Hovdey: Los Al Derby's recent star power makes it deserving of bigger spotlight

Consider the Los Alamitos Derby – a race of proud heritage, modest reward, and a low national profile that gives lie to its brief, muscular history.

Five 3-year-olds will go postward in Saturday’s version of the race, with its nine furlongs strung out around the unique Los Alamitos layout. The runners can get up a full head of steam before they take the clubhouse hairpin turn and then negotiate the odd kink right down the backstretch before the final bend and the 1,400-foot stretch, an eternity rivaled only by Churchill Downs and Fair Grounds among the nation’s one-mile tracks.

It’s a good enough test for any young horse on the rise. Good enough that the Los Alamitos Derby has been won in three of its four runnings by:

◗ Shared Belief (2014), the previous year’s 2-year-old male champion, subsequent winner of the Pacific Classic and Awesome Again over older opponents, followed by victories as a 4-year-old in the San Antonio over reigning Horse of the Year California Chrome and the Santa Anita Handicap.

◗ Accelerate (2016), a late bloomer whose promising 2017 campaign has flowered big time in 2018 to include victories in the San Pasqual, Santa Anita Handicap, and Gold Cup at Santa Anita.

◗ West Coast (2017), a lightly raced colt who made up for missing the classics by adding the Travers and the Pennsylvania Derby on his way to an Eclipse Award as champion 3-year-old male.

Not a bad group. And yet the Los Alamitos Derby languishes these days as a Grade 3 event, teetering on the edge of irrelevance in the face of the American Graded Stakes Committee’s unforgiving metrics.

Every five years, America’s stakes races face the equivalent of an employee evaluation, leading with the loaded question, “What have you done for the game lately?”

When the committee convened in 2016 to rate the races of 2017, the five most recent runnings of the Los Alamitos Derby included two offered at Hollywood Park as the Swaps Stakes. The Grade 2 rating of the Swaps was grandfathered over to the Los Alamitos version, and in 2014, the Orange County track made sure people took the race seriously with a $500,000 purse.

In 2015, the purse was $350,000 – the winner was Gimme Da Lute, a nice colt who died too soon – and in 2016, the vagaries of the California calendar required the Los Alamitos Derby to be run in September, when parimutuel handle projections could justify only a $200,000 purse.

The lack of widespread industry support for the Los Alamitos Derby flies in the face of the most frequent criticism of the California stakes menu: that once the Santa Anita Derby is in the books in early April, there is no race of national significance for 3-year-olds on the main track for the rest of the year, while ultra-rich events like the Haskell, Jim Dandy, Travers, and casino-funded derbies in West Virginia and Pennsylvania suck all the summer air from the division.

Way back when, the Swaps Stakes marked a legitimate attempt to lure the best 3-year-olds West for a post-Triple Crown bow. Prized shocked Derby and Preakness winner Sunday Silence in 1989. Best Pal shook off disappointments in the Derby and Preakness to take the Swaps in 1991, while Derby winner Thunder Gulch stopped by Hollywood Park in 1995 for a quick Swaps payday between wins in the Belmont Stakes and Travers.

As an increasing number of top 3-year-olds fell victim to the intensity of the Triple Crown and its cutthroat stampede for Derby qualifying points, the fields for the Swaps suffered. Neither did it help that the owners of Hollywood Park lost interest in the race, reducing its purse to $150,000. To its credit – and despite that its two- and three-week meets are too brief to establish any kind of promotional momentum – Los Alamitos management has kept the faith and offers the Los Alamitos Derby with as much enthusiasm as the budget allows.

At $150,000, the purse is $50,000 more than what is required for a Grade 3 race. That the horses in the field of five this time around come from just three barns and 11 nominees speaks more of the distribution of wealth among trainers than the lack of depth in the local division. Bob Baffert and Doug O’Neill both have two in the race, while Peter Eurton will go with one, Affirmed Stakes winner Draft Pick, the likely favorite.

Blessed with an embarrassment of young riches, Eurton will be at Indiana Grand on Saturday to saddle Dark Vader in the $500,000 Indiana Derby. The son of Tale of Ekati was a close third last time out in the Easy Goer on the Belmont Stakes undercard. Stir in recent Ohio Derby winner Core Beliefs, and it’s plain to see what Eurton is looking forward to this summer, beyond the beach at Del Mar.

“It’s great to have such choices because I’ll probably never have that opportunity again to have that many nice 3-year-olds at one time,” Eurton said.

“Draft Pick always looked like he’d be late coming around, and Core Beliefs I didn’t get until he was up to working three-eighths. Dark Vader didn’t show much early, and now he’s getting better every day.

“I’ve never been to Indiana Grand,” Eurton added. “That’s the great thing about having horses like these, the interesting places you get to go.”

Even Los Alamitos.