No Crown, but plenty of fanfare
The Belmont Stakes Racing Festival turned into an equine Woodstock, one great act following another.
Even with no Triple Crown at stake, a boisterous crowd at Belmont Park on Long Island evoked memories of Max Yasgur’s farm in upstate New York on an August weekend in 1969. Four-legged wonders, many of them trained by Bob Baffert, put on a show for a lot less than you can see “Hamilton” on Broadway.
Songbird, horse racing’s Lady Gaga, toyed with her rivals in the Ogden Phipps, her first start since the lone defeat of her career (to the since-retired Beholder) in the Breeders’ Cup last fall. Four winners on the card carried the Baffert banner — Mor Spirit looking spectacular in the Met Mile, Abel Tasman taking the Acorn after her May success in the Kentucky Oaks, and American Anthem winning the Woody Stephens and West Coast the Easy Goer. At least in New York they don’t cancel whole cards for lack of horses — a recent trend at Santa Anita, Baffert’s California base.
Frank Sinatra, or at least a recording thereof, came on before the main event to remind all they were in “a city that never sleeps,” and that, regarding New York, “if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.” Years earlier, in “On the Town,” a musical starring Gene Kelly, Ol’ Blue Eyes provided a dummy’s guide to what hometowners merely call “the city,” that the Bronx is up and the Battery’s down.”
Belmont Park is officially in Queens, where one can find a pizzeria or barber shop open at all hours. Public transportation is recommended, although it is not always reliable: On the same trip in 2014, a taxi driver missed the exit to the racetrack and a bus ride between airports, La Guardia to Kennedy, wound up in Manhattan. Not sure if the taxi driver and I haggled over cab fare, but the Manhattan melodrama resulted in a coveted New York dateline, first of my journalistic career.
Ten years earlier, in another Queens taxi, I struck up a conversation with a Lexington, Ky., husband and who were friends of socialite Marylou Whitney, who had a horse running in the next day’s Belmont Stakes. That chance visit led to the mailing of a coffeetable book about the late Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, to whom Marylou was married for the last 34 of his 93 years. My handicapping was not enhanced; Birdstone, Marylou’s horse, won the Belmont at 36-1 odds; fistfuls of complimentary tickets on undefeated Smarty Jones, the second-place horse, were torn and discarded.
I wondered then, and 10 years later when California Chrome dead-heated for fourth in a Belmont won by Tonalist, if we would ever see another Triple Crown winner. Then came American Pharoah in 2015 to petition horse racing’s most exclusive club to receive another member. For those too young to remember Secretariat, Seattle Slew and Affirmed achieving racing immortality in the 1970s, American Pharoah reminded us that it can happen again. And that Oaklawn Park, where AP won two Kentucky Derby prep races, is a great place for 3-year-olds with dreams.
Since AP exited stage right, we have had six Triple Crown races and six different winners. Is this the new order of things? Impossible to say, although declining foal crops make it more likely that we will not have to wait 37 years, as between Affirmed and American Pharoah, for the next Triple Crown winner. Suffice it to say that the next Kentucky Derby winner, and that of the Preakness and Belmont, is out there, perhaps an unraced maiden and likely to make its first start before its unofficial third birthday Jan. 1 so as not to run afoul of the “Apollo jinx” in the Derby — but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
It may be trained by Todd Pletcher, whose third Belmont victory came Saturday with the high-priced Tapwrit, a two-length winner over favored Irish War Cry. His second Kentucky Derby win coming five weeks earlier with Always Dreaming, Pletcher is the first trainer in 21 years to win two legs of the Triple Crown with different horses. Hall of Famer Wayne Lukas, Pletcher’s mentor, won all three
in 1995 with Thunder Gulch (Derby, Belmont) and Timber Country (Preakness) and the first and third races in ‘96 with Grindstone (Derby) and Editor’s Note (Belmont).
“Any time you have a Derby and a Belmont winner it’s awesome,” said Pletcher. “We feel fortunate to have won two legs.” One-eyed Patch, third in the Belmont, “put himself in the thick of things,” said his trainer. “We have options with Patch. He’s still eligible for a one-other-than (allowance), and there’s the Curlin ($100,000, July 28, Saratoga).”
Factor in the undefeated Coal Front, who might go next in Belmont’s Dwyer Stakes, and Wood Memorial runner-up Battalion Runner, along with Oaklawn stakes winners One Liner and Malagacy, and “it will be interesting to see how it develops down the road. … They’re in the mix,” Pletcher said.
Tapwrit, incidentally, is the third son of Tapit to win the Belmont in four years (Creator last year following Tonalist’s lead). Tapit, it might be remembered (or not), finished ninth in the 2004 Kentucky Derby, the race that put Smarty Jones on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Despite classic winners on both sides of his pedigree (sire A.P. Indy, damsire Unbridled), Tapit did not make the Preakness or Belmont and was retired after finishing ninth in the Pennsylvania Derby. But I wouldn’t feel sorry for him.
Tapit has become horse racing’s supersire, his $300,000 stud fee the highest in the United States. Another of his sons, 4-year-old Cupid, Oaklawn’s 2016 Rebel winner, scored his first Grade 1 victory recently in California. Tapit’s estimated value is $140 million.
Birdstone, whose name I heard in a taxi one night in Queens but couldn’t quite remember the next day at the track, had two classic winners (Mine That Bird, champion Summer Bird) from his first group of foals. His stud fee, once $30,000, has dropped to $5,000. Smarty Jones, with no classic winners, bestows favors in the breeding shed these days for $7,500. In this sport, you never know.