American Pharoah

by Joe Drape

  In the wild, with no one looking, more than 2,000 pounds of horseflesh collide routinely as new life is made. Here the ballet between Littleprincessemma and Pioneerof the Nile was choreographed by a quartet of handlers suited up in helmets and flak jackets and offering whispers of encouragement to an excited stallion and his compliant mare.

  There were no sharp corners in sight, the walls were padded thick, and the floor was made of playground rubber. Littleprincessemma leaned against a foam-wrapped chest board so she wouldn’t skitter forward. She waited patiently as Pioneerof the Nile snorted and bellowed and pounded out a muted rhythm with his false starts.

  Finally, he reared back on his two hind legs and landed not so gently on Littleprincessemma’s backside. He did not really need any further help, but the “entering man,” as the gentleman charged with ensuring a stallion hits his bull’s-eye is known, helped Pioneerof the Nile hit the target.

  Talk about a dirty job. He held a breeding roll—a sort of padded baton. It was soft, thick, and wrapped in plastic. He wedged it between Littleprincessemma and Pioneerof the Nile to his colleague on the other side. The stallion bucked and roared. The mare staggered and whinnied. The noise was tornado volume but car crash brief.

  The big horse was done.

  The entering man whisked a cup beneath Pioneerof the Nile and caught some semen. He handed it off to the stallion manager, who took it to a lab on the other side of a glass window and put it under a high-powered microscope. He estimated the quantity and motility of the sperm and added it to his detailed notes of Littleprincessemma and Pioneerof the Nile’s appointment.

  She was led out.

  He strutted around the ring before being taken back to his paddock. There was another mare waiting for another stud here and at every other breeding farm in the Bluegrass.

  This was breeding season in the Bluegrass, after all, which, fittingly, begins around Valentine’s Day of each year.

  It would be eleven months before Zayat would know if this coupling that looked so good on paper resulted in a healthy foal. It would take two more years after that to get this horse to the racetrack.

  There would be a championship season, a near career-ending injury, and enough twists and turns from the good, the bad, and the ugly sides of horse racing to put the words Triple Crown on the tip of the tongues of sports fans, racing fans, and even the general public.

  For five glorious weeks America’s oldest sport would return to the center of the nation’s consciousness.

  What no one suspected was that a brief encounter in the Bluegrass on a March morning in 2011 would give us a horse for the ages.

  CHAPTER TWO

  GROUNDHOG DAY

  February 2, 2012

  It was about 11:00 p.m. on February 2, 2012, when Dr. Tom VanMeter got the call from his farm manager telling him Littleprincessemma’s water had broken and she was ready to drop her baby. Dr. VanMeter pulled his boots on and made his way to the foaling shed, or Stork Barn as he liked to call it, on top of the hill of his Stockplace Farm. He had 800 acres here just ten miles down the road from another of Kentucky’s most revered landmarks, Rupp Arena, which was named for legendary basketball coach Adolph Rupp and was the home of the Kentucky Wildcats. Fast horses, bourbon, and the Big Blue were more than obsessions in the Commonwealth of Kentucky; they were woven into the fabric of every born-and-bred Kentuckian who believed himself a true hardboot. VanMeter believed he was a hardboot by bloodlines as well. He was a seventh-generation Kentuckian whose family had done all sorts of ranching, raised cattle, grew cotton, and bred horses. Back in 1901, a distant cousin, Frank VanMeter, owned and trained that year’s Kentucky Derby winner, His Eminence.

  With a full brush of dark hair, a trim build, and a barrel chest, VanMeter was a polished-looking Bluegrass gentry almost. He was a veterinarian primarily but boarded mares on his farm and dabbled in breeding and selling Thoroughbreds. In fact, that is how he met Littleprincessemma’s owner, Ahmed Zayat—or Mr. Z as VanMeter called him. He had sold him a horse, one that Zayat thought he outfoxed the veterinarian on, getting him for a mere $150,000. He named the colt after VanMeter’s sales company at the time, Eaton’s Gift. Mr. Z often needled him about the bargain colt, especially after the colt won a couple of Grade 1 sprint races as a three-year-old. However, VanMeter knew better than most that no one gets one over on someone else in the horse business for long. In 2006, when Zayat introduced himself as a major player in horse racing with the $4.6 million purchase of a colt at the Keeneland September Sale, VanMeter raised an eyebrow and thought what every other horse trader did: “He’s jumped in with some money and made a big splash.” By 2008, Zayat Stables had won nearly $6.9 million, leading all American Thoroughbred owners in earnings, and the next year, he matched that total, highlighted by Pioneerof the Nile’s second-place finish in the Derby. He also started throwing big money around at auctions—spending $24.5 million on seventy-seven horses in 2009. That’s when VanMeter (and everyone else in the business) raised the other eyebrow.

