Baffert’s Justify evokes Pharoah
BALTIMORE — The comparisons were inevitable. One of the most famous trainers in thoroughbred racing, Bob Baffert, brings a talented Kentucky Derby champion to the Preakness just three years after he ended a 37-year Triple Crown drought with another horse who seemed to float above the dirt.
It’s impossible to talk about Justify, the 1-2 favorite for Saturday’s 143rd Preakness, without bringing up American Pharoah.
Even the setting for Justify’s attempt — a Pimlico Race Course track that has been pounded by four consecutive days of rain — seems designed to evoke Pharoah’s Preakness run from three years ago, when he roared out of the mud and mist to win by seven lengths.
Everyone remembers his historic victory three weeks later at Belmont Park. But it was at the Preakness where American Pharoah stamped himself a great horse. Can Justify do the same? “They’re superior horses,” Baffert said, drawing the comparison. “They’re both quick and their mechanics are the same. They just glide over the ground.”
Justify is about 100 pounds heavier, hence Baffert terming him the LeBron James to American Pharoah’s Michael Jordan. “King Kong,” rival trainer D. Wayne Lukas called him on Friday morning.
No matter how you spin the metaphor, his talent has the racing world excited in a way it has not been since 2015.
“I think he’s a real star already,” said NBC race announcer Larry Collmus, who called the 2015 Triple Crown and Justify’s Derby victory. “As for reaching American Pharoah’s level, I think he absolutely could. He’s got the size, the name, the trainer, he’s undefeated.”
Collmus will never forget walking out to the roof at Pimlico on May 16, 2015, and watching the line of charcoal gray clouds creep above him as post time neared. With two minutes to go, the rain was so fierce he could not see the track.
“The only one who didn’t seem bothered at all was American Pharoah,” he said.
Justify seemed similarly unperturbed at the Derby, where he had to cope with a relentless downpour, an unusually talented field of 19 rivals and a bellowing crowd of 157,813. He handled the madness more impressively than Pharoah did in his Derby victory.
“He’s just got that big, powerful body, that big, long stride,” Baffert said. “He’s so efficient. He just does it easily, and I’m sure those other horses were thinking, ‘Dude, we can’t keep up with him!’”
The performance was all the more stunning because the big chestnut colt had run his maiden race just 76 days earlier. Talk centered on him slaying the dreaded “Curse of Apollo,” the 136-year streak in which no horse won the Derby without running as a 2-year-old.
But the curse talk almost undersold Justify’s remarkable progress. He existed far off the racing world’s radar last fall, when horses such as Good Magic and Bolt d’Oro vied for 2-year-old supremacy. Baffert didn’t lay eyes on him until the turn of the year.
Justify was not a born underdog like California Chrome. His father, the late Scat Daddy, was a terrific sire.
Both Elliott Walden of WinStar Farm and Michael Wallace of the China Horse Club were struck by his rare combination of size and lightness of foot when they paid $500,000 for him at the September 2016 Keeneland sale.
“He was a beautiful horse,” Wallace