“I like to root for the underdog a bit and this is an underdog deal,” he said. “He’s not what you call royally bred. The stud fee for him was $7,500 compared to $150,000 and more for some other horses. He was initially sold for just $11,000 and then resold for $35,000.”
And his 25-year old jockey, Mario Gutierrez, has been just as overlooked.
Raised in poverty in Veracruz, Mexico, he left home at 19 and honed his craft in Vancouver, B.C., before finally finding his way to the marque tracks in the States and this year — in his first time in either race — guiding I’ll Have Another to victories in the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness.
All that might seem like glass slipper gospel, but come Saturday evening — just a little past 6:30 — and this truly could turn into the tale of Sleeping Beauty.
Should the tenacious little chestnut colt kiss the finish line first in the grueling 1 ½ mile race — and a few prominent Miami Valley horsemen think that will happen — then he’ll awaken a Triple Crown dream that’s been asleep for 34 years.
Only 11 horses in 137 years of Triple Crown racing have won all three races. None has done so since Affirmed in 1978.
Since then, 11 horses have won the Crown’s first two legs only to be derailed in the Belmont marathon.
Sometimes the horse isn’t up to the herculean task. Often it’s the jock who short-circuits on the track’s sandy expanses and sometimes, as Gabel put it, “it’s just happenstance.”
In that category might be War Emblem stumbling out of the gate in 2002 or previously unbeaten Spectacular Bid stepping on a safety pin the morning of the 1979 race.
Add it all up and the Triple Crown may be the most elusive title in all of sports.
“It’s asking a lot — maybe too much — of these horses at this stage in their careers,” said Jim Morgan, the former Stivers High and Louisville basketball star who went on to become Ohio’s top thoroughbred trainer.
“You’re having young horses go three different distances in three different states in just five weeks. And along the way they keep facing fresh shooters (horses that sat out the last race) so it can take a terrible toll on them.
“But this horse is something special and I give him a great chance to win. His breeding is unusually stout for an American horse. He’s not one dimensional. He’s pretty much what we call a push-button horse. When the jockey asks him, he can go anyplace he has to go.”
George Smith — once a highly rated Ohio State golfer and later one of Ohio’s top thoroughbred owners who was based in Washington Twp. — agrees with Morgan:
“I think there’s a good chance he’ll win. He looks like he’s got the speed and he has a pedigree with a lot of distance in it. It’s not like he was bred to be a sprinter and he’s trying to go 1 ½ miles.”
Springboro’s Lee Midkiff — who owned a piece of 2011 Kentucky Derby winner Animal Kingdom and now is one of the founders of Eclipse Thoroughbred Partners, an ownership syndicate with several top horses nationwide — agrees, sort of:
“I think there’s definitely a chance — he’s a good horse — but I know anything can happen and history tells us it’s not likely, so that holds me back a little from getting too excited.”
And yet all horsemen agree on one thing. They’ll all be watching the race Saturday.
So, too, will a lot of other folks in the area, said John Engelhardt, the River Downs marketing and publicity consultant from Dayton.
Although he’ll be at the Cincinnati track on Saturday — where gala festivities will surround a live racing card, simulcasts and, of course, the Belmont broadcast — he knows many people in the area will be watching NBC’s six-plus hours of television coverage.
“For the Kentucky Derby, Cincinnati was the No. 2 TV market in the nation and Dayton was No. 19 — and Dayton’s not exactly the 19th biggest city in the nation,” he said.
“There is a high interest in thoroughbred racing here and especially now. Everybody wants to see what happens Saturday.”
Changing sport
There were three Triple Crown winners in the 1970s — Secretariat in 1973, Seattle Slew in 1977 and Affirmed in ’78 — and none since.
Only one of Belmont’s last 10 winners — Afleet Alex in 2005 — even ran all three races.
Penny Chenery — who bred and raced Secretariat — recently said the reason for the drought is that the game’s breeding philosophy has changed since the 1970s. She said the industry is concentrated more on sales than racing horses and there’s more interest in turning out good looking, precocious, early speed horses that aren’t equipped for stamina or distance races — two Triple Crown necessities.
