For Baffert and Pletcher, ‘curse of Apollo' a false creed

If the horse had been named Fish Cakes or Jabbering Jack, everything might be different.

“The curse of Fish Cakes” or “the curse of Jabbering Jack” – no one is saying that.

But no, his name was Apollo, and “the curse of Apollo,” well, that’s got a ring to it, and for decades now it’s been ringing through every Kentucky Derby that includes a starter who didn’t race at age 2.

Apollo, an unheralded underdog in the Derby of 1882, remains the only Derby winner who didn’t race as a 2-year-old. That is the factual part. “Curse” is just a matter of branding.

“The curse of Apollo, that never enters my mind,” said four-time Derby-winning trainer Bob Baffert. “I think it’s one of those things that’s something extra to write about.”

That’s Baffert’s position as of late April. Check back May 6 for chicken blood sprinkled around his shed row, wreaths of garlic nailed to his office door – some sort of curse protection.

One day earlier, Baffert will saddle the Derby favorite, Justify. You can tell Baffert believes he has the goods, an American Pharoah-type athletic freak with a ceiling somewhere up in the ether. No doubt Justify has been brilliant in his three-start career, but it’s a career that began Feb. 18 – right in the heart of Apollo territory.

On the other side of America from the California-based Baffert, in Florida, trainer Todd Pletcher admits to the occasional superstition. “I won’t cross the path of a black cat,” he said.

But Pletcher, like Baffert, won’t cross the line into believing there’s much merit to the Apollo curse. That’s good because among his four Derby runners this year is Magnum Moon, unbeaten in four starts but unraced until Jan. 13, when he won a maiden sprint at Gulfstream Park.

“He was 13 days late,” Pletcher said. “I actually considered running him at Tampa on Dec. 31.

“I don’t know in an industry that’s continually evolving that comparing now to 100 years ago seems wise.”

Of course, there’s no curse. But there are real dynamics at work that help explain this strain of Derby loser, 61 of them since 1937.

Start with the fact that most horses structurally sound enough and naturally talented enough to win major races will as a matter of course race as 2-year-olds. Among the set of the potential elite who don’t, nearly all will at least have gone into serious training, and while they might lack seasoning – all that goes into participating in a race, from the lead-up to the various challenges encountered in the heat of battle – their bodies have been prepped for the rigors required to get to the Derby.

“I do believe that every superior horse trains at 2,” said Larry Bramlage, a noted equine surgeon at the Rood and Riddle clinic in Kentucky. Horses mature about 20 times faster than humans; their limbs stop growing two years after their birthdate, Bramlage said. “That’s when you need to do something, be it racing or training, to develop bone.”

Magnum Moon and Justify did plenty of training at 2. Justify didn’t post an official timed workout until Oct. 19 at Keeneland, but he wound up working eight times as a 2-year-old without even accounting for the training he’d done before that first published drill.

“We started him out in February [2017],” said Elliott Walden, president and chief executive of WinStar Farm, part of Justify’s ownership group. Justify was purchased at auction as a yearling and was stabled at WinStar, which has training facilities, until being moved to Keeneland and then on to California.

“He strained a muscle behind and had to be stopped on for 60 days – not a big deal,” Walden said.

Magnum Moon worked three times early last summer over the Saratoga training track, breezing June 13, June 19, and June 29 before Pletcher pulled the plug.

“He was a May foal, and we thought a lot of him,” Pletcher said. “He had a couple minor things, so we took the conservative approach, which we do with a lot of horses. If a baby comes in June or July and has one setback, they can easily be pushed back to January.”

Now, there is something to the idea that a horse suited to winning the Kentucky Derby needs to be mature enough to stand up to training and get on a solid schedule within the right time frame. Magnum Moon has hit all his marks since October, and Pletcher has no such concerns about this colt, but “when you’re trying to play catch-up with a horse, sometimes you do something unconventional” to get to the Derby, he said.

“The date of Jan. 1 is somewhat arbitrary, but the horse that matures fast enough to race [at 2] is also probably the horse that’s able to train hard enough to run a mile and a quarter in about two minutes in May,” Bramlage said. “Another horse that matures later, he may be able to do it in August but not in May.”

Beyond physical development, there’s the question of how beneficial a variety of race experience is to a Derby horse. In the past, an unraced 2-year-old might have ceded considerable seasoning to horses who started as juveniles, but with horses starting ever less frequently in this era, 2-year-old form doesn’t go as far as it used to.

“I’ll take the superior talent over seasoning any old day,” Baffert said. “Seasoning is if you happen to break poorly and get behind, and once you take a horse out of their rhythm, it doesn’t matter if they’ve run 20 times or three times. A 20-horse gate like the Derby, you worry more about that and the draw than an Apollo curse.”

