Maximum Security a dominant winner in Cigar Mile

OZONE PARK, N.Y. – The four races leading into Saturday’s Grade 1, $750,000 Cigar Mile at Aqueduct had all been won in gate-to-wire fashion. Any consideration that the connections of Maximum Security and Spun to Run might have had of trying to rate their 3-year-olds was no longer in play.

Thus, the Cigar Mile was going to be an old-fashioned battle of speed to see who was the fastest horse.

From start to finish, Maximum Security ($4.60) was the fastest horse on this day, turning aside the pace-pressing Spun to Run and drawing clear to an emphatic 3 1/2-length victory over that rival in the Cigar Mile. It was a performance that very likely wrapped up an Eclipse Award for Maximum Security, who seven months ago became the first horse to be disqualified from first in the Kentucky Derby for an in-race infraction. He was placed 17th.

“My personal opinion is he ought to be the 3-year-old Eclipse Award winner,” said Gary West, who owns Maximum Security with his wife Mary. “I don’t think anybody else has the kind of credentials that he has . . . That was a pretty impressive race we just saw there, I think.”

Maximum Security, under Luis Saez, made a slow Aqueduct main track look fast. On a day when the fastest of three other one-turn mile race was 1:39.11, Maximum Security covered the one-mile distance in 1:36.46. That was after being hounded by Spun to Run, under Irad Ortiz Jr., through a quarter in 22.80 seconds, a half-mile in 46.17, and six furlongs in 1:11.03. Maximum Security switched leads at the three-sixteenths pole and opened up and was never hit with Saez’s whip.

“I knew we had to fight, so my attitude was 'Let’s see what happens,'” Saez said. “That’s what we brought him here to do, and we just battled. He felt amazing. When we hit the turn, I knew we had a lot of horse. He gave me everything and it showed.”

Maximum Security is the only 3-year-old with three Grade 1 victories. In March, he won the Florida Derby at Gulfstream. In July, he took the Grade 1 Haskell at Monmouth Park. He missed the Pennsylvania Derby due to a severe bout of colic and came back to win the Grade 3 Bold Ruler Handicap at Belmont in October and the Cigar, both races that included older horses.

“How do you not give it to him?” said trainer Jason Servis. “I’m partial, I train the horse, maybe I’m not the guy to ask. Even if Omaha Beach wins the Malibu I don’t think his form looks like our form.”

Though Maximum Security seemed in control of the Cigar Mile from the outset, both West and Servis said they were concerned because of how fast he was going early.

“I’ll be honest with you, at the quarter-mile and half-mile I didn’t think we’d win the race, he was going so fast based on the times earlier today, I was genuine concerned,” West said. “I didn’t think we’d be around at the end, but we were. We were drawing away.”

Said Servis: “I didn’t get up out of the chair til late. This track was very slow today. It’s hard to go fast and sustain that.”

Spun to Run was coming off a front-running victory in the Breeders’ Cup Dirt Mile at Santa Anita. Ortiz, who rode him for the first time that day, was again trying to get Spun to Run to the lead. He couldn’t.

“I break running to the lead, but I can’t make it,” Ortiz said. “[Maximum Security] broke sharp, too, he got the lead and he never gave it away. We were going fast from the beginning to the end.”

Spun to Run finished second by two lengths over True Timber, who finished second in this race last year. Following True Timber Saturday, in order, were Looking At Bikinis, Forewarned, Bal Harbour, Whitmore, Network Effect, Nicodemus, Pat On the Back, and Tale of Silence.

West said Maximum Security will head this week head to Gulfstream Park and point for the Grade 1 Pegasus World Cup on Jan. 25.