Flurry buys share in Southwest starter
No matter their foal date or place of birth, horses arriving in 2021 have one thing in common: This is their only chance to win the Kentucky Derby.
This year’s running holds special significance as the 150th since Aristides prevailed at Churchill Downs in 1875. Though once held in September, during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, the race is traditionally on the first Saturday of May in Louisville, where Derby, as the natives call it, is a yearlong celebration that ramps up in the spring. Through a series of prep races, qualifying points are earned for a chance to run on May 4.
The Derby is the race everyone in the sport wants to win, becoming in recent years an international pursuit. Among jockeys, Eddie Arcaro and Bill Hartack won the race five times; Bob Baffert, with six (he had a seventh taken away), holds the record among trainers.
Any list of noted non-Derby non-winners must include Steve Asmussen, who last February set a North American record with his 10,000th training victory. He has a chance to break an 0-for-25 Derby mark (17 starters) with a list of contenders including Track Phantom, co-owned by Hot Springs horseman Jerry Caroom.
Caroom, a Lakeside High graduate who has raced a number of stakes winners at his hometown track, races the Quality Road colt in a partnership that includes attorney Clark Brewster and breeder Breeze Easy LLC. Track Phantom, with 30 points, is tied with juvenile champion Fierceness after winning the Gun Runner and Lecomte stakes at Fair Grounds in New Orleans. Using Oaklawn as a backup plan, Asmussen intends to keep Track Phantom on the Louisiana road to the Triple Crown.
Another Hot Springs man owns a share in an Asmussen-trained 3-year-old, one long on potential but short on experience. Staton Flurry appears among those campaigning Carbone before the unbeaten Mitole colt goes in Saturday’s Grade 3 $800,000 Southwest at Oaklawn, the mile-and-sixteenth race worth 20 points to an eligible winner and drawing 12 starters.
Carbone, in his second start, blazed home by four lengths Dec. 31 on the local track’s second all-juvenile card. One of four Asmussen winners that day, Carbone represented the first at Oaklawn for his sire, the Eclipse Award-winning champion sprinter of 2019 whose seven-win season included a defeat of local superstar Whitmore (the next year’s Eclipse and Breeders’ Cup Sprint winner) in the Grade 3 Count Fleet Sprint Handicap.
Asmussen trains Carbone for the same owners as Mitole, Bill and Corinne Heiligbrodt, a Houston couple who
courted while attending the University of Texas in Austin. Showing their state pride, the couple’s silks have an orange lone star on the back, Asmussen, a Laredo native, further extends the Texas connection.
So what is an Arkansas guy and devoted LSU fan doing in the horse business with Longhorn Nation?
Turns out, Flurry bumped into Asmussen at the track moments after Carbone’s maiden victory, a mile in 1:38.63 for which the colt received a 98 Beyer Speed Figure. Striking up conversation, the Hot Springs man asked Asmussen about the colt, visually impressive at first asking, and whether the owners might be willing to take on a racing partner.
In time, Flurry got a number to call in Houston and settled on a price with Heilig-brodt. Along with stakes-winning stablemate Otto the Conqueror for another owner, Carbone goes in the Southwest, rescheduled from Jan. 27, two days after his actual (Feb. 1) birthday.
Known for his success with Brad Cox-trained 2020 Kentucky Oaks and multiple Grade 1 winner Shedaresthedevil, Flurry is bidding for an Oaklawn title with his meet-high ninth victory as an owner coming Sunday after he took two of the first three races Friday. A Spa City native who with his mother, Dorothy, parks cars across from Oaklawn on race days, Flurry has played the claiming game to best advantage by dropping horses in class among multiple trainers.
About Carbone, Flurry says, “I look forward to seeing whether he can go on to bigger and better things.”