Justify can seal Triple Crown in land I came to love
Lost luggage and a hospital visit scarred early memories for Marcus Armytage, but racing in the US won him over
It may surprise you that two of my top 10 races of all time were American dirt races
America and I did not get off to the best of starts but, like a lot of relationships which begin on the wrong foot, things could only get better.
The first time I went, in 1987, I had been invited on a week-long trip to ride in an International amateur Flat race at Delaware Park as part of a six-man European team. Instead of forwarding my luggage, including all my racing kit, to Philadelphia, the baggage handlers at JFK International Airport, presumably for a bit of fun, sent it back across the Atlantic to Brussels.
It caught up with me on day six of the seven and, in the meantime, I had to borrow clothes from my team-mates, so I wore Italian trousers, a French shirt, Swedish swimming trunks, Dutch trainers, Spanish sunglasses and Irish Y-fronts because of John Queally’s predilection for them over boxers.
In the Flat race, I clipped heels with the horse in front and fell; even by my standards, a 7,000-mile round trip to fall off took some beating and, although pushed into a hospital in a wheelchair for a foot X-ray, I ran out when someone was sick all over the waiting room.
My second visit a few years later was not much better. On the morning of the race at Arlington, Chicago, I awoke with an eye infection, which meant I could not use my contact lenses.
Without glasses or contacts, my life is a blur, so I had to get another jockey to lead me to my trainer in the paddock and I had to ride ‘blind’.
Though mediocre dirt racing in America can be excruciating to watch, since that day I have never complained about the lack of variety in US racetracks or that every course, a left-handed dirt oval about a mile round, is almost identical to the next. Even if I had been instructed to make the running, I would not have got lost.
It may surprise you, therefore, given my history with the land of the free and my own jumping pedigree that two of my top 10 races of all time were American dirt races; Zenyatta’s defeat by Blame in the 2010 Breeders’ Cup Classic, and the three-way photo between Bayern, Toast of New York and California Chrome in the 2014 Classic.
At the very highest level, dirt racing has the capacity to be as captivating as any racing on the planet and tomorrow night in New York, horse racing will provide one of the most compelling moments of America’s sporting year when Justify bids to win the US Triple Crown in the Belmont Stakes.
Unlike with our own Derby fourth, Saxon Warrior, whose British Triple Crown aspirations were already in tatters at Tattenham Corner, Justify is already two thirds of the way there, having won the Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes, two energysapping races run in gruelling conditions.
While it is the range of distances that make our own Triple Crown so challenging – a mile in the Guineas, a mile and a half in the Derby and a mile and three quarters in the St Leger – it is the proximity of the races in America, three in five weeks, that makes the US version so demanding.
Justify’s wholehearted style of racing means he arrives at Belmont Park on the back of two hard races. A couple of rivals tomorrow night, including the secondfavourite Hofburg, will arrive fresh having skipped the Preakness, while Bravazo, a fastclosing runner-up at Pimlico, ran as if the extra 2½ furlongs at Belmont will help his cause.
But as long as Justify has a better journey than I did on my first two trips to America, 99 years after Sir Barton became the first, US racing should be celebrating its 13th Triple Crown winner tomorrow.