Omaha Beach gives Porter an unexpected shot at Derby win

Editor's Note: Omaha Beach was scratched on Wednesday, May 1, 2019, shortly after this story was originally published.

During 2018, the Fox Hill Farms stable of owner Rick Porter won three races from 53 starts. Porter had one graded stakes starter, who lost.

The fallow season for one of North America’s leading owners had 2-year-old roots planted in Porter’s belief he was losing a long bout with cancer. First diagnosed in 2001, the disease returned in 2015 bent on destruction. As Porter’s latest stable star Songbird rolled through a captivating championship 2016 campaign, Porter told bloodstock advisers he would buy no yearlings at auction. To purchase a young, unformed horse is to hope for the future. Porter figured Songbird was his swan song.

Saturday at Churchill Downs, Porter will be singing a different tune, “My Old Kentucky Home,” the musical accompaniment to the Kentucky Derby post parade. Out on the racetrack, jockey Mike Smith, Porter’s go-to guy and Songbird’s rider, will sit astride a robust hunk of horseflesh named Omaha Beach. Porter, who had long odds of beating cancer three years ago, now has the Kentucky Derby favorite.

“It means a lot to me,” Porter, 78, said in a recent NTRA conference call. “It might be my last shot at it.”

Omaha Beach on the morning of Feb. 2, 2019, had yet to win a maiden race. Favored in all four of his starts and trained by Richard Mandella, Omaha Beach had loomed a sure winner in his three previous races only to fall just short.

“That has to do with his temperament,” Mandella said. “He’s such a good-natured, kind horse. It took a few races to get the fighter out in him.”

But that afternoon, cut back to a seven-furlong sprint following four two-turn route races, the first three on turf, Omaha Beach flashed excellent speed, inhaled the leader with about three-eighths of a mile to race, and splashed over a sloppy track to win by nine lengths. Six weeks later, he beat champion 2-year-old Game Winner in the Rebel Stakes at Oaklawn Park. A month after that, Omaha Beach won the Arkansas Derby by one length over Improbable. Game Winner and Improbable both are top-line Derby contenders for four-time Derby-winning trainer Bob Baffert. Defeating that pair, Omaha Beach established himself as the leader of the crop entering Triple Crown season.

“It’s total shock and disbelief,” Porter said. “I hadn’t even thought of the Kentucky Derby” before the maiden win.

“Number one, we thought he was going to be a grass horse. It wasn’t until the Rebel that we really started thinking about” the Derby.

Chemotherapy didn’t cure Porter, but an experimental treatment coordinated by owner-breeder B. Wayne Hughes (whose Spendthrift Farm will stand Omaha Beach during his stud career) sent the cancer into remission. So, in 2017, Porter put his money back into yearlings, buying 14, including a gorgeous son of War Front and the Seeking the Gold mare Charming.

That was Omaha Beach, and his route onto the Fox Hill roster was less than straightforward. Omaha Beach at the Keeneland September yearling sale of 2017 failed to meet a $625,000 reserve, after which Reiley McDonald, principal of Eaton Sales, the colt’s consignor, contacted Porter. McDonald mentioned that trainer Larry Jones, scouting yearlings for Porter, had tabbed Omaha Beach as his top horse at the sale.

“He’s just what you look for,” Jones said last week. “All the right parts in all the right places.”

But Jones had told Porter he expected the colt to bring seven figures. The pedigree leaned turf, Porter was interested in dirt horses, and so the case seemed closed until Omaha Beach failed to sell.

A “little bit of an issue came up on X-rays,” Jones said, and because of the circumstances, Porter took his chance at a discounted price.

This had all happened before – a handsome colt that failed to meet his reserve, consigned by Eaton and purchased privately by Porter. That horse was Hard Spun, and under Jones’s guidance, Hard Spun set a furious pace and finished second to Street Sense in the 2007 Derby. Porter had run a horse in the Derby 10 years before, when Shammy Davis was 12th, but Hard Spun was his first real taste of the flavor, and a year later Porter and Jones returned with a ridiculously talented filly with the constitution and strength, they believed, to beat the boys.

Eight Belles, like Hard Spun, put forth a powerful Derby effort, finishing second to Big Brown, but everything went tragically wrong as Eight Belles, galloping out around the clubhouse turn, fractured one front ankle, then the other, crumpling to the track, never getting up. Her catastrophic injuries sent racing itself into a tailspin. The loss devastated both owner and trainer.

