DRF sales editor Joe Nevills analyzes the Kentucky Derby field, in post position order, in the form of Haiku, a Japanese poem of 17 syllables, in three lines of five, seven, and five.
Ocho Ocho Ocho
Delta Jackpot ace
Still seeking 2-year-old form
He’ll find it elsewhere
Carpe Diem
Seven-figure colt
Appears built for the classics
But that post is tough
Materiality
Apollo’s shadow
Looms on a woozy stretch run
This is not his time
This year’s Kentucky Derby might be quite polarizing between the favorites and the longshots, but the great equalizer for them all will be the distance of the race.
The Derby will be the first start at 1 1/4 miles for every horse in the field, and many of the horses running Saturday will never run 10 furlongs in competition again, leaving bettors to speculate on each horse’s capability at the classic distance.
While a majority of the runners in this year’s Kentucky Derby will indeed be returning to “My Old Kentucky Home” when they step onto the track for the post parade, a handful of colts serve as standard-bearers for state and regional breeding programs looking to add to their history or add international flavor to America’s most storied race.
Grade 1 winner Jimmy Creed will join Warrior’s Reward among the inaugural stallion roster at Spendthrift Australia for the upcoming Southern Hemisphere season.
The 6-year-old son of Distorted Humor will participate in Spendthrift’s Share the Upside program, standing for a fee of $8,637 ($11,000 Australian), or $6,908 ($8,800 Australian) for a standard live-foal contract.
Spendthrift announced the purchase of Yalambee Stud in Victoria, Australia, on April 7 and renamed the property with plans to expand into breeding, racing, and sales.
Darley Australia has revealed the advertised fees for its 21-horse stallion roster for the 2015 breeding season, led by U.S. shuttle sire Medaglia d’Oro.
Sheikh Mohammed Al-Maktoum’s Australian breeding operation spans two farms, with the majority residing at Kelvinside Stud in Aberdeen, New South Wales, and seven stallions standing at Northwood Park in Seymour, Victoria.
Spendthrift Farm is loaded for bear with representatives by its stallions in this Kentucky Derby – and that appears unlikely to change in future years, as some of those stallions are just getting started.
Of the 20 horses in the main body of the Derby field as of Monday morning, sires standing at Spendthrift’s Lexington, Ky., base accounted for six. Those include three first-crop sires – Line of David, Temple City, and Warrior’s Reward.
Following a bullet work at Churchill Downs, juvenile champion American Pharoah, an open-lengths winner of both his starts this year, looms as the heavy favorite for the Kentucky Derby. The colt, who races for his breeder, Zayat Stables, and is trained by Bob Baffert, is the son of another standout for the same connections – WinStar Farm stallion Pioneerof the Nile, who finished second in the 2009 Kentucky Derby.
The race records of the half-brothers Ghostzapper and City Zip are, in a sense, mirror images of each other. City Zip was a top-class 2-year-old, winning the Grade 1 Hopeful and three other graded stakes from 11 starts, but he was not quite as effective at 3, though still a very fast horse, and retired to stud at 4. Ghostzapper, by contrast, raced only twice at 2 but did not win his first stakes until late fall of his 3-year-old season.
