Alan Truex: Improbable battles Bourbon War at creaky Pimlico
Updated Thursday, May 16
Pimlico Race Course, in a very nonexclusive suburb of Baltimore and home of the 144-year-old Preakness Stakes, is an embarrassment to the sport of horse racing, which as you know is not easily embarrassed.
This long-crumbling arena was showing most of its age in the early 1990s. In more recent years it sprang a leak in the roof. There are concerns about the roof’s stability. And the floor’s. Last month the Maryland Jockey Club removed 6,600 rickety seats in the older of its two grandstands. Now there’s only enough seating for 32,000.
Thank God the weather for Saturday’s Preakness is a good bet (though not a lock) to be sunny. As it wasn’t a year ago. Justify on his way to his Triple Crown had to slosh through mud and fog that made for a scene messier even than the recent Kentucky Derby.
The Preakness on a good day is a worthy runner-up to the Derby, its $1.5 million purse being something only Gary West would sneeze at. Hey, Gary, the second jewel of racing’s Triple Crown is not quartz.
And let’s not forget the history here, which a handful of Baltimore’s politicians are trying to preserve. Pimlico, a/k/a Old Hilltop, survived the Great Baltimore Fire of 1910. Fort McHenry is less than a half-day’s ride. This is still one of the country’s most popular sporting events, one of the few that’s attended by upwards of 100,000, even when battered by rain in an era of climate change or not.
It can still be the Second-Most Exciting Two Minutes in Sports. And with any luck at all it will not be followed by the Second-Most Agonizing 22 Minutes of Video Replay.
Racing fans were hoping for a rematch between the Kentucky Derby’s gate-to-wire leader, Maximum Security, and the stewards’ winner, Country House. But West, owner of Maximum Security, turned maximum sore loser. He responded to an unfair but not unfathomable DQ with a threat of litigation and an historic snub of the Preakness. West vanned his horse not to Maryland but to New Jersey.
As if it couldn’t get worse, Country House contracted a virus and has been scratched from the race, meaning there can be no Triple Crown this year.
And it turns out that Maximum Security probably would not have run in this Preakness even if jockeys Flavien Prat and Jon Court had never objected to the unofficial result.
Maximum’s trainer, Jason Servis, saw a worn-down horse three days after his circling of Churchill Downs. There were abrasions on his legs. “Banged around on a sloppy track,” he said. “He needs rest.”
So we’re left with a field that includes only seven of the top 30 qualifiers for the Kentucky Derby.
Of the ones who ran for the roses, only four are going for the Blackeyed Susans (or painted daisies) two weeks later: Improbable (4th by disqualification), War of Will (7th), Win Win Win (9th) and Bodexpress (13th).
Improbable, who’s trained by twice Triple Crowned Bob Baffert, is the morning-line favorite (5/2) after post positions were drawn Wednesday afternoon.
Baffert entered three in the Derby, but Improbable, the narrow favorite, was the only one who emerged unscathed. Game Winner has muscle soreness in the hind end – similar to what afflicted War of Will in the Louisiana Derby.
As for Roadster, of whom Baffert had the highest hopes, a roughly contested trip at Churchill took a couple hundred pounds off him, thank you, Florent Geroux. The colt looked haggard three days later. “I need to get some weight on him,” Baffert said.
Sadly, this is the year of disillusion, death and destruction in the Sport of Kings. Horse racing weathered, so to speak, two shutdowns of one of its premier venues – Santa Anita Race Park, on the outskirts of Hollywood – because horses were dying – 23 for the meet.
And now, in what traditionally has been its most glorious week of the year, the sport is pummeled by Pimlico negativity. Belinda Stronach, CEO of Santa Anita as well as Pimlico and other tracks, received a government subsidy to renovate two of the ones she owns in Maryland.
The writing is on the wall. And in the checks she writes. Lots more money going to Laurel, which has 159 racing dates this year to Pimlico’s 12.
The Preakness is committed to Pimlico for 2020, but that’s probably the last gasp of a ghost track.
Which is not to say we won’t have an entertaining race Saturday.
Improbable benefits from the jockey switch to Hall of Famer Mike Smith. He steered Roadster to victory in the Santa Anita Derby but chose Omaha Beach for Kentucky. Probably the right call had not Omaha scratched with the same sort of breathing issue that knocked out a third of Roadster’s juvenile year. Yes, irony is running amok in this Triple Crown season.
War of Will (Preakness second favorite at 4/1) was the best horse in Louisiana until he was hurt. He was making a strong run in the Kentucky Derby before he was fouled, intentionally or not, by Luis Saez, who’s been suspended 14 days for whatever he did or did not do on Maximum Security.
This Preakness has five “new shooters” who failed to qualify for the Derby but are better than several who did: Signalman (hugely discounted at 30/1), Anothertwistafate, Bourbon War, Owendale, Alwaysmining.
Alwaysmining (8/1) has won six straight races, all at Laurel, five stakes. Among the colts he beat was Win Win Win, last December. Alwaysmining’s trainer, Kelly Rubley, kept him home and targeted the Preakness instead of the Derby.
When Alwaysmining won the Federico Tesio Stakes he automatically qualified for the Preakness. When he won it by 11 ½ lengths he qualified as a win contender for the Preakness.
Rubley hopes to be the first female trainer to win a Preakness, and the colt’s speed figures support her cause. Daniel Centeno, on a bigger stage than usual, may stalk from the 7 post and concede the front to two other speedy new shooters, Warrior’s Charge and Market King.
Warrior’s Charge (12/1) is well trained by Brad Cox, and well bred, has raced four times, won two and showed twice. Market King (30/1), who’s trained by 83-year-old but always welcome Wayne Lukas, set the pace in the Rebel Stakes. He finished third to the Kentucky Derby’s ephemeral favorite, Omaha Beach.
A well-contested pace sets up Bourbon War (12/1), whose closing style was not suited to Gulfstream Park, where he finished second and fourth in two slow-paced stakes, the Fountain of Youth and Florida Derby. The son of Tapit was seeking more distance and should find it in the Preakness, 1 3/16 miles.
Irad Ortiz Jr., reigning Eclipse award winner, rides Bourbon War from the ground-saving No. 2 post. He could bring a closer to victory and perhaps go on to claim the Belmont, whose mile and a half should be even more advantageous. With two-thirds of a Triple Crown now being the most we can hope for, Bourbon War seems the most likely to get there, though I won’t back him on Saturday at less than 5/1.
Baffert may have been thinking of Bourbon War when he denounced non-winning prepsters being in the Derby. But one of those, Giacomo, did win one, and in a more conventional way than Country House did it. In Triple Crown racing these days, there’s not much you can rule out.
