NEW YORK - It is not easy to root for Michael Gill, the nation's leading owner with an astounding 121 victories already this year. He is a predatory businessman with a seemingly endless bankroll, claiming horses in droves and running them back for less than they're worth to rack up victories. He is a sometimes abrasive individual with seemingly little regard for the genteel veneer of the sport.
ARCADIA, Calif. - Consider the pressure heaped on a colt who just happens to be of Derby age.
There are perhaps 16,000 of them born and registered every year, and of those, maybe 11,000 might make it to the races. From there the demographics broaden. Horses tend to seek their rightful level. But for those who make the mistake of winning a race with flair and exhibiting a trace of quality, expectations begin to rain down like frogs in a Biblical plague.
It becomes the Derby, or nothing.
ARCADIA, Cal. - The road to the spring classics is anything but smooth. Even the great ones take their lumps, as Secretariat did in the Wood Memorial of 1973. The handicappers chorus sang that old refrain about Bold Rulers being unable to stay 1 1/4 miles and then the Red Horse came back to win the Kentucky Derby in track-record time.
ARCADIA, Calif. - On Saturday, Laffit Pincay Jr will celebrate the 25th anniversary of his victory aboard Affirmed in the 1978 Santa Anita Derby. It was a great moment, burned into the history books by Affirmed's eight-length romp over 11 hapless opponents, which essentially discouraged any West Coast colts from heading east in pursuit of the Kentucky Derby. With the red horse in the race, why bother?
ARCADIA, Calif. - The rare Karabakh horse of mountainous Azerbaijan traces back to the fifth century. It is not a large horse, described in various livestock references as built "clean and thick-set," with muscles well-developed and tendons well-defined, topped by a small, clean-cut head with a sharp eye and straight profile.
The loin is flat, short and wide, the croup is wide and strong, and the chest is deep. The hair, noted one review, "is soft and gleaming, either chestnut or bay with a characteristic golden tint."
Sound familiar?
LEXINGTON, Ky. - Keeneland's spring race meeting - its appeal to horsemen enhanced by an average daily purse distribution of over $600,000 - gets under way Friday and swings into high gear Saturday with an unusually compelling edition of the $500,000 Ashland for 3-year-old fillies.
ARCADIA, Calif. - John Veitch was asked to think back to the summer of 1977, when he trained the horses of Calumet Farm. He was more than happy to comply.
After all, that was the year Our Mims reigned as the best 3-year-old filly in the land. It was the beginning of Alydar, and his emerging rivalry with Affirmed. And it was the summer that Veitch's father, Sylvester Veitch, became a member of the Thoroughbred Racing Hall of Fame.
NEW YORK - The following sentence is not an early April Fool: The road to the Kentucky Derby goes through New Mexico Sunday.
Sunland Park, three miles over the Texas border and adjacent to El Paso and Juarez, Mexico, is really and truly hosting a $500,000 race for 3-year-olds. That jackpot has not attracted a Derby candidate on anyone's top 25, but it has lured trainers Bob Baffert and Steve Asmussen and jockeys Pat Day, Gary Stevens, and Pat Valenzuela to a track better known for Quarter Horse futurities than any connection with Thoroughbred stakes racing of any consequence.
ARCADIA, Calif. - Man o' War was foaled in the spring of 1917, while World War I was still raging in Europe.
War Admiral, Man o' War's most famous son, went to stud just in time to inspire a bounty of "war" babies foaled during World War II, including War Watch, War Jeep, and Cable.
Now comes a brand new war with a fresh vocabulary, rife with possibilities.
Coalition, Sandstorm, and Aljazeera already have been taken, according the Online Names Book accessible through the website of The Jockey Club. So has Peace Now, as well as both Tigris and Euphrates.
WASHINGTON - "I have never been one to endorse frivolous amusements," Sister Mary Catherine Antczak told one of her companions at Santa Anita Park last Sunday. Neither she nor any of the five nuns with her had ever been to a racetrack before, but they were about to learn that there is nothing frivolous about winning a pick six worth $194,047.80.