Mubtaahij and de Kock take the long road to Louisville

LOUISVILLE, Ky. – Stories abound at the Kentucky Derby, rippling from the combatants themselves and their human connections in predictable arcs: the tear-jerker, the ugly duckling, the little guy on the big stage. This Derby colt Mubtaahij? He is a four-legged travelogue.

Bred in Ireland and campaigned in England and Dubai, Mubtaahij arrived the hard way at Churchill Downs. On April 16, he flew from Dubai to Amsterdam, had a layover, flew on to Chicago, settled into a quarantine barn at Arlington Park outside of Chicago for a couple days, switched barns, trained at Arlington, and finally boarded a Louisville-bound van this past Tuesday.

It’s exhausting just running through the travel itinerary. Mubtaahij? He looks fresh as a daisy. Trainer Mike de Kock watched him walk off a trailer Tuesday on the Churchill backstretch and saw the same horse he’d been looking at all winter in Dubai.

“He was very bright, pulling everyone around,” de Kock said.

Like horse, like trainer.

To get to Louisville, de Kock took an endless, nonstop flight from Johannesburg, South Africa, to Atlanta and then hopped over to Louisville. The last time he’d seen Mubtaahij at his stables in Dubai, he was making a quick stopover on the way from a horse auction in Australia back home to South Africa.

This is standard operating procedure in the world of Mike de Kock.

About a quarter-century ago, de Kock, 51, was a young assistant trainer in South Africa, planning to travel the world, to work in America and England, to sow his wild oats. Then his boss, just 44, died of a heart attack.

“We had 50 horses at the time, and we were doing well together, so the patrons said, ‘Let’s give him a chance,’ ” de Kock said. “I wasn’t ready for it. I felt like I didn’t want it. I felt I hadn’t lived yet. I was barely 24. I wanted to get out into the world, see what the rest of the world does. I didn’t have the chance, and I think that’s why I travel so much now.”

De Kock knows travel, and he knows how to travel his horses. A legendary trainer in South Africa, he opened a division in Dubai and has developed the second-leading operation there, behind only the powerhouse Godolphin team. From Dubai, he has shipped for all the big international races in Asia. He runs a string in England during the flat season there. The handful of horses he has sent to the U.S. all ran to form – no surprise since de Kock, in addition to being a master trainer, is a master at shipping.

Only two of his eight North American starters finished worse than third, all but one competing in Grade 1 races. De Kock has one win here, though the total would be two had The Apache not been disqualified to second for interference in the stretch in the 2013 Arlington Million. His international set are turf horses, and from 2010 through 2014, the big races in Dubai all were on turf or synthetic surfaces, but South Africa races plenty on sand tracks, and de Kock knows dirt.

His only North American winner, in fact, was his only starter here to race on dirt, Horse Chestnut, who, coming off a long layoff, destroyed his foes in the 2000 Broward Handicap at Gulfstream, earning a world-class 110 Beyer Speed Figure. The Broward was a prep for the Grade 1 Donn Handicap, but Horse Chestnut, with 10 wins in 11 starts perhaps the best horse ever to race in South Africa, and the best de Kock has trained, sustained a training injury and was retired.

Horse Chestnut died at 19 of heart failure last February in South Africa – exactly the same time Mubtaahij was emerging from the shadows in Dubai. Mubtaahij, de Kock said, is no Horse Chestnut, who, in the words of his trainer, “was a monster.”

“He looked American; he was big, strong, massive,” de Kock said.

Mubtaahij, who is owned by Sheikh Mohammed bin Khalifa al Maktoum, comes from different cloth. He was in no way meant even to be a dirt horse, his career starting in England last year with two poor showings on turf.

“He’s a very tall, leggy, European-type horse, not an American at all, and you wouldn’t have thought this was a dirt horse,” de Kock said.

De Kock only has a handful of horses stabled in England. He buys horses in Europe, trains some 2-year-olds there, and tries to get them into a race or two before the season ends in autumn to see if they’ll pass muster for Dubai, since all roads at this point in his career lead to the World Cup Carnival at Meydan Racecourse from January to the end of March. There had been hopes for Mubtaahij, but his two starts, a fifth and a seventh against other maidens, were so modest that de Kock considered not even taking him to Dubai.

In the end, he went, and de Kock threw the colt into a maiden race, strangely written for horses 2 years old and up, against much older, hardened foes Dec. 31, before the Carnival even began. Mubtaahij won.

