BALTIMORE - For months, Jeremy Rose has been a marked man within the riding profession. Almost every top jockey, and every top jockey's agent, wanted to take his job as the rider of Afleet Alex, one of the nation's leading 3-year-olds. Rose did indeed lose the assignment on Afleet Alex earlier this winter, and almost lost it again as the Triple Crown campaign was about to begin.
INGLEWOOD, Calif. - That shout of alarm heard last Saturday above the Pimlico din came from the living room of a suburban Lexington, Ky., home, where Chris McCarron was jolted off his couch by a sudden flashback to a similar near disaster of 18 years ago.
On the afternoon of May 2, 1987, McCarron and Alysheba appeared to be well on their way to victory in the 113th Kentucky Derby when Bet Twice, under Craig Perret, veered suddenly into their path. Alysheba stumbled badly, regained his stride, then had to angle even farther to the outside as Bet Twice continued to wander.
INGLEWOOD, Calif. - Sunday's Willard L. Proctor Memorial Stakes at Hollywood Park is a quiet little race for 2-year-old colts and geldings that celebrates the legacy of an unsung giant.
In his heyday, Willard Lee Proctor was a straight-shooting, hard-drinking, Depression-era Texas refugee who, thank goodness, fought on our side during World War II. He trained his horses as if they were his own, which they sometimes were, but mostly they belonged to men and women who could cut through Proctor's coarse cloth to the heart of a true horseman beneath.
NEW YORK - If someone had told you before the Kentucky Derby that Giacomo might improve three lengths off his previous form and run his final quarter-mile in 25.80 seconds, you would not have deemed such a proposition 50-1. You still would have doubted that this would be enough to win him the Derby. The shocking part of Derby 131 was not what Giacomo did, but what every other horse failed to do: run a triple-digit Beyer Speed Figure or finish the race in better than 26 seconds.
INGLEWOOD, Calif. - Mike Smith thought he could sneak into the Kentucky Derby Museum early Wednesday afternoon, sign a couple of Derby doodads, and pick up a few souvenirs before reporting to the jocks' room next door at Churchill Downs and hitting the hot box.
Boy, did he get that wrong.
TUCSON, Ariz. - There is a cloud casting shadows on the best thing to happen in California horse racing in years, and the California Horse Racing Board should act quickly to blow it away.
The board should publicly make clear, strongly and unequivocally, its continued support and full confidence in Ingrid Fermin, who has taken some unjustified criticism for the mistakes of others.
The racing board chose Fermin as its executive director in January - and made its best decision in years in doing so - and it should stand foursquare behind her now.
WASHINGTON - Kentucky Derby winner Giacomo may not inspire much excitement, but as many as 105,000 people are likely to pack Pimlico on Saturday to watch him try to win the Preakness. The race owes its immense popularity not to the horses but to a force larger than itself: the importance of the Triple Crown series.
INGLEWOOD, Calif. - That silvery gray smear of bone and muscle hurtling down the Hollywood Park stretch last Saturday to win the $350,000 Jim Murray Memorial Handicap answers to the name of Runaway Dancer. In a parallel life, however, he serves as the honorable carriage horse to a weighty cargo of personal dramas, all of them worthy of their own Oprah moment.
