American Pharoah

by Joe Drape

  There are phone calls horse trainers dread and they come more often than they like, especially when you have a super-talented horse in the barn with great expectations that ride on its back. The previous morning, October 26, American Pharoah had turned in his final workout for the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile, clicking off five-eighths of a mile in 1 minute flat, with his ears happily pointed forward, leading the way. The colt was one of the best workhorses that had ever passed through Baffert’s barn. Where some might have found American Pharoah’s dependability boring, the trainer thought it was absolutely thrilling. The colt was just perfectly engineered.

  So whenever Baffert could drive through the gates of Santa Anita and park at his barn having not heard any bad news from Jimmy Barnes, his day was off to a good start. On Monday, October 27, the trainer was having one of those mornings. No calls meant no news, which meant all systems were a go for the Juvenile now six days away. At least they were until Baffert noticed a bobble in the colt’s gait as he walked the shedrow. Something was off. He called in the veterinarians, who did their best to slip into Baffert’s barn unnoticed. On the days before big races, the backside was crawling with reporters as well as the usual keen-eyed racetrackers, who made everyone else’s business their own. The rumor mill was working overtime. The vets took X-rays and ultrasounds. Both came back negative.

  The trainer called Zayat in New Jersey and told him where they were at with American Pharoah, which was pretty much nowhere.

  “It’s not soft tissue; it’s not bone,” he said.

  Maybe the colt had a deep foot bruise? or maybe not. Maybe there was a hairline fracture? He hoped not. Zayat told him to give it a day and see if the vets could get American Pharoah better or at least figure out what was wrong.

  The following morning, a glum Baffert drove through the gates of Santa Anita and pulled up to his barn. There was a racetrack saying attributed to the late Hall of Fame trainer Charlie Whittingham: “Horses are like strawberries and can go bad on you overnight.” Baffert had quoted it often, usually with a microphone before him and a smile on his face. Sure, he had had plenty of horses come up lame before races. None would hurt worse than if he had to scratch American Pharoah from the Juvenile. Baffert did not have to watch the colt long. He was still off, and there was no sense in pushing him to the starting gate. He called Zayat and gave him the bad news.

  The owner was devastated but understood.

  “When he’s that special and that good, you treat him as such,” he told Baffert. “This horse was going to run away with that race.”

  While Zayat fired up his Twitter account and shared the grim news with his followers, Baffert faced a waiting media crush. The rumors of American Pharoah’s imminent scratch from the Juvenile had ripped through the backside. His voice cracked as he told them that the colt was not going to run on Saturday.

  “We all saw the way he was training,” he said. “He’s something special. I hadn’t had a colt like this in a long time. It’s a pretty tough pill to swallow. He’s going to be okay, but it’s just the timing—it’s a killer. You get to the barn, and you want to vomit.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  HE’S READY

  March 6, 2015

  The closest Bob Baffert ever came to feeling what it was like to ride American Pharoah was when he spoke to Martin Garcia over the two-way radio on the mornings they breezed the colt. The wired exercise rider was Baffert’s contribution to modern Thoroughbred training, a product of both his history as a jockey and his need for control. He pioneered the two-way radio for breezes because he liked to dictate his horses’ workouts down to the fraction of a second. Through the magic of technology, he was able to slow a horse down or speed him up or change up the workout altogether. When a horse was moving well and looking too strong, Baffert would tell Garcia, or any of his other riders, to let it run another eighth of a mile. He often did it in Spanish, a language that he was fluent in thanks to his father, the Chief. Bill Baffert insisted that all his children speak the language the majority of their neighbors did on either side of the Mexican border. It was a good foundation for a budding horse trainer, as 90 percent of any racetrack backside in America was inhabited by Spanish speakers. There were more than forty in Baffert’s employ, and with more than one hundred horses and more than one hundred different schedules, communication was the key to avoiding misunderstandings. The trainer did not get enough credit for his managerial skills. He found good people, put them in important jobs, and let them do their stuff.

  One of those was Martin Garcia. If Baffert was to be successful at getting American Pharoah to the Kentucky Derby and beyond, his barn jockey would be owed a great deal of credit. It took a nuclear scan and a week of poking and prodding by veterinarians, but the colt had finally been diagnosed as suffering a high suspensory strain. In laymen’s terms, American Pharoah had overextended his left front knee. Usually it requires thirty days’ rest, but knowing the talent of the athlete in his barn and the goal ahead as well as Baffert did, the trainer prescribed sixty days for the colt. He believed the strawberries that were American Pharoah were priceless and he would do everything in his power to prevent them from going bad.

  Baffert improvised and adjusted along the way. He kept American Pharoah at his barn in Santa Anita for one, instead of sending him to the more relaxed environment of a rehab farm. He needed to keep the colt light so he would not lose any training time in January. Horses tended to get fat on the satellite farms. At the end of Lookin At Lucky’s two-year-old season, the colt suffered a similar setback that put some pressure on his Triple Crown preparation. So Baffert circled the Rebel Stakes at Oaklawn Park in Hot Springs, Arkansas, on his calendar as the targeted return race and went about getting there. He was following that plan now with American Pharoah. After letting the colt down for several weeks, Baffert had American Pharoah’s groom, Eduardo Luna, walk him around the shedrow. They began as strolls, a limbering of the legs. They got longer as the days went by and harder when some weights were slung over his back.

  Life pretty much went on with American Pharoah mostly under the radar. He returned to the racetrack on the third day of January with his regular exercise rider, Jorge Alvarez, for a short jog. Thirteen days later, he was given the Eclipse Award as the top two-year-old despite missing the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile. That race was won by Texas Red, the colt that finished third in the FrontRunner five lengths behind American Pharoah.

