrelated issues is not so wild-eyed, just lazy and credulous. Both, however, nourish shrillness and anger–the principal cultural and political currency of the internet age.

Conspiracy depicts our entire industry as engaged in satanic exploitation. But conflation, whether through a lack of patience or intelligence, can't be bothered with nuance; can't be bothered with the idea that all our various travails should be judged on their individual merits. Any walk of life, says conflation with a shrug, that can present us with so many ghastly stories, one after another, is just too disgusting to be allowed to continue. Unfortunately, the Medina Spirit disaster has rendered that view more vocal than ever, and right in the middle of Main Street.

So how does conscience respond? On one level, it would seem pretty straightforward. Just as no reasonable person, away from the venomous extremes, wants society to be governed by ignorance, prejudice and rancor, so we should be able to reject those poisons directed at a community we know, in the vast majority of cases, to be utterly devoted to the horse. It must be terribly hard for those who have groomed Medina Spirit so lovingly, to have their grief over that empty bridle compounded by the vituperation of some whose professed empathy for animals will never remotely measure up to the arduous and reverent services they render daily to Thoroughbreds.

The trouble is that perceptions, shared sufficiently widely, ultimately obtain the political force of reality. If the social media wildfire ends up with millions giving our industry moral equivalence with cockfighting or bear-baiting, then there would seem limited point in persuading a rational minority that they should not bundle together, say, the allegations against Navarro and Servis with the reality that a foal can shatter a limb while cavorting innocently in a paddock. Even if we can collectively achieve the kind of self-improvement so plainly necessary, we may never retrieve the “social licence” if enough people have already taken a position that would, logically, end up with a handful of horses preserved in safari parks.

Our opinion that horses will never make good housepets feels like an informed one. But let's say that we accept, and strive to meet, far more exacting terms for the conscionable use of horses for any kind of sport. In the meantime, do we have to go out and meet halfway people we consider to be wholly wrongheaded? Do we, as a matter of sheer pragmatism, abandon other precious precepts, simply to be allowed to continue doing business?

That may sound a woolly question. But isn't that pretty much where we find ourselves with Bob Baffert? Because if we expect a fair hearing, as an industry, then surely we have to remain scrupulous in applying the same standards ourselves. However vexing Baffert's serial provocations, we can't just say: “Look, we don't care whether you have just been fantastically unlucky, or culpably inattentive, or something far worse. You have now become so tiresome that you simply have to go away.”

If jurisdiction can be established and due process is observed then, sure, Baffert should expect to pay a proportionate price for individual and indeed cumulative infractions. But you can't respond to the harrowing denouement of the Medina Spirit saga by exchanging the principles of equity for lynch-mob standards of evidence.

In such a gale of hatred, it takes a degree of courage to keep weighing probabilities fairly, keep heeding the science. But exactly the same nerve and dispassion will also be required to tackle any whose idea of fairness is for people just to back off their buddy Bob, simply because he may have favored them with his stardust, his charm, above all his professional success.

As we know, some very powerful patrons already appear to have taken the view that Baffert is responsible for enough damage to the sport for them to feel obliged to take their business elsewhere. However innocent the circumstances in which Medina Spirit has been added to the list not only of Baffert violations, but now also to that of Baffert fatalities, maybe the kind of ratios that wouldn't in themselves support a regulatory prohibition are sufficient for the market to apply a less exacting standard of evidence.

Would that be a form of mob rule? Or wouldn't it actually represent an informed judgement? Not necessarily of an individual horseman, but of the extremely perilous situation in which all horsemen find themselves. For the courage we need most urgently, now, is in acknowledging that some of the generalized charges against our entire community are actually pretty fair. Because anyone still in denial about our sport's ongoing failures must accept a share of responsibility for those. And, to that extent, it's by no means unfair even for those who “know nothing” about what we do to conflate all the various headlines that have done us so much damage over the past two or three years. Why shouldn't outsiders make such angry inferences, when they see such willing complicity among those of us who “really understand” the business?

Far more egregious offenses than have ever been suspected of Baffert remain incorrigibly indulged. We see programs in plain sight that cannot be coherently explained, other than by flagrant cheating; and we don't necessarily mean only “juicy” improvement in certain blue-collar claims on certain blue-collar circuits.

Meanwhile we see non-racing states cynically harnessed to stand up for horsemen's constitutional right to bear syringes. And of course we see hundreds of mares bred to stallions with the flimsiest credentials, while others that might recycle soundness and constitution are neglected as somehow “uncommercial.”

Doubtless some of those who profit from dubious training programs will only discover a dormant capacity for moral indignation if the stallions graduating from any given barn start to be received with due scepticism by breeders. All that glisters, remember, may not be genetic gold. But that would be doing the right thing for the wrong reason. Cowardly, in other words. And now, as we said, is the time to show some moral courage. Time to be fair to everyone–including our critics.

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