D'Amato seeks pay dirt in the Santa Anita Derby
ARCADIA >> Visitors to Phil D'Amato's barn at Santa Anita are greeted by bright white wooden plaques with neat blue numbers advertising the thoroughbred trainer's impressive career totals in stakes victories and track championships.
D'Amato's next stakes win might deserve a plaque of its own.
When he saddles the 3-year-old colt Stronghold for the $750,000, Grade I Santa Anita Derby today, D'Amato will be seeking the biggest win of his life and a chance for a career-defining win in the May 4 Kentucky Derby.
“It's definitely looked at as the Super Bowl of our sport more than any other race in the country,” D'Amato said of the Kentucky Derby. “Just to get there is a feat. To get there and win it is an exceptional feat. We've got to get there first.”
Stronghold, ridden by Antonio Fresu, is the 5-2 second choice on the Santa Anita Derby morning line, behind 8-5 favorite Imagination and ahead of 5-1 Tapalo, 5-1 Mc Vay, 8-1 Wynstock, 10-1 Tessuto, 20-1 E J Won the Cup and 20-1 Curlin's Kaos.
Imagination and Wynstock are ineligible for the Kentucky Derby because Churchill Downs added a third year to trainer Bob Baffert's suspension resulting from Medina Spirit's disqualification from victory in the 2021 Derby. That leaves Stronghold and five other Santa Anita Derby runners to battle for qualifying points awarded to topfive finishers.
To add enough points to his column to ensure a spot in the 20-horse field at Churchill, Stronghold probably must finish third or better in the Santa Anita Derby. A fourth-place finish might be good enough too, depending on the results of other races today. The Blue Grass Stakes, in Lexington, Ky., and the Wood Memorial, in New York, round out the final week of major Triple Crown preps.
It's a new experience for D'Amato, 48, a San Pedro native who was an assistant to training giant Mike Mitchell before taking over the stable when Mitchell retired 10 years ago this month. Mitchell died of cancer the following year.
D'Amato has established himself as one of Southern California's top trainers. The signs on the barn's exterior remind you he has led meets in victories 12 times and has won 18 elite Grade I races along with more than 100 Grade II's and III's. The biggest, from a national perspective, was Obviously's front-running win with jockey Flavien Prat in the 2018 Breeders' Cup Turf Sprint at Santa Anita.
But his reputation has been built on success with horses specializing in turfcourse races, an emphasis he says he and most of his clients settled on because it's generally less expensive to buy young horses whose pedigrees and conformation are suited to grass than those built for dirt main tracks. In simple terms, turf horses tend to be more lightly built, dirt horses more solidly built, like the difference between human distance runners and sprinters.
Although turf racing has grown in prominence in America in recent decades, dirt-track classics such as the Triple Crown races remain the heart of the sport here.
That's why getting to the Kentucky Derby would be a huge stride for D'Amato, whose closest brush with the race has been running horses on the undercard.