Dubai World Cup: Life Is Good could give Pletcher a rare first

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates – He was the California-based 2021 Kentucky Derby favorite until he got hurt in late March. His trainer wound up winning the Derby anyway, only to have his Derby winner test positive for a medication banned on race day, which drew harsh sanctions not only in Kentucky but in New York.

So, the horse – the early Derby favorite who got hurt – was moved to a different trainer in New York to ensure he could start in important East Coast races last summer. Meanwhile, right after the early Derby favorite got hurt, another horse, a year older but with a common owner, ran two excellent races in California for the trainer of the injured Derby favorite. Then he, too, was moved to the same East Coast-based trainer, only to himself get hurt before racing again, eventually ending up back in California with the trainer who campaigned him in the spring.

Whew. Life, if you hadn’t yet realized, is complicated.

But when you have the fastest dirt horse in North America, if not the world, life is good.

Life Is Good – the horse, not the affirmation of being – is the equine protagonist in this soap opera. He is neither on the Pacific nor Atlantic coast this week but is stabled at Meydan Racecourse’s international quarantine facility seven miles from the Arabian Sea in Dubai, trying to win the $12 million Dubai World Cup on Saturday. Life Is Good laughed at overmatched rivals in the Breeders’ Cup Dirt Mile last November, stretched his speed to 1 1/8 miles for the first time crushing 2021 Horse of the Year Knicks Go in the Pegasus World Cup in January, and is the hot favorite to run away with the World Cup here Saturday night.

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Victory would be a first in the race for Hall of Fame trainer Todd Pletcher, who has taken down nearly every major prize in North America but has yet to win a World Cup.

“Of the races we haven’t yet won, this is the one I’d put at the top of the list,” said Pletcher.

Pletcher is the East Coast trainer to whom Life Is Good was sent last year after his untimely injury in March. He trains Life Is Good for WinStar Farm and the China Horse Club. WinStar also is part-owner Country Grammer, who might have the best chance to defeat Life Is Good.

Country Grammer is the aforementioned older horse with the two elite races last spring while trained by Bob Baffert. He was sent to Pletcher last summer to run in New York but injured an ankle before making his target race, the Whitney Stakes. Now he’s back with Baffert, a three-time Dubai World Cup winner who had Country Grammer finely tuned for the $20 million Saudi Cup on Feb. 26, his first start since May 31. Any improvement on an excellent second-place finish in Saudi Arabia and Country Grammer can have something to say about Life Is Good’s dominance.

“He ran an unbelievable race off a 270-day layoff,” said Elliott Walden, WinStar’s president and CEO of racing operations. “Bob did a great job of getting him ready.”

WinStar owns Country Grammer in partnership with Amr Zedan’s Zedan Racing, the owner of Medina Spirit, the late, disqualified Baffert-trained winner of the 2021 Derby.

Still more strands interweave this story. Pletcher came closest to landing a World Cup when Harlan’s Holiday, sharp winner of the Donn Handicap with a 113 Beyer Speed Figure in his previous start, finished second, beaten five lengths by Moon Ballad in the 2003 World Cup at the old Nad Al Sheba Racecourse. Moon Ballad never had won a Group 1 race before the World Cup and didn’t finish better than fifth in four starts after it.

“Moon Ballad looked like Man o’ War that day,” Pletcher quipped.

Frankie Dettori rode Moon Ballad, his second World Cup winner. He hasn’t won another but has landed a plum mount Saturday – Country Grammer.

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Who came closer to winning a World Cup than Pletcher? That would be Elliott Walden, who trained from 1985 to 2005 and in 1999 had a very live World Cup starter. Victory Gallop the year before had finished second in the Derby and the Preakness and won the Belmont, and came to Dubai off an ideal prep in a Gulfstream Park allowance race, where he ran fast enough to get a 111 Beyer. He wound up third in the World Cup, beaten 1 1/2 lengths by 44-1 shot Almutawakel. Silver Charm, the Baffert-trained winner of the 1998 World Cup, finished sixth.