Two weeks later, he won again, beating 12 in the UAE 2000 Guineas Trial in a five-length stroll, but in the 2000 Guineas itself, a Godolphin horse, Maftool, out-quicked Mubtaahij at the top of the stretch, took a clear lead, and held on for a narrow win as Mubtaahij tried to come back along the rail.

By now, de Kock and his team already were toying with a Kentucky Derby trip. Mubtaahij was slated to start on the Dubai World Cup card in the UAE Derby, a $2 million race awarding 100 Kentucky Derby qualifying points to the winner, basically an automatic entry with a win. Maftool was there, too, but no one that evening came close to Mubtaahij, who settled behind the quick, contested pace of several rivals, burst to the front with about a quarter-mile to run, and jogged to victory under Christophe Soumillon, the elite Belgian rider who is de Kock’s go-to jockey for major races and will be riding in his first Kentucky Derby.

Mubtaahij’s performance was visually excellent, but what did it mean? The UAE Derby has produced 10 Kentucky Derby starters, but none so far has made a dent. Some think Mubtaahij is different; others are expecting more of the same.

The UAE Derby was added to the World Cup card in 2000, when races still were contested on the old Nad al Sheba dirt track, and that year, two horses who raced in it, the victorious China Visit and third-place Curule, came for the Kentucky Derby. They finished sixth and seventh, setting the precedent for eight more UAE Derby runners in the subsequent 14 years. Master of Hounds’s fifth in the 2011 Derby is the best placing among them.

Meydan opened in 2010, Nad al Sheba’s dirt track giving way to a synthetic surface that rendered the UAE Derby winner highly unlikely to be suited for the big dirt race in Louisville. The UAE Derby is in some ways an imperfect fit as a Derby prep since it is open to horses who are 4 on the Southern Hemisphere calendar, and not eligible for the Kentucky Derby, but 3 in the Northern Hemisphere.

In fact, go through the past Dubai-to-Derby horses (see chart), and there’s little surprise that their impact has been so soft. China Visit was a proper horse, but he favored turf and distances of a mile or less. Regal Ransom had class and handled dirt but proved to be a sprinter. And the last three to come, all from Aidan O’Brien, were almost certainly better on synthetic than dirt.

Also, de Kock trained none of the previous runners.

His operation is minutely detail-oriented like that of a Todd Pletcher, but de Kock’s methods go beyond most, if not all, North American outfits. De Kock is big on data. All the important horses in his stable do their training with a digital transmitter stuck into the saddle, the device feeding information such as heart rate, speed, distance traveled, and time into computer. De Kock weighs his horses religiously and has all the analytics plugged into a database to guide training.

“I’ve done it this way since I started traveling, when I realized I had to, because when you’re trying to run two sets in two different countries, you need some sort of scientific data to back you up,” he said. “I would have heart rates, weight, times of gallops from home, and in Europe or Dubai, I’d adjust accordingly. Everyone says, ‘Oh, your eye, your eye, your eye, but put two horses in front of you, and they can get your eye to lie.”

De Kock’s horses do not lack for fitness, breezing up to three times per week in Dubai, less over the deep sand in South Africa. They train without shoes, and Mubtaahij will only be shod this week for his race Saturday.

For all his rigor and success, de Kock has lash-quick wit and loves a good time. He carries something of an entourage, a band of merry pranksters who do not hesitate to mix business and pleasure.

“Listen, we enjoy ourselves wherever we go,” he said. “Win or lose, we shoot the booze, you know?”

Mubtaahij, de Kock seems to believe, probably is going to lose. The trainer well knows the apparent strength of the Derby this year. He likes that his horse can quicken off a fast pace, and Mubtaahij already has raced just shy of the Derby distance twice; de Kock knows he will stay the trip.

“If we make the boards, it would be a huge win for us, and it would encourage you to go on to the next leg,” de Kock said. “You just want to see him kicking on strongly, and you’d say, ‘Okay, let’s go to the next one and see what happens,’ or go straight to the Belmont.”

You see what it is like with Mike de Kock? He and his horse have come all this way to Louisville, and already there is talk of the next piece of travel.

Kentucky Derby starters who last ran in the United Arab Emirates Derby

Year Horse Finish Odds

2000 China Visit 6th 23-1

2000 Curule 7th 23-1

2001 Express Tour 9th 18-1

2002 Essence of Dubai 9th 10-1

2003 Outta Here 7th 39-1

2009 Regal Ransom 8th 22-1

2009 Desert Party 14th 14-1

2011 Master of Hounds 5th 16-1

2012 Daddy Long Legs 20th 26-1

2013 Lines of Battle 7th 31-1