There’s evidence suggesting that simply not racing at 2 has no discernible bearing on Derby performance. (see chart)

Starting in 1982, the year that Air Forbes Won, an unraced 2-year-old, finished seventh as the 5-2 Derby favorite, there have been 32 Derby starters who fit the criterium. Using post-time odds as a guideline but also considering past performances and broadly realistic expectations, 10 of those horses underperformed. Of the other 22, 13 ran about as expected, and nine could be considered to have overperformed.

Pletcher and Baffert, Derby regulars, have been down this road. Pletcher has started five Derby horses without a 2-year-old race, all of them underperformers compared to their odds but likely for reasons mainly unrelated to Apollo.

Patch, 14th at 14-1 in 2017, simply wasn’t good enough, his odds artificially deflated because of a widely disseminated narrative surrounding his missing eye.

Materiality, the Florida Derby winner who was unbeaten going into the 2015 Derby, finished sixth at 11-1. He broke poorly and was in a rotten spot thereafter because of the miscue. “If he’d had two more starts as a 2-year-old, would he have been able to overcome that?” Pletcher said. “I think not, but you never know for sure.”

Verrazano, barely Apollo-qualified with a Jan. 1 debut, finished eighth in the 2013 Derby, his fifth career start. Pletcher said the colt spun his wheels over a sloppy track, though he also believes he ran Verrazano one too many times that spring. Trippi, 11th in 2000, was purely a sprinter and had no chance to stay the distance. Dunkirk, 11th at 5-1 in 2009, might have been negatively impacted by his lack of 2-year-old form.

“I think inexperience hurt Dunkirk more than others, though again, he was on a sloppy track that even galloping he wasn’t handling,” said Pletcher. “He didn’t do well with the shipping part, either, and some of those variables that mentally they need to handle.”

Baffert’s two Apollo starters were Midnight Interlude in 2011 and Bodemeister in 2012. Midnight Interlude, an underperformer, finished 16th at 9-1, but just one race earlier, when he won the Santa Anita Derby by a head in his first start outside the maiden ranks, he’d been almost 14-1. His Derby price dropped simply because Baffert trained him. “The Derby was asking a lot,” Baffert said.

Bodemeister nearly kicked the curse to the curb. The 4-1 Derby favorite after an awesome Arkansas Derby win, Bodemeister sped to the early Derby lead and held to deep stretch before I’ll Have Another ran him down, but the fractions he set resembled those in a sprint more than a testing 10 furlongs. Baffert believes that alone defeated him. “The pace was just too gut-wrenching,” he said.

Bodemeister returned to finish second in the Preakness Stakes and no doubt was good enough to win the Derby. With the benefit of hindsight, he’s one of only a handful of such Apollo horses since 1982.

Pulpit looked like a serious player in the 1997 Derby, where he essentially ran to his odds, finishing fifth, but he sustained a career-ending knee injury that compromised him in the race.

The Charlie Whittingham-trained Strodes Creek finished second at 8-1 in 1994 and was good enough to win, but he chased loose-on-the-lead mudlark Go For Gin over a sloppy track and ran out of ground. “Charlie felt like he could’ve won if he hadn’t gotten knocked sideways on the first turn,” said owner Arthur Hancock.

Then there’s the poster boy of modern Apollo horses, Curlin, the best horse born in 2004 but a well-beaten third in the 2007 Derby after breaking slightly flatfooted from post 2, getting shuffled back into the 20-horse field early, and finding traffic on the far turn as the victorious Street Sense got a clear run up the rail. Did a lack of 2-year-old experience derail Curlin? Perhaps, though as Hancock, who missed with Strodes Creek but hit with Gato Del Sol and Sunday Silence, said, “The best horse regularly gets beat in the Derby.”

Curlin didn’t debut until Feb. 1, and there’s some evidence that the later an Apollo horse starts, the more his Derby hopes dim. Among the 10 Apollo horses who underperformed in the sample starting in 1982, seven didn’t make the races until Feb. 1 or later, a notably high proportion, albeit in a generally small sample. Everything has gone according to plan with Justify since his first start, and it appears he hasn’t so much as missed an intended day’s training, but that Feb. 18 debut is late indeed.

One of the truly late starters was Air Forbes Won, who didn’t race until March 4, 1982, yet managed to squeeze in four races before the Derby that May 1. No trainer operating within a mile and a quarter of the American mainstream would consider a schedule that demanding these days. That’s a major plank in the platform that Baffert, Pletcher, and many others have advanced: Times have changed, and historical trends like the Apollo rule built on archaic practices can’t persist much longer. Maybe not even past this first Saturday in May since Justify and Magnum Moon both look eminently capable.

Unless, of course, there really is a curse.