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 Horse sense from SI's racing sage
Posted: Thursday April 29, 1999 04:37 PM
Sports Illustrated senior writer William Nack answers 10 basic questions about Saturday's Kentucky Derby. 1. Why three-year-olds? Two-year-olds can't go a mile and a quarter. At three, horses sort of come to maturity, they're like teenagers. When they're babies, two-year-olds, they're not formed yet, their bones are not knit. A mile and a quarter is just too far. By the time they're three they can do it, they can start to go longer distances, they become competitive going a distance. Many years ago, Man o' War's owner, Sam Riddle, refused to put Man o' War in the Kentucky Derby beause he thought going a mile and a quarter early in a three-year-old's year was too much. He didn't think horses should go that far until summer or fall. It's a long distance to go for even a young three-year-old. 2. What's the average size of a horse and of a jockey? Horses usually weigh about 1,000 pounds. And from the withers (where a horse's neck starts to rise from his back) to the ground, measured in hands (four inches), the average height of a Thoroughbred is 16 hands. Jockeys are ectomorphs. Some are short and built like fireplugs, others are taller and very lean and very narrow. Traditionally, they're very fit, very athletic guys. They're just miniature people. They have very, very low body fat. Most of them diet very strenuously to try to stay around 112, 114 pounds. Bill Shoemaker in his prime was 100 pounds, he was just a toy person. They diet every day, they go into saunas, some of them are flippers (a guy who eats, then puts his finger down his throat and flips the food back up). But they make 10 percent of the winning purse, which for the Derby is $600,000, $700,000 -- so that's 60 grand for two minutes work. None of them will have a problem making the Derby's weight limit, which is 126 pounds. And they'll put lead slabs in the saddles so that every horse runs with exactly that load. 3. How important is post position? It's much more important in a large field, which is what we have Saturday. It's a cavalry charge to the first turn, more than a quarter-mile straightaway. Horses tend to sort themselves out in the run to the first turn. Churchill Downs is a one-mile track, so they start at the top of the stretch to go a mile and a quarter. When they hit the finish line for the first time it's been a quarter mile, and there's another 100 yards to the first turn -- so you're talking about a straightaway of about 500 yards. I think the bad post positions in the Kentucky Derby are 1 and 2, because horses can get trapped on the rail. Also, way outside: In a 20-horse field, you have a starting gate with 14 stalls, then an auxiliary gate with six stalls. When you're caught way out there, you gotta run hard in order to get to the first turn in decent position. The best post positions for the Derby are 4-14, because the jockey can look around and decide where to go. Horses way outside, if they have any speed, have to go from way out, outside of the racetrack, to try to get position. So post position can have a big influence on a large Derby field. When there's been smaller fields, eight or nine horses, then it doesn't matter. When you have a huge field, a charge-of-the-light-brigade like Saturday, if a speed horse is on the far outside, he'll have used himself up to get way over. Horses that start on the inside have a tendency to get trapped in all the traffic inside; they get buried on the rail and get shuffled back. The best post position at the Kentucky Derby is 7, lucky 7. 4. Why are fillies so rare? There are two females in this country who could beat most of the colts in this race -- the best one is Silverbulletday, and then there's Excellent Meeting. Both are trained by Bob Baffert. I think he'll run both in the Kentucky Oaks on Friday, for fillies. This time of year, unless they're really seasoned, unless they're big, strong fillies -- and I don't think either of these ones are; Silverbulletday is not robust, she's on the feminine side -- to run in herd of guys makes no sense. But both these fillies have won over a million dollars, and none of the colts in the Derby has. Baffert also might enter one or both of the horses but not run them, drawing a post position and thereby reducing the size of the field. 5. How does a Thoroughbred differ from other horses? A Thorougbred is bred for speed. It tends to be lean -- unlike, for instance, a quarterhorse, which is very stocky and very muscular. A mile-and-a-quarter racehorse, a Derby-type horse, tends to be leaner, taller, more slender. It has nothing to do with aerodynamics, it has to do with musculature. If you were to bring six or eight different breeds out of a barn, I could pick out the Thoroughbred immediately, just by size and the way he's muscled. Other horses? You have trotters and pacers. The Hambletonian is for trotters and The Little Brown Jug for pacers, those are their Derbies. Another popular breed in America is the saddlehorse, which you show at horse shows -- there's five-gaited and three-gaited saddlehorses. There's the fine harness horse, a tall, elegant horse -- they pull a buggy. Parade horses, often pintos or palominos, they have high action in front. Same with fine harness horses and most saddlehorses, they have high action, they raise their legs high in front. There are larger horses like the Budweiser horses, Clydesdales -- they're huge, they go sometimes 1,500 pounds. There are ponies -- miniature horses. They're also in horse shows, also high action, very fine looking. Like toy horses. And you've got dressage horses. There's also a breed called the Tennessee walking horse -- they have walking-horse classes in shows. It's very smooth to ride them. They're like saddlehorses also, but a different kind of a breed.
