After Rich Strike’s win, order is restored
Two weeks after a late entry named Rich Strike unleashed a rail-skimming, swerving stretch run to win the Kentucky Derby at impossible 80-1 odds, reality set in again.
Early Voting, a colt owned by billionaire hedge fund investor Seth Klarman, repelled the challenge of the heavily favored Epicenter to capture the 147th running of the Preakness Stakes.
Granted, the colt’s victory wasn’t as compelling as the Derby winner’s.
Rich Strike was the only horse in training for his owner, Rick Dawson. His trainer, Eric Reed, ships his horses from his modest farm in Lexington, Ky., to backwater tracks in Ohio, Indiana and West Virginia, where the ding, ding, ding of slot machines provides the soundtrack for low-budget horse dramas.
His jockey? Sonny
Leon. Don’t worry if the name is not familiar; seasoned horseplayers were barely familiar with the 32-year-old Venezuelan.
Still, it wasn’t like Early Voting’s victory was totally void of warm and fuzzy. Klarman was celebrating his 65th birthday and grew up three blocks from Pimlico Race Course, a blistered monument to the sepia age of horse racing.
After all, the hardknocking Seabiscuit gave hope to Depression-era Americans when he upset 1937 Triple Crown champion War Admiral, owned by one of the titans of the turf, Sam Riddle, in a match race there.
Seabiscuit was a victory for the proletariat. Early Voting’s win here was a tribute to a sound business plan executed by a team of thoroughbred racing’s blue bloods.
The colt’s trainer, Chad Brown, has hundreds of horses provided by enough well-heeled owners to make him a fourtime Eclipse Award champion trainer. Early Voter’s jockey, Jose Ortiz, along with his brother Irad, are perennially among the top 10 riders in the nation.
And Klarman, who got rich and famous as a value investor, applied those principles to win the middle jewel of the Triple Crown. He had the foresight and iron will to resist the lure of the Derby.
With only three starts, two of them victories, Klarman told Brown that Early Voting wasn’t ready to face 19 horses and the mayhem of America’s most famous race.
The trainer and owner followed a similar path to win the 2017 Preakness with Cloud Computing, a similarly lightly raced colt that offered more promise than performance at that point in his career but delivered.
So when Dawson and Reed decided their colt needed more than two weeks’ rest and chose to skip the Preakness to run in the Belmont Stakes on June 11, Klarman, Brown and Ortiz took advantage of the fundamentals presented them.
“They had an option to run in the Derby and passed,” said Ortiz, wiping away tears in the moment after the race. “It’s very hard to get a winner to pass on the Derby, and they made a right choice by the horse.”