Taking a shot
Liveyourbeastlife at 30-1 in Crown finale
The most unorthodox Triple Crown in history comes to an end with Albany’s Bill Lawrence taking a shot with “Beast.”
The most unorthodox Triple Crown in the history of the Triple Crown comes to an end on Saturday when the 145th running of the Preakness is held at Pimlico Race Course in Baltimore.
And Bill Lawrence would not mind one more case of strange as horse racing puts a bow on its marquee three-race series. The Albany owner, a 1979 graduate of Shaker High School, has one of the 11 horses that will enter the starting gate for the 1 3/16-mile Preakness, which, for the first time ever, is the final leg of the Triple Crown.
Lawrence's horse is named Liveyourbeastlife and he got no love at the Preakness draw. He, along with two others — Excession and Jesus' Team — was assigned 30-1 odds, the longest of any horse in the race.
"Look, I'm excited," Lawrence said this week. "I made a statement a couple weeks ago that I would never put a horse in a race that I didn't think we could win. This is a little different. I am not thinking we are definitely going to win, but I think we have a chance."
Liveyourbeastlife, a son of 2004 Horse of the Year Ghostzapper, gave Lawrence some Preakness confidence after he finished second in his latest start, the Grade II Jim Dandy at Saratoga on Sept. 5. In that race, Liveyourbeastlife, who went off at 14-1, rallied to finish behind Mystic Guide. He also finished three-quarters of a length in front of Jesus' Team.
In the start before that, he won an allowance race at the Spa, on Aug. 12.
Eight times Liveyourbeastlife has gone to the races and he has two wins, a second and a third. Six of his starts have seen him go off at double-digit odds, the lowest being 11-1, the highest 83-1. The Jim Dandy was his first graded stakes race.
He also had his best speed figure (94) in that race. He will get his sixth different jockey in his ninth career start. Trevor Mccarthy, the leading rider in Maryland in 2013, 2014, 2016 and 2019, gets the nod.
"I am very excited," trainer Jorge Abreu, who will be making his first try in a Triple Crown race, said. "The horse is going into the race in very good shape, so we'll take a shot and see what happens."
The 46-year-old Abreu has been training on his own since 2016. Before that, he worked six years for Hall of Fame trainer Nick Zito and then was with Mechanicville's Chad Brown for nine more. He has worked with Lawrence before. While with Brown, Abreu saw plenty of the horses co-owned by Lawrence with his longtime partner Seth Klarman of Klaravich Stables.
Lawrence and Klarman were together from 2006 to the end of last year and won more than 500 races. They won the 2019
Eclipse Award for top owner in 2019, thanks in part to Bricks and Mortar, that year's Horse of the Year.
"(Klarman) wanted to keep running a big stable," Lawrence said, explaining why he got out of the partnership. "He has 100-plus horses a year and I wanted to wind down. When you have that many horses and you are running every day, it was a big chunk of my life being taken up. I just decided to run a small stable."
He has certainly done that. Lawrence, the CEO and chief investment officer of Meridian Capital Partners, has just a handful of horses in training right now. In addition to Liveyourbeastlife, he has Analyze It, one of four Brown-trained horses running in the Grade I, $750,000 Shadwell Turf Mile at Keeneland on Saturday. The main reason for the downsizing has been the pandemic; Lawrence expects he will get more stock when things get back to normal.
Lawrence said he hasn't been to a race track since March. He's not sure if he'll be in Baltimore or not on Saturday.
He does think his horse is one that will improve. Can he knock off the likes of Kentucky Derby winner Authentic and Art Collector and the filly Swiss Skydiver and win the Preakness? There's only one way to find out. Because Liveyourbeastlife was not nominated to the Triple crown, the horse had to be supplemented to the Preakness for a $25,000 fee.
The odd name for the horse came about simply enough.
"Over the years, some of my friends nicknamed me "beast," Lawrence said. "It is what it is. We are going to try and win in beast mode."