Engelhardt and Smith both said another change is that 2-year-olds are lightly raced these days so the horses don’t have the necessary foundations.
“In the old days horses had 12 or 14 starts as a 2-year-old,” Smith said. “Now they might have two or three. They’re not built up so they can go a long distance.”
Then there’s “the vanity of some owners,” Morgan said. He said that’s why so many people bring horses with no chance of winning to the Derby and the other Triple Crown races. It’s as much to be part of the scene as to contend. That makes for overcrowded fields and good entries sometimes are forever log-jammed in the race.
For example, Count Fleet faced 14 different opponents on the way to winning the 1943 Triple Crown. I’ll Have Another — depending on today’s draw — likely will end up facing 39.
Add in the other troubles plaguing the game — over-medicated horses, an alarming rate of breakdowns, financial woes — and you see why it’s hard for a true champion to emerge.
And racing needs that.
“It’s not like with traditional sports where fans get behind their home teams — where you’re vested in the Bengals or the Reds or the Yankees — so you need a horse to draw attention, one that people can latch onto and root for,” Midkiff said.
I’ll Have Another might be that attention-grabber, but even should he win Saturday he won’t cure the woes of the sport.
In fact, his trainer, Doug O’Neill, is laboring under his own cloud. According to the Association of Racing Commissions, he’s been fined or suspended 14 times in the past 14 years.
While some of the transgressions have been for little more than clerical errors, he’s had four violations for horses registering an excessive amount of total carbon dioxide, which is usually the result of a practice called milk shaking. That’s when horses are given a mixture of bicarbonate of soda, sugar and electrolytes and that enhances performance and combats fatigue.
Last week California suspended him 45 days because one of his horses in 2010 had an excessive amount of TCO2. The suspension won’t take effect until after the Belmont.
While some in the business like Chenery and Smith are dismayed that the personable O’Neill now commandeers the spotlight, others like Engelhardt and Gabel say the charges are not that serious.
Through it all there’s no indication I’ll Have Another has gotten any illegal benefits and that fact is not lost on Midkiff.
“Certainly medical issues and industry standards need to be dealt with — and we can talk about that next week — but it’s unfortunate that’s become the focus of some people now. At the end of the day this is a great horse and he deserves the attention here. He’s got just a phenomenal story really.”
Belmont or bust
One of the first times Midkiff — whose partnership has Patrioticandproud on the Belmont undercard Saturday — was at the New York track, he took a traffic short cut to the clubhouse, came around the backside and said he got an eye-opening view:
“You get the sensation you could land a 747 on that homestretch.”
Morgan knows Belmont, too. He won a big stakes race there several years ago with Bold Rendezvous. He said Hall of Fame jockey Gary Smith said the first time he raced there he got lost.
Engelhardt explained: “The place is so big that the three furlong pole isn’t where it is at other tracks. An unfamiliar jockey can get mixed up. A lot of people think that’s what happened to Stewart Elliott in the (2004) Belmont. He made his move too soon with Smarty Jones and that cost his horse the race.”
Smith, who with longtime partner Dr. Wilbur Johnston, won the big filly race at Belmont — the Coaching Club American Oaks — with Spoken Fur, said the whole track can be daunting: “Jockeys have to ride it differently because when they come around the last turn they still have another quarter mile to go.”
To combat all this, O’Neill has sought out the advice of Seattle Slew’s trainer Billy Turner, and Gutierrez has toured the track with retired jock Richard Migliore, who won more than 1,350 races at Belmont.
As for I’ll Have Another, he seems to be mirroring a Triple Crown winner, too. He won the Derby by 1 1/2 lengths and the Preakness by a neck, both over Bodemesister. Affirmed won by the exact same lengths over Alydar.
This time there will be no Bodemeister — trainer Bob Baffert took him back to California — but there are a couple of challengers in Dullahan, who was third in the Derby, and Union Rags, who was seventh. Both sat out the Preakness so they are rested.
Engelhardt, though, is not swayed:
“The stars seem to be aligning for I’ll Have Another. I hope he does it because it would make for a heck a story.”
Cinderella? Sleeping Beauty?
It doesn’t really matter.
On his own, as Midkiff put it: “He’s got just a phenomenal story really.”
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