Flavien Prat was acting like a kid at Christmas. No, check that. He was acting like a kid the week before Christmas, dizzy with anticipation.
“He kept saying, ‘Let’s get to the big stuff,’ ” said his agent, Derek Lawson, as last Saturday’s Santa Anita program began. “I told him to be patient. Do his job, and then we would be heading for Kentucky. It would be here before he knew it.”
It’s a very lucky racetracker who can hold dear the memory of winning a Kentucky Derby. Then there is Yvonne Azeff, who is lucky to have any memory at all.
As chief assistant to trainer John Ward, Azeff was deeply involved in the development of 2001 Derby winner Monarchos. The son of Maria’s Mon carried the colors of Oklahoma oilman John Oxley, who owns this year’s likely Derby favorite, Classic Empire.
In May 1983, the flashy chestnut Fighting Fit gave Jerry Moss his first big hit in the racing business, winning the Mervyn LeRoy Handicap at Hollywood Park. Two months later, “Every Breath You Take” by The Police reached No. 1 on the pop music top 20 for the A&M record company founded by Moss and Herb Alpert and stayed there through the rest of the summer.
Rudy Alvarado recalls talking to Garrett Gomez for the last time during the summer of 2016. He said Gomez sounded cautiously upbeat, that he was feeling good and living in Arizona. When Alvarado asked if Gomez was contemplating a return to riding, the former four-time national champion said he was not.
Every year, in the run-up to the first weekend in May, the Kentucky Derby overshadows everything in its orbit including, unfortunately, the Kentucky Oaks. It doesn’t even matter how good (or not good), the Derby promises to be; the Derby dwarfs the Oaks simply because it is the Kentucky freakin’ Derby.
And every year, people, sometimes with justification but always with misplaced hope, lament how the Kentucky Oaks gets short shrift. It’s an endless cycle. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
In a stretch of 13 races beginning with an allowance March 21, 2015, and ending with a flourish last Sept. 17, the Thoroughbred racehorse known as Tepin finished first 11 times and second twice. In one of those seconds, she was beaten a head; in the other, a nose.
Seven of those 13 races were rated Grade 1 or Group 1, four Grade 2, and one Grade 3. Three times in that stretch, Tepin ran against the best males purse money could buy.
Even without a calendar, the signs of April are obvious. The Cubbies are losing games again. The calla lilies have been in glorious bloom. And Imperative is heading to West Virginia for the Charles Town Classic.
It is hard to imagine a world without both Imperative and the Classic. The race was inaugurated in the spring of 2009, shortly before he was conceived in Kentucky through the breeding of champion Bernardini to the 15-year-old Call Her, a daughter of Caller I.D.
Mark Casse is not Canadian. It only looks that way.
It looks that way because he is a member of the Canadian Horse Racing Hall of Fame, having been inducted in 2016. He has been Woodbine’s leading trainer 11 times, trained four horses to be Canadian Horse of the Year, and just last week received his ninth consecutive Sovereign Award as Canada’s outstanding trainer.
In a Kentucky Derby prep-race season that has taken some weird and uninspiring turns even by Kentucky Derby prep-season standards – which says a lot – Saturday’s Arkansas Derby at Oaklawn was an entirely fitting coda.
At the top, it was good for the Derby and good for the game that Classic Empire won the Arkansas Derby. Classic Empire was last year’s unanimous 2-year-old male champion, and a 3-year-old with credentials like that should absolutely be in the Kentucky Derby field, as long as he is ambulatory.