6. What's the training regimen like for a Thoroughbred? They live in the stall virtually 23 hours a day. They're out in the mornings, usually between 6 and 10. What a horse normally does is gallops -- not a full run, not a slow canter. A horse will gallop a mile and a half, two miles. Every fifth day, they'll have a workout in which they run fast. Some will go farther, but generally three-eighths, a half-mile, five-eighths, three-quarters are standard distances depending on where the horse is in its training and what it's getting ready for. For the Derby they're going five-eighths to three-quarters to get ready for a mile and a quarter. And they do that every fifth day. The day after they work hard, they just walk and don't leave the shed. Then they gallop for three days, then they work again. All depending on what you're working toward. 7. Who are some of the most significant trainers and stables? D. Wayne Lukas is prominent, he has two horses in the race -- Cat Thief and Charismatic. Bob Baffert has trained the last two Kentucky Derby winners, and he's got the two favorites this year: General Challenge and Prime Timber. Those stables are like empires. Baffert and Lukas have racing stables at various tracks, and they'll direct training by telephone if they're not there. They also have really good assistant trainers who work under their stead. Even if Baffert is in California, he'll be on the phone with his guy at Churchill Downs. Elliot Walden had Victory Gallop, which won the Belmont last year. His stable is here at Churchill Downs, and he has two horses in the race: Menifee and Ecton Park. There are three guys in the Derby this year who have won two Kentucky Derbys in this decade -- Lukas (past winners: Grindstone, Thunder Gulch); Baffert (Real Quiet, Silver Charm); and Nick Zito (Strike the Gold, Go For Gin), who also has two entries: Adonis and Stephen Got Even. No trainer has ever won three in row, and Baffert's in that position right now. Lukas won two in row then finished way back in the third one. Then you've got Carl Nafzger, who won with Unbridled, and he's got a really, really good horse in this race named Vicar. Carl's in position to be the fourth trainer to win two this decade. So, really, the Derbys have become dominated by a short supply of trainers. 8. How do track conditions factor in? I think the Derby is going to be fast, if it doesn't rain too hard. Generally if a racetrack has been rained on in the last 24 hours and is drying out, it'll be called good. So you go from fast to good to muddy. But this muddy track is not like the muddy you'd think of, real deep and sticky. It's got a firm bottom, and horses will kind of skip over it. It's like the part of the beach where the waves hit and then recede, and you can run over that fairly well. A cuppy track is generally a track that doesn't have a lot of water on it, it's dry, and when a horse hits with his foot and pulls himself forward with his front feet, his front foot will slide a little bit instead of grabbing firmly; he'll be tentative, and a lot of horses hate that. 9. Do horse colors have any bearing on results? The predominant color is bay -- brown with a black mane and tail. Real Quiet was a bay, last year. Silver Charm was a gray. There used to be superstitions about grays; nobody wanted a gray until Native Dancer came along, the great Gray Ghost they called him. The other color, which is my favorite, is chestnut, sometimes almost like copper. Secretariat and Man o' War and Alydar were chestnut. Secretariat looked like a new penny. There are different shades of chestnut, darker or lighter and brighter. It's just genetics, there's no effect on speed. But it just so happens the best racehorses I've seen in this country have been chestnuts. 10. What are the storylines to watch this year? A great experiment is going on. The Arabs, who have dominated European racing for years -- sometimes it seems that all they care about is horse racing -- are this year launching their assault on America's most famous race. Sheiks Maktoum al Maktoum and Mohammed al Maktoum, members of the ruling family of the United Arab Emirates, had to buy a horse last fall in order to get a real contender for Derby. They bought an American horse, trained on dirt by Baffert -- Worldly Manner. He won the Del Mar Futurity last September 9 and emerged as one of the best two-year-olds, and the two sheiks' Godolphin Racing bought him for $5 million. Worldly Manner has been in the desert all fall and all winter, and just got to Kentucky a week ago. He's only had one prep race. It's unprecedented. No horse has ever trained in Dubai or the Middle East and gone on to win. Derby horses have usually fought and struggled through prep races, and they're as fit as a goose flying from Montreal to Florida. By the time a horse gets here he has no body fat, he's very fit, he's had dirt kicked in his face, and he's ready. In order to win the Kentucky Derby, the one underlying fact is he's got to be physically and mentally fit. Otherwise he'll get lost; it's too far and there are too many horses around you ready to go. If Worldly Manner wins off a single trial race against stablemates in Dubai ... it would be just completely off the wall. As Wayne Lukas said, "I guess we'd all start training in Dubai." This horse has not been knocked around. I saw him, other trainers have seen him, and he looks fit. Whether he's mentally ready to undergo the pressure for a mile and a quarter is another story.
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