“I don’t think about it,” Porter said. “If you run in the Derby, you can’t keep thinking about that. She took a bad step, then another one. It was a fluke. You can’t dwell on it at all.”

But Jones said Eight Belles’s breakdown, softened by the mere passage of time, still carries heavy weight.

“You gotta understand, Mr. Porter is in a different situation than other owners because of Eight Belles,” Jones said. “If it happened again, I don’t know if he could take it. I know I couldn’t.”

Jones also trained Friesan Fire, owned principally by Fox Hill, who went off favored in the 2009 Derby but finished 18th. Chad Brown trained Fox Hill’s Normandy Invasion to a fourth-place finish in 2013, Porter’s most recent Derby experience.

Porter, a Delaware resident and native, had money to play the racing game as a third-generation owner of Porter Auto Group, an expansive car-dealership operation, and he might be the rare owner to make money racing. Porter, who does not keep broodmares, sold Round Pond, his first Breeders’ Cup winner, for $5.75 million. He sold Horse of the Year Havre de Grace for $10 million and Songbird for $9.5 million.

Porter began buying horses in 1994, hiring John Servis as his trainer. Jostle, who won two Grade 1’s as a 3-year-old of 2000, was their first top horse, but six years later, Porter and Servis split.

“I had been discussing with John for a while about making some organizational changes I thought needed to be made, feeling he was understaffed,” Porter told The Blood-Horse magazine at the time.

Porter and Servis would reunite, but their fracture began a pattern, with Porter periodically shifting stock from one trainer to another. His relationship with Jerry Hollendorfer, Songbird’s trainer, ended badly when Porter sent Songbird away from Hollendorfer’s care to be examined by a Kentucky veterinarian following her defeat in the 2017 Personal Ensign Stakes. Hollendorfer, according to Porter, insisted nothing was wrong with Songbird. Porter got a contradictory report, retired the filly, and moved his horses away from Hollendorfer.

The Songbird incident is a murky one from the outside, but putting that aside, Porter, by many accounts, has been a demanding owner. He views himself differently.

“I think I’m very easy,” Porter said. “I’ve been with Larry a long time. Dick Mandella, we have a great relationship. I don’t interfere.”

Porter and Jones had their own rupture, since repaired, and when Jones first came back into the Fox Hill fold in 2011, he implied Porter once had taken some joy out of competing on the grand stage. Things have changed.

“Most people that are in the Thoroughbred business on the higher end are motivated, driven, and have been very successful,” Jones said. “Thing is, you can’t do that with horses. You can’t just do an extra lap, work harder, this or that.”

Jones recalls that Porter at one point ran out of patience with Eight Belles, who was slow to come around as a 2-year-old.

“When I had Eight Belles, he was ready at one point at the end of her 2-year-old year to retire her and breed her to Hard Spun,” Jones said. “Rick said, ‘I’ve never had a good 3-year-old who wasn’t a good 2-year-old.’ Now, he has gotten a lot more patient. He hasn’t been pushing, just has slowed it down. In 2011 it changed for him and I. He has been a joy to be with, and he’s a great owner now.”

Porter’s relationship with Mandella began in 2014 when he purchased a good Brazilian turf horse named Bal a Bali.

“I was recommended, he called and asked if I’d train him for him,” Mandella said. “I had no problem saying yes quickly. Two years ago, he sent a few 2-year-olds that did okay. Last year, he sent a few more and one was Omaha Beach. It’s not a long relationship, but it’s been a good one. We’ve had a hotline the last two months.”

If Jones feels miffed he wasn’t tapped to train Omaha Beach he’s hiding it well. From the start, he said, the colt was bound for California. After the sale, Omaha Beach went to Bill and Lynn Recio’s Lynwood Stable in Ocala, Fla., for his earliest lessons, but before being shipped to Mandella he spent several weeks during spring 2018 in Jones’s barn at Keeneland. Jones himself rode the colt during morning exercise. Omaha Beach moved comfortably over the Keeneland dirt, and after the three turf defeats last summer and fall, owner and trainer huddled and decided to move to the main track. Omaha Beach has done nothing but move forward since.

“It gets me a little nervous when we’ve got all this hype about him,” Porter said. “I was fairly confident when Hard Spun ran in 2007, and Friesan Fire went off the favorite. . . . I feel like I have a better chance than I had before.”

Three Mays ago Rick Porter might have doubted he’d live to see another Derby. Instead, he’s very much live in this one.