  “We’ve seen these guys come and go,” said VanMeter.

  Yes, they had. There is no better adage than “the best way to become a millionaire in the horse business is to start as a billionaire.” NFL franchise owners Eugene Klein (San Diego Chargers) and Robert McNair (Houston Texans), software billionaire Satish Sanan, entertainers like rapper MC Hammer, and scores of Wall Street tycoons had dropped fortunes in the sport before abandoning it altogether with a lot less in their coffers. Now all VanMeter and everyone else in the business had to do was follow the newspaper headlines or look in his “Past Due” file to set an over/under line on when Zayat was going to leave the business for good.

  All that winning and buying was costly. While Zayat Stables was borrowing money and bringing home trophies, it was also losing more than $52 million, according to bankruptcy records, all while Zayat was paying himself a salary of $650,000 and withdrawing $2 million from stable accounts. Beyond the $34-plus million due Fifth Third Bank, his creditors’ list read like a who’s who of the Thoroughbred industry—he owed $3 million to Keeneland, the auction company; hundreds of thousands to breeding farms owned by the ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, and Canadian industrialist Frank Stronach; and tens of thousands to trainers, veterinarians, and even horse transportation vendors. Zayat owed VanMeter and Stockplace nearly $30,000 and Eaton Sales another $50,000.

  VanMeter knew Mr. Z was a slow payer, which was preferable to a no-payer, of which there were plenty scattered across the Bluegrass. This was a handshake rather than contract business and sometimes all there was to cling to was a twisted and unwarranted trust that a horseman’s better angels would make him honor a deal. Sure, Mr. Z was going to pay him when he got a little ahead. Besides, VanMeter liked Mr. Z’s company, his childlike exuberance that turned excursions to the racetrack into life-and-death passion plays when the emotive Egyptian touted his betting selections like they had been passed down from on high and then turned every stretch run into a struggle for his soul. Mr. Z cackled and screamed. He worked up a sweat running to the betting windows. Victories were celebrated with moist bear hugs and tough beats with wails of grief.

  “He’s a very passionate guy, and so emotional,” said VanMeter.

  Now it was his duty—no, his oath—to forget about Littleprincessemma’s complicated owner and focus on getting the mare’s baby safely out of her uterus and onto this earth. It was Groundhog Day, and that morning Punxsutawney Phil had awoken to see his shadow, signaling that six more weeks of winter were in store. It was a mild night in the Bluegrass in what so far had been a warm and wet winter. VanMeter made the short walk to his farm’s “maternity ward.” About 90 percent of all foals were born at night, between 11:00 p.m. and 3:00 a.m. mostly, a statistical anomaly attributed to Mother Nature. Long before there were breeding farms, mares dropped their foals when predators were asleep. It gave them time to get them to their feet, nurse them, and have them ready to run like hell if necessary.
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  VanMeter knew that horses did not need his help to bring new life to earth, but there was so much money at stake that breeders felt obliged to have eyes on their investments around the clock. Mostly, however, VanMeter couldn’t beat back the flutter in his heart when the foals hit the ground.

  “It’s like the heavens open up and deliver a little piece of magic,” he said. “It’s the best part of what I do.”

  He had about forty mares in the fields, and it was still early in the foaling season. He had been down to the Stork Barn for two previous births, but the pace was about to pick up. It took somewhere between 343 and 365 days for a foal to gestate in the womb. Some of the mares were beginning to wax, their teats producing a white crystal substance that was seemingly weaved from fine salt. Overnight, a yellow teardrop often forms at the tip of the teat, stopping it from leaking.