“He popped a quarter crack 10 days before the race,” Walden said of Victory Callop. “He missed a couple days training, had a couple easy days because of it. He’d never popped a quarter crack in his life. He was not a horse with bad feet.”

With Life Is Good the issue is not bad feet but a bad-ass approach to competition. Life Is Good steps onto the track, whether to train or race, ready for a fight.

“He’s basically a horse that is very enthusiastic about doing things,” Walden more diplomatically put it.

Life Is Good is very, very fast. He wants to prove that right here, right now, no questions. Such an all-out attitude might work with a sprinter, and Life Is Good raced effectively in his two sprint starts, but it is no way to cover a distance of ground, and Life Is Good’s career has revolved around slowing him down and teaching him to race, not merely run. The talent part – that never was in doubt from Life Is Good’s earliest sessions on WinStar’s training track.

“One day he was supposed to go a quarter [mile] in 28 or 29. He went in 23 and galloped out 36, 48. That was in March of his 2-year-old year,” said Walden. “When he got to California and had worked a few times, Bob would always talk about him in the same breath as Justify and American Pharoah,” two Triple Crown winners. “He didn’t say some of his other Grade 1 winners; he said two of the best horses he’s had in the last two decades.”

The journeyman jockey Jack Gilligan’s mother is employed at WinStar and it was Gilligan who rode the colt in the fast farm work Walden mentioned. Gilligan is not the only one Life Is Good has fooled. The colt’s stride is reaching but low and very efficient. When he works, you don’t realize how fast Life Is Good is going until he comes into close range and passes in a blur.

“It’s deceiving for sure,” said Pletcher. “You watch him and looking down at your stopwatch and it’s not what you expect.”

Pletcher has seen Life Is Good mature and learn a degree of patience over the last eight months. Assistant trainer and former English jockey Amelia Green long has been charged with helping tame the beast. The pair has developed a rapport. Monday at Meydan, training in the dark on a quiet track, as connections have found he prefers, Life Is Good kept to a slow, steady tempo during his gallop. He trains in draw reins, which give a rider an added measure of control, and though you can tell Life Is Good desperately wanted to be given his head and race away, he accepted Green’s guidance.

“He goes in draw reins but doesn’t need draw reins, and now he’s using them properly,” Walden said. “He’s setting his head the right way and rounding out his back, not fighting to run off.”

Life Is Good mastered 1 1/8 miles in the Pegasus and now tries 1 1/4 for the first time. Walden said he has “never seen him get tired in a work” but the distance could mitigate the talent gap between Life Is Good and Country Grammer. Originally trained by Chad Brown, Country Grammer’s best win came last year in the Grade 1 Gold Cup at 1 1/4 miles. There, he won by only a head over Royal Ship, but those two had more than four lengths on third-place Express Train, recent winner of the Grade 1 Santa Anita Handicap.

In the Saudi Cup, Country Grammer raced close to a taxing pace and near the rail, which might have been the most demanding part of the track surface, and after being collared by outside-closing longshot Emblem Road, Country Grammer tried to battle back, falling a half-length short. He finished 1 1/2 lengths clear of Midnight Bourbon, who, along with Hot Rod Charlie, look like the other key World Cup contenders.

“You never know when you run a mile and a quarter,” Walden said.

All the other horses Pletcher has brought in the World Cup – Magna Graduate, A. P. Arrow, Mshawish, Keen Ice, Neolithic, and Audible – ran to form here. They just weren’t good enough. Life Is Good, though, is the most talented American runner in Dubai since the Baffert-trained Arrogate, who might have turned in the best World Cup performance ever beating future Horse of the Year Gun Runner in 2017. Pletcher, were he a racehorse, would not need draw reins. Seemingly from his first moment in the spotlight, he knew how to rate and relax. Pletcher’s cool, purposeful approach has helped define him as a trainer and horseman.

If the fire-breathing favorite finishes first in the World Cup? “Perhaps I’d smile,” he said.

Life would be great.