One-eyed Finnick the Fierce and his team have work cut out in Lecomte

NEW ORLEANS – Where a right eye should flicker, Finnick the Fierce sports an empty socket.

The horse with one eye drew post 1 for the 14-horse Lecomte Stakes, to be run Saturday at Fair Grounds.

Finnick the Fierce would merit spilled ink, downloaded bytes, even with full vision. He was bought for a relative song by a Kentucky veterinarian, Arnaldo Monge. The man who broke him as a yearling, Rey Hernandez, liked him well enough to acquire a half-interest from Monge and trains him. Hernandez, 39, hails from Guatemala. Ever heard of a Guatemalan racetracker?

In 2018, Hernandez, a former jockey and exercise rider who worked for retired trainer Elliott Walden and WinStar Farm, notched a mere eight winners. Now he has 35 horses in training, 28 winners during 2019, and a one-eyed gelding he was shipping midweek from his base at the Thoroughbred Training Center outside Lexington, Ky., down to New Orleans.

“I’m pretty happy with the numbers I got,” Hernandez said. “Had a really good year last year – win my first stake. Now I have this nice 3-year-old that’s been doing well. It’s everyone’s dream to try and get better horses.”

Finnick the Fierce, by Dialed In out of Southern Classic, by Southern Image, has been doing well. He looked like a beaten horse racing five furlongs this past July in his career debut at Indiana Downs but found a higher gear at the furlong grounds and surged to victory. Hernandez said that for lack of appealing opportunities he took it easy with Finnick the Fierce the rest of the summer, and the gelding finished fourth after being stopped before the quarter pole in a first-level allowance race over 6 1/2 furlongs on Nov. 9 at Churchill. Hernandez and Monge opted to run him back three weeks later in the Grade 2 Kentucky Jockey Club, where Finnick the Fierce rallied to finish second, beaten three-quarters of a length by Silver Prospector.

Ridden by Sonny Leon, Finnick the Fierce might have lost more than three-quarters of a length while racing wide around the far turn, but outside paths are preferred when a horse lacks a right eye. Leon has a return call Saturday.

Finnick the Fierce lost his eye as a foal, said Hernandez, who moved to the United States in 1987 and worked as a hotwalker and groom before becoming an exercise rider. Hernandez still gets on many of his own horses, including Finnick the Fierce, who has been posting swift solo morning works preparing for his 3-year-old debut. In his two Churchill starts, Finnick the Fierce raced through the homestretch with his head cocked to the right, trying to use his left eye to obtain a larger field of forward-facing vision.

“Post 1, that’s the post position pretty much nobody wants,” Hernandez said. “It’s the last place you want to be with a one-eyed horse. The good thing is it’s a mile and a sixteenth, and there’s more time to recover.”

Finnick the Fierce was 34-1 in his Churchill allowance and almost 90-1 in the Kentucky Jockey Club – a habitual outsider who needs to find his way off the inside part of the Fair Grounds track Saturday.