Well, that’s one way to make history. Richard Mandella already had his name in the books as the only trainer to win four Breeders’ Cup races in a single day, to finish in a dead heat with two of his horses in a Grade 1 event, and to train the only female in the history of the sport to win championships in four separate campaigns. Then he had to go and join an altogether different kind of club by announcing on Wednesday that Omaha Beach would need to be scratched from Saturday’s running of the 145th Kentucky Derby, a race in which the son of War Front, winner this year of the Rebel and Arkansas Derby, would have been favored to give Mandella his first victory in America’s most famous horse race. Instead, Mandella and owner Rick Porter had to face the fact that their colt had an entrapped epiglottis that could not be resolved this late in the day. “The hardest part is over,” Mandella said. “I got hold of the owner, and you couldn’t ask for better people to deal with. To look at the colt you wouldn’t have any idea there was something wrong. But there was no other option than to take him out and fight another day.” :: DERBY WATCH: Top 20 Kentucky Derby contenders with comments from Jay Privman and Mike Watchmaker Mandella was speaking from his Louisville hotel room Wednesday evening, where his wife, Randi, had made certain the windows were closed tight and the trainer was eyeing a bottle of unopened Kentucky bourbon as a possible dinner companion. “He’ll have a simple procedure,” Mandella said of Omaha Beach. “Then they usually have two or three weeks off, and then they’re back in training.” Since nothing unprecedented ever happens in a sport as ancient as horse racing, it should come as no surprise that the Omaha Beach news can take a number. The Kentucky Derby has seen this horror flick before. Like the time Calumet Farm’s Gen. Duke was considered the finest 3-year-old in the land, and stars like Bold Ruler, Round Table, and Gallant Man figured to be running for second money in the 1957 version of the Derby. Gen. Duke was scratched the morning of the Derby with what turned out to be a broken bone in his foot. Calumet won the race anyway with Iron Liege. Or the time Sir Gaylord was rolling into the 1962 Derby with flags flying high, unbeaten as a 3-year-old and already proven better than Ridan, Decidedly, and Crimson Satan, the best of the rest. A hairline leg fracture put an end to all that after a three-furlong breeze the day before the race. Owner Christopher Chenery’s reaction when trainer Casey Hayes brought him the news? “Casey, I feel so sorry for you.” At the Derby in 1992, trainer Neil Drysdale was confident A.P. Indy could handle European hotshot Arazi, and the others didn’t really figure. But then, late in the week, heat was detected in one of Indy’s four very valuable feet. He was scratched the morning of the race. “We didn’t know exactly what was wrong,” Drysdale said. “That’s why we didn’t take the risk of running. It turned out to be a blind quarter crack, which we didn’t discover until the next day.” A.P. Indy’s hoof was subsequently patched, after which he won the Peter Pan, the Belmont Stakes, and eventually Horse of the Year. More recently, 2-year-old champ Uncle Mo was pulled from the 2011 Derby late in the week because his people couldn’t figure out why he went off his feed. The 2009 Derby was knocked sideways by the Saturday morning scratch of morning-line favorite I Want Revenge, winner of the Gotham and the Wood. When trainer Jeff Mullins detected heat in an ankle, managing owner David Lanzman immediately pulled the plug. So shaken was the Derby cosmos at the dramatic turn of events that the race ended up being won by Mine That Bird, at 50-1. The defection of Omaha Beach immediately brings his two closest pursuers from the Oaklawn Park races – Game Winner and Improbable – into even sharper focus. There also was an immediate rush on a Google search of classic colts and throat operations. After Tank’s Prospect ran dead last in the 1985 Santa Anita Derby, trainer Wayne Lukas knew something was up. A few days later, veterinarian Scott Merrill performed a tie-back procedure on the colt’s entrapped epiglottis, and soon after Tank’s Prospect was back in training. He split the field in the Kentucky Derby, then set a Pimlico track record beating Chief’s Crown by a head in the Preakness. Jack Van Berg was similarly flummoxed after Alysheba lost his first two starts as a 3-year-old in 1987. Enter Dr. Merrill once again for a March 24 tie-back. One month later Alysheba finished first in the Blue Grass, though he was DQ’d to third, then took the Derby and the Preakness on his way to the Hall of Fame. If Mandella didn’t have bad luck on the road this century with his stable stars, he’d have no luck at all. Watch The Tin Man flinch from the hanging finish line wire at Arlington Park to compromise his chances in the 2002 Breeders’ Cup Turf. There is Beholder at Belmont Park, her leg slashed during the 2014 Ogden Phipps and still running a close fourth. And then there is Beholder again, primed for a showdown with American Pharoah in the 2015 Breeders’ Cup Classic at Keeneland, only to be scratched when she failed to scope clean after a routine gallop. Ron McAnally knows how all these guys feel. His first good horse was Donut King, winner of the 1961 Champagne Stakes and rated a strong third that year on the Experimental Handicap of 2-year-olds. “We had him at Turf Paradise earlier in the season and he kicked the wall of his stall,” McAnally recalled. “It never really bothered him the rest of the year, but after his last work before the Derby something came up. It was a bruise in that foot. Our blacksmith worked on him, but we just couldn’t make it. A shame, too, because he’d beaten Decidedly, the Derby winner, both times he ran against him.” The scratch of Donut King from the ’62 Derby field was lost in the headline news about Sir Gaylord. McAnally was all of 28 at the time, with a career ahead that would include such transcendent runners as John Henry, Bayakoa, and Paseana, as well as a place of his own in the Hall of Fame. Surely, at such a tender age the trainer must have thought there would be plenty of Kentucky Derby opportunities to come. And certainly, Richard Mandella can allow himself the hope that there is another Omaha Beach in his future. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works. “We ran other horses over the years, but they never had a chance like he did,” McAnally said of Donut King. “He was a really good horse, and that was his Derby.”