Triple Crown bid next test for Justify
BALTIMORE – He emerged out of the fog, and the crowd at Pimlico Race Course roared. From where most of the 134,487 people were watching the 143rd Preakness Stakes, it was unclear what they had missed.
When Justify vanished into the abyss leaving the first turn, he had been locked in an eyeto-eye duel with Good Magic, the same horse that challenged him at the top of the stretch in the Kentucky Derby. And when Justify finally emerged, it was obvious that nothing had changed, the match race still ongoing.
“It was like the longest race of my life,” said Teo Ah Khing, chairman of the China Horse Club, which co-owns Justify. “Twenty seconds without seeing the horse felt like years.”
Those excruciating seconds now reduced to one quartermile stretch run, and it was obvious this was going to be nothing like the Derby, when Justify put away Good Magic with one burst of acceleration and cruised to the finish line.
Now, we were going to learn something about the undefeated colt, whose first four races had all been won rather easily. Was he going to sprint away from the field like American Pharoah and romp his way to Belmont Park with an air of invincibility? Was he going to have to gut it out for the first time in his life? Might he actually lose?
“I was never relaxed during the race,” trainer Bob Baffert said. “He was in for a fight. I was just praying for the wire.”
When the wire came, Justify was still in front of hard-charging Bravazo by a half-length, but the big picture was just as hazy as it had been 45 seconds earlier.
Justify heads to the Belmont Stakes 5-for-5, a special talent, a superstar in full bloom and perhaps the 13th Triple Crown winner. But horse racing is a game in which everything is open to interpretation, and for the next three weeks, Justify’s performance in the Preakness will serve as a Rorschach test in which all the answers reside with an equine animal who is unable to speak for himself.
Sunday morning, Baffert offered one possible interpretation: the bounce theory. It’s a term horse players often use to predict or explain a sharp regression for a horse immediately after running the best race of his career, and in Justi- fy’s case it manifested itself in the stretch when he struggled to break free from the field like he did in the Derby once jockey Mike Smith asked him for his best.
“He got a little tired,” Smith said. “This was his hardest race he’s had, but he was waiting on competition too. It was a good kind of tired, and I’m hoping he’ll move forward.”
It wasn’t just the visual evidence that suggested the Preakness was a less impressive race for Justify. His Beyer Speed Figure, a well-known handicapping tool that distills how fast every race was run taking into account distance and track condition, was 97 for the Preakness after running a 103 for the Derby.
For comparison’s sake, American Pharoah ran a 105 in the Derby and 102 in the Preakness, before posting a 105 in the Belmont as he clinched the first Triple Crown in 37 years.
“These great horses, they just define themselves when they get in that situation,” Baffert said. “He showed not only is he a big, beautiful, gorgeous horse, but he’s all racehorse, and that’s what it took to win today.”
If Baffert is right — that Justify’s Preakness was about overcoming the bounce, surviving a duel with Good Magic that was unlike anything he had experienced before on the racetrack and digging deep to get to the wire first — perhaps he’ll be fitter and faster than ever in three weeks.
But don’t expect the competition to buy it.
The other interpretation coming out of the Preakness is that Justify, a horse that didn’t even make his debut on the racetrack until Feb. 18, has been pushed so hard just to get to this point that the cracks are beginning to show. The Preakness was his fifth race in 91 days — a demanding schedule by modern racing standards — and now he must turn around in three weeks to run 11⁄ miles, a
2 challenge that has undone even some all-time greats.
For the connections of Bravazo or Tenfold, who finished a good third in his fourth career race and was closing the gap at the end, there will be every reason to press on, to make Justify earn his way into the club of immortals.
Baffert understands that part of it, too, notably in 1998 when Real Quiet got nipped at the wire by Victory Gallop, a horse trained by Elliott Walden. Now 20 years later, Walden is CEO of co-owner WinStar Farms, and spoiling a Triple Crown is not among his list of regrets.
“Those things tend to happen the way they’re supposed to happen,” Walden said. “Bob and I talked about that before, that when you mention American Pharoah, Seattle Slew, the horses that won it — take nothing away from Real Quiet — but he just wasn’t quite the horse that could get that done. So if Justify is meant to do it, it’ll happen. If not, it just won’t.”
Justify might very well belong in that group. What he’s already done is special, and perhaps at the end of the day on June 9 there will be no question about his place in history. But until then, he’s left the door open just enough to make his rivals think he can be had.