Kentucky Derby: Epicenter can give Asmussen a long-awaited first win
LOUISVILLE, Ky. – The numbers are staggering.
Horses trained by Steve Asmussen made 2,427 starts during 2021. Asmussen, as of Monday, had won 9,727 races during his career. He has won eight Breeders’ Cup races, won the Preakness twice, and won the Belmont once. He has trained the American Horse of the Year four times, including three years in a row, with Curlin in 2007 and 2008 and Rachel Alexandra in 2009.
Last summer, the number in Asmussen’s head was 9,446, the victory that would make him the sport’s winning-most North American trainer.
This spring, as the 148th Kentucky Derby looms, the number that keeps coming up is zero.
Every morning the last several days, people he barely knows or never has met wander up to his Churchill Downs barn, point a camera or microphone at his face and ask Asmussen to talk about zero – zero winners from 23 Kentucky Derby starters.
How, they want to know, could a Hall of Famer, called a training genius by many of his colleagues, run his first Derby horse 21 years ago and still lack a Derby win? Only five trainers have saddled more Derby starters than Asmussen and no one has run as many horses without winning.
“At least I’m good at getting here,” Asmussen, 56, cracked during an interview last week.
Here’s an answer: Winning the Kentucky Derby is hard. Likely, the horse you bring to the race doesn’t really, truly belong in it. And when you do bring the right horse, you need everything to break your way in a 20-runner field.
“I had horses where it wasn’t meant to be. Who knows what all the reasons are?” Asmussen said. “Whether they didn’t run their best race that day or weren’t good enough to begin with . . . I’m a horse trainer. We’re not smart enough to give up.”
Most of the Asmussen 23 were not good enough to begin with. Fifteen of them went off at odds of 19-1 or higher and a dozen were more than 30-1.
Asmussen’s Derby hope this year? He’s good enough.
Epicenter is a head away from bringing a five-race winning streak and a 4-for-4 two-turn stakes record into the Derby. As it is, breezy wins in the Risen Star Stakes and the Louisiana Derby have made Epicenter no worse than second choice behind Zandon, possibly the favorite.
Epicenter has speed in spades and a brain capable of wrapping around the complexities of racing. In the Louisiana Derby, jockey Joel Rosario settled the colt off the leader and Epicenter waited for Rosario’s cue. His Beyer Figure from the race, 102, is within a point of the highest number from a 3-year-old stakes race during 2022 and other figure-makers rate Epicenter similarly. The colt has not missed a beat training into the Derby.
You won’t find a better-looking Derby starter Saturday than this colt, by Not This Time out of Silent Candy, by Candy Ride. A rich bay, Epicenter looks considerably more mature than a spring 3-year-old. He’s tall, though not concerningly so, and extravagantly muscled. The head is stately, the eye intelligent, the stride long but efficient.
“He’s a beautiful mover, a really attractive horse that is very physical. He takes everything he does with a great amount of ease,” said Asmussen.
If Epicenter is beaten Saturday, it won’t be due to insufficient ability. Yet as strong as Epicenter looks, this Derby appears equally strong: He could be the colt we think he is, get a good trip, run his race, and still lose.
“These are wonderful horses training extremely well. My goodness, they look good. What a great crop,” Asmussen said.
Epicenter, bred by Westwind Farm, is the first good horse produced by his dam, a stakes winner over nine furlongs on turf. The female line dives quickly into strong turf stamina influences; no grass yet for Epicenter, but he’s already comfortably stayed 1 3/16 miles.
His owner, Ron Winchell’s Winchell Thoroughbreds, has a relationship with Asmussen going back decades. Winchell’s father, Verne Winchell, sent all his young horses to be broken at the Laredo, Texas, training center run by Asmussen’s parents, Keith and Marilyn. Asmussen winning his first Derby with a Winchell horse would mean the cosmos aligned.
“When it was Verne, Ron’s dad, coming down and seeing their young horses at my parents’ place and stuff, me and Ron got to eat at the big people table, but we didn’t get an opinion,” Asmussen said. “For us to be in this position now with possibly the favorite going into the Derby is very special.”
Asmussen hasn’t brought a horse this ready to win the Derby since Curlin, coming off a 10 1/2-length Arkansas Derby win, was done in here by tough luck, finishing a distant third to perfect-trip Street Sense. Curlin came back to beat Street Sense in the Preakness and from there became a two-time Horse of the Year. The Asmussen-trained Gun Runner was a good colt when he finished third in the 2016 Derby but not the great horse he’d become at age 4, when he, too, was Horse of the Year.
“I think it would be extremely arrogant of me to think Epicenter was Curlin or Gun Runner, but he is going faster sooner than they were,” said Asmussen.
Sunday, Epicenter, working inside the older horse Alejandro, breezed a sharp five furlongs in 1:01. That was noteworthy. Asmussen’s Derby runners typically come into the race off a slow half-mile Monday work. Only Nehro, who breezed five furlongs in 1:00.40 the Sunday before finishing second in the 2011 Derby, had a work like Epicenter’s.
“The great level of confidence I have in Epicenter is because it does not appear I can do too much with him, whereas several of the other runners I’ve had in the Derby, it was very apparent that you could,” Asmussen said.
Third-place Curlin and third-place Gun Runner were inherently better horses than Asmussen’s two best Derby finishers, Nehro and runner-up Lookin At Lee in 2017, but, as Asmussen said, often the Derby, where good fortune means everything, is “more an event than a race.” But the second-place finishes gave Asmussen a small taste of a Derby win.
“Nehro, I thought he was home,” Asmussen said. “I looked back at the wrong moment, and I didn’t see Animal Kingdom coming, So I literally know what it feels like to think you’re going to win the Derby, but it didn’t happen. With Lookin At Lee, the way Corey [Lanerie] cut the corner with him, the acceleration he showed going by tiring horses, it just looked like he was going fast enough to win. And then Always Dreaming had enough left to hold him off . . . I got 23 different feelings on the Derby.”
Always Dreaming – that was trainer Todd Pletcher’s second Derby winner. But until Super Saver splashed to victory in the 2010 Derby, it was Pletcher, a record 0 for 19 in the Derby at the time, who was sprayed with the zero questions Asmussen fields this year.
“Getting asked why you’ve won 10,000 races and not the Kentucky Derby? That didn’t annoy me so much as we hadn’t won the Kentucky Derby yet,” Pletcher said. Like Asmussen, Pletcher had brought many horses to Louisville who had qualified for the Derby but weren’t qualified to win the Derby. Still, the losses mount. A proud, successful trainer starts to feel it.
“Always Dreaming was more rewarding,” Pletcher said. “I felt the Super Saver one was more of a relief. It felt good to just get it taken care of. Did it change my life? It did not. You still get up the next morning and go to work.”
Asmussen has been getting up and going to work with horses since he ran around in diapers. A half-century in racing. His brother Cash was a world-class jockey, one of the leading riders in France for years. His parents, lifelong horse people, still are around to watch their younger son Steve succeed on the brightest stage. Epicenter draped in roses or 0 for 24, Asmussen wakes up Sunday morning, a Hall of Famer with more wins than anyone ever, and he goes to work.
Still, do you think a human driven to this degree of accomplishment doesn’t want it and want it badly? The horses down at the end of the homestretch, 20 of them loading into the gate late Saturday afternoon. Will Steve Asmussen be nervous? “If it’ll help I will, but I’m not running, so how I’m feeling isn’t very important,” he said. “I’m just excited. I’m a 13-year-old on Christmas morning ready to open the package.”
At the center, the epicenter, of that package, just a number – 1.