Kentucky Derby
favorite Justify left an impression on veteran jockey Mike Smith the first time he asked the colt to move.
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — He just … feels like a Kentucky Derby champion.
Maybe it’s the massive, rippling frame. Maybe it’s the chestnut coat, evocative of Secretariat and other beloved runners of yore. Maybe it’s the one-word name that seems to beg for an exclamation point at the end.
For 52-year-old jockey Mike Smith, it was the sensation Justify gave him the first time he climbed aboard and asked the 3-year-old colt to move. “Freaky,” said Smith, who has ridden some of the greatest thoroughbreds of the last quarter century.
For a lot of people, it’s the white-maned gentleman standing beside the entrance to Barn 33, Justify’s temporary home this week at Churchill Downs. The backstretch carnival always seems to center on Bob Baffert when he brings a horse to Kentucky with a real chance of winning.
When Baffert — who’s won the Derby four times — believes in a horse, he speaks not in bold declarations but in subtle drips of confidence. So it was three years ago with American Pharoah. And so it has been this week with Justify, a 3-1 favorite in the morning line for today’s race.
“He’s a superior race horse,” the Hall of Fame trainer said this week. “He’s just so talented.”
This is Baffert’s first serious chance to win his fifth Derby since American Pharoah swept to the Triple Crown in 2015. He had a potential favorite last year, but Mastery fractured his left front leg after a dominant win in the San Felipe Stakes. Another top contender, McKinzie, fell off the Derby trail this year because of leg injury.
Which is all a way of saying Baffert appreciates what he has in Justify — a gifted, undefeated horse who seems to be peaking at the ideal moment.
So why don’t we just throw the garland of roses on him and save the other 19 horses the trouble?
Well, there is that pesky curse.
Justify did not run a race as a 2-year-old. The last time a horse won the Derby without a 2-year-old start on his resume was 136 years ago (for perspective, the race itself is 144 years old). If you follow the sport, you know his name.
Baffert had fun with it this week. Asked the biggest threat to Justify on Saturday afternoon, he pushed his voice to a mock-horrified rasp and said: “Apollo!”
Ah yes, the name of the 1882 champion and keeper of the curse. But it’s not a curse, really. More a very long trend or a warning to those who would dare show up with an insufficiently tested contender.
But history rolls on, and the era of Secretariat and Affirmed, who both ran nine times as 2-year-olds, is done. It’s no longer strange for a Derby contender to arrive with just four or five starts on his résumé. Almost every top trainer and owner seems to agree the Curse of Apollo is ripe to fall.
Justify isn’t the only top contender with a shot to topple it. Magnum Moon, the 6-1 third choice in the morning line, also did not run as a 2-year-old.
“Apollo” would hardly be the first arcane theory to be demolished by the right horse. For a long time, handicappers pointed to “Dosage Index,” a statistical measure of a horse’s pedigree for running at greater distances. Adherents believed that contenders with a Dosage Index above 4 were actually pretenders.
Well, American Pharoah’s Dosage Index was 4.33.
“Everybody talked about it and talked about it until it didn’t need to be talked about anymore,” said Elliott Walden, president and CEO of WinStar Farm, which coowns Justify. “I’m not worried about the curse. I think a big part of it is that the sample set is so small. I haven’t done the research, but typically, how many horses in the Derby didn’t run at 2? Probably one or two a year out of 20, so your percentage chances of winning are small going in.”
Curses aside, there is something to the inexperience angle. Baffert and Smith acknowledge it’s hard to know everything about a horse after just three starts (only one of them a graded stakes).
In the most important race of his young career, the Santa Anita Derby, Justify glided straight to the lead and hardly broke a sweat holding off another top Derby contender, Bolt d’Oro.
But what if he hadn’t been able to make that initial move unchallenged? How would he react to a bad turn of racing luck?
“We know he’s a great horse. But still, he has to do it,” Baffert said. “When you have 20 horses, the trip is so important — racing luck. Ten of them are probably going to get wiped out before the first turn. You just hope you’re not one of them.”