  Earlier in the day, VanMeter noticed Littleprincessemma’s teardrops were turning white, indicating she was coming to the end. He had poked his finger into her tail muscles and felt the squishy, jelly-like pillow that signaled her vulva was lengthening. VanMeter was fond of the mare. She was a striking chestnut with the presence of a girl who knew that she was more than just pretty. She was a confident sort. He didn’t anticipate any problem, as this was her third go round in the foaling barn and she had been walking in circles for the last two hours as the contractions began. Except for the sweat glistening on her coat, she appeared poised and oblivious to the convulsions going on inside her. VanMeter had heard mares groan and bite walls to express the excruciating pain that can accompany delivering big-shouldered foals.

  Now Littleprincessemma was lying on her side in stall 15—in the center of the barn. No one had to help her get there. As soon as the placenta bubbled with its thick goo, followed by a small hoof, Littleprincessemma folded herself into the hay like a queen taking her throne. In an instant, the second hoof poked through. Mother Nature’s hand at work again, making the foal aerodynamic to scoot through the opening. A small, wet nose shot through and gulped for its first breath. At 11:15 p.m., the foal squirted out as if hurtling down a water slide. He was wriggling there, slippery as a seal. VanMeter toweled the baby off himself.

  It was a colt, a sturdy one.

  No drama—just a nice, good-sized, and strong horse, he thought.

  Littleprincessemma gave her baby a lick, then another. It didn’t take long for him to find his legs, scaffolding up at first unsteadily and then standing atop the hay like he had been staked there. He was quick to take to his mama’s nursing as well, feeding greedily. There was no way of telling whether he’d be a great racehorse, but VanMeter knew he’d be able to run like hell in the morning if it was necessary.

  The odds were very strong that somewhere in a pasture here in the Bluegrass was the future winner of the 2015 Kentucky Derby. In the 138 prior runnings of America’s signature race, Kentucky-bred Thoroughbreds had already captured 105 of them. The odds were even more prohibitive that the winner three years from now was going to be a colt, as the boys have won all but three Derbies. The three fillies that managed to actually win the battle of the sexes did it long ago: Regret in 1915, Genuine Risk in 1980, and Winning Colors in 1988.

  There have been all sorts of theories and folklore offered about why the Commonwealth of Kentucky is the cradle of fast Thoroughbreds. There’s the right place, right time argument—that rich New Yorkers, Virginians, and Marylanders had no choice but to come south in the late 1800s and early 1900s as their home states were cracking down on gambling and deemed betting on a horse race to be one of society’s great corrupters. It didn’t hurt that Colonel Matt Winn’s race, the Kentucky Derby, was gaining more notoriety every year since being run at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Kentucky, beginning in 1875. Even better, Winn had found a way to cut the bookmakers out completely by offering pari-mutuel betting, which eliminated fixed-odds betting. By putting all bets in a pool and calculating winning payoffs by the total amount, the racetrack could take a commission, which helped fund the purses of races and paid local and state taxes.

  Horses, of course, were here long before the well heeled from the Northeast decided they needed big farms to breed their Thoroughbreds and a safe innovative way to bet on them. The story goes that soon after Daniel Boone settled in Kentucky, he declared that “every man needs a wife, a horse, and a gun,” which perhaps is the basis for a Bluegrass proverb that a “good horse never stumbles and a good wife never grumbles.” It was Boone who introduced a bill to improve the breed of horses at the territories’ first legislative assembly in 1775. The Virginians who followed Boone here were experienced breeders, wealthy landowners and among America’s first true horse people. They imported from England descendants of the Darley Arabian, the Godolphin Arabian, and Byerly Turk stallions from which all Thoroughbreds descend. By 1800, in fact, 92 percent of Kentuckians owned a horse, and the average owner had 3.2 horses, according to tax rolls.

  Then there was the bluegrass itself with its thin blades whose origins trace back to the Black Sea and are woven deep into the sod by a roots system that regenerates itself and paints a vivid tapestry on the land. In the spring, blue-purplish buds rolled over it like a royal carpet and gave Kentucky’s horse country a postcard quality that linked its past to the present. “When God made the picturesque valleys of Southwest Virginia, He was just practicing for the Bluegrass country,” a turn-of-the-century circuit judge once wrote. It was the limestone beneath the ground, however—in places 25,000 feet thick—that was most mythologized by the hardboots. It meant iceberg concentrations of calcium and phosphorous oozing vitamins and minerals, transforming 120-pound foals into 600-pound yearlings and, finally, half-ton racehorses with steel in their bones and wings on their feet.

  Mostly Kentucky’s success as an incubator for these stunning, ethereal creatures was because of people like Frances Relihan. She was one of the thousands who believed in her soul that Thoroughbred racing was truly the sport of kings. They were the unseen hands, shovels, and rakes that were whirling eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, foaling horses, helping them wean from their mamas, feeling their legs and putting thermometers in their bottoms. They fed them, treated them, cared for and loved them. You rarely saw them in the winner’s circle after a race. They knew little about Cristal champagne, private jets, or the Mercedes-Maybach. The owners of the horses they cared for, who knew such luxuries, barely knew the names of the people entrusted with their assets. It was not an occupation for a narcissist, an action junkie, or even an extrovert. Your days creeped along and you were mostly alone as you relied on a skill set that required a bit of mechanical know-how (tractors break down) and a lot of grit (the manure doesn’t sweep itself up). You also had to be half horse—how else would you know a slight hip roll on a weanling might mean a bruise on a back foot, or a whisper of a rattle in the chest might be the beginning strains of a respiratory infection?

  As she patrolled the grounds of the Vinery, Frances Relihan wore the uniform of her tribe—rubber muck boots, a fleece zipped up to the neck, and a barn jacket. She eyed the mares for any sign of disturbances, a rheumy eye, swishing tail, and then let her gaze fall hard on the babies that followed them. She smiled at the playful ones that zigzagged in the mares’ wake, chasing each other like kids do as they walk home from school. She watched more intently the docile babies that lumbered in their mothers’ shadows. What could she do to relieve their stress?

  This was all Frances Relihan ever wanted to do when she was a little girl growing up in Listowel, Ireland, a rustic hamlet along the River Feale in County Kerry. It proudly wore its title as the “Literary Capital of Ireland” and annually celebrated the achievements of its poets, playwrights, and writers such as Bryan MacMahon, Brendan Kennelly, and John B. Keane with Ireland’s largest literary festival. Keane, one of its most famous denizens, had returned the favor in a poem:

  Beautiful Listowel, serenaded night and day by the gentle waters of the River Feale,

  Listowel where it i
s easier to write than not to write,

  Where first love never dies, and the tall streets hide the loveliness,

  The heartbreak and the moods, great and small,

  Of all the gentle souls of a great and good community.

  Sweet, incomparable hometown that shaped and made me.

  It was another Listowel institution, however, that had shaped and made Frances Relihan: the Listowel Races, a weeklong gathering whose origins trace back to the 1800s, when it was initially held nine miles north of her village in Ballyeigh, Ballybunion. It started as a rough-and-tumble affair, featuring a closing day faction fight between clans where hundreds, sometimes thousands, engaged in a mass brawl. A death, or two, or a dozen were guaranteed and the maimings were de rigueur as the combatants brandished stones, knuckle dusters, and homemade pistols all in the name of instilling courage and a love for a good fight into the next generation. It wasn’t until the festival moved to Listowel in 1858 that it became a kinder, gentler celebration with the horse races as its centerpiece. What once was a destination for farmers and small towners to blow off steam and lose some money had transformed over the generations into a low-key but chic and highly anticipated week of quality racing.

  As a little girl, Frances could not wait for the start of the harvest races over at “the Island,” as the locals called it, because you could cross a bridge over the River Feale to where the mile-and-a-quarter course was laid out like magic carpet on undulating farmland. The races were reason enough for school to shut down and for Frances to trade the sport horses on her family’s dairy farm for the magical athletes that—for a week per year—haunted the 147 stalls, like old souls in a familiar resting place. They turned Frances’s tiny corner of Ireland into Brigadoon. In the mornings, hundreds of horses sprang to life, crossing the grounds, their hooves beating out a rhythm on the soft grass and sounding like a symphony of sleepy heads gratefully hitting their pillows one after another. Steam poured from the necks of horses bobbing and ducking during their baths as bubbles wafted from their lips as their “lads” lovingly soaped and bathed them.