  It was the first Eclipse for Zayat Stables after being a finalist six previous times. It was some consolation for missing the Breeders’ Cup, but with the uncertain future of the star in the barn, what were once potentially life-changing opportunities became less so. Ahmed Zayat never got to go toe-to-toe with the Irish in the way that he had once envisioned. He had no real leverage, because the future of American Pharoah was uncertain. Zayat needed cash and the previous November had sold the colt’s mother, Littleprincessemma, who was in foal to Pioneerof the Nile, for $2.1 million at the Fasig Tipton Kentucky Fall season. So, in the middle of January, as American Pharoah’s jogs turned to gallops, Zayat sold the colt’s stallion rights to Coolmore. It was a fine deal for a two-year-old champion, but not so much for a horse that had the opportunity and potential to win the Kentucky Derby and even the Triple Crown. It was a $10 million deal up front with incentives that bumped that number to $14 million for sweeping the series. There was a possibility of an additional $10 million if American Pharoah captured the Haskell and Travers Stakes as well as the Breeders’ Cup Classic and was awarded the Eclipse Award as Horse of the Year, according to two people familiar with the deal.

  The Irish were risking a fair amount of money for a horse that may never race again but had gotten in cheap if American Pharoah picked up where he had left off and increased his breeding value by winning the Derby, the Preakness, or the Belmont Stakes. It was a far different horse business than it was fourteen years earlier in 2000 when Coolmore paid $60 million for a colt named Fusaichi Pegasus in the days after he won the Der
by. He was beaten, however, in the Preakness and skipped the Belmont altogether. As smart as the Irish were, even they could not predict the outcome of a given horse race or the ability of a stallion to pass on his brilliance. FuPeg, as he was known, has had modest success as a sire and stands for $7,500 a breeding at Coolmore’s Ashford Stud.

  Zayat was hedging his bet. He had followed the golden rule of horse ownership and had taken the suitcase full of money that was in front of him. Neither he nor Baffert was certain that American Pharoah was going to be fit enough in time to get on the Triple Crown trail, or how he might fare once he got to the prep races. If the colt came back running and became the first Triple Crown champion in thirty-seven years, he was leaving a lot of money on the table.

  As January turned to February, all the Zayats could do was wait on word from Baffert on American Pharoah and hope for one of their other three-year-old prospects to stamp himself a classic horse. At Aqueduct, close to their New Jersey home, El Kabeir, a gray son of Scat Daddy, was helping them take their mind off American Pharoah. He was taking the back road to Louisville, having already run seven times and won two graded stakes, from his very wintry home base of New York. He earned a special place in the heart of Justin Zayat, who frequently visited the colt at the barn of trainer John Terranova each weekend because it was an easy trip from New York University as well as an opportunity to continue his education in the horse business.

  “We got to see him grow up and develop,” Justin Zayat said. “He was a rank, very aggressive, very green two-year-old with a lot of energy. Now he’s a totally different horse. He can relax and he can rate.”

  He knew he was no real replacement for American Pharoah, but what was a Triple Crown season without hope springing eternal?

  “He’s really developing at the right time,” he said, willing himself to believe it.

  Baffert, too, had plenty of things to think about beyond American Pharoah to keep him occupied. That was the luxury of having more than one Ahmed Zayat among your owners. He had made his reputation as a Triple Crown trainer and the men and women who sent him horses did so because they wanted to win the Kentucky Derby and more. The upside was that Baffert was rarely out of bullets as the Triple Crown approached. When one contender fell by the wayside, there usually were two or three to take his place.

  On the downside were the volatile personalities Baffert often had to juggle. Each of them could afford to purchase millions of dollars of horseflesh because they were uber-successful in their primary business, which usually meant that they pursued an unshakeable vision, a relentless drive, and were ultra-competitive. Most of them thought if they applied the formula that made them rich to the horse racing business, similar results would follow. That never happened and Baffert has spent countless hours on the phone explaining to the rich what they did not know about horses. In fact, training the owners was far harder than training the horses and sometimes it was easier to fire an owner than waste your time and temper on placating them.

  Zayat had fired Baffert first. When Zayat wanted him back into his barn, Baffert thought long and hard about it before saying yes. Zayat had been exhausting the first time around, overly demanding of his time and eager to second-guess Baffert’s decisions.

  “We agreed that I wouldn’t tell him how to build a beer business and he wouldn’t tell me how to train horses,” Baffert said.

  There was another serious horse emerging from the Baffert barn by the name of Dortmund. At seventeen hands, Dortmund was a beast of an animal. He was a bargain, too, costing his owner Kaleem Shah just $140,000 at a Maryland two-year-old-in-training sale. He had the right pedigree as the son of 2008 Derby winner Big Brown, who so far had yet to establish himself as a big-name sire.

  Baffert was pleased for Shah as well. He was the son of a prominent horse trainer in southern India who insisted that his son return to the racetrack only after he got an education and only as an owner. Shah came to America in the late 1980s and earned a master of science in computer engineering from Clemson University and an MBA in international finance from George Washington University. He then built an information technology and telecommunications consulting firm called CALNET that morphed into a company with hundreds of millions of dollars of contracts with the United States Defense Department to provide intelligence analysis. He and Baffert were starting to have some success together.

  Dortmund was undefeated in five starts, all with Garcia aboard. He had won the Grade 1 Los Alamitos Futurity and the Grade 3 Robert B. Lewis Stakes, and Garcia was riding him tomorrow in the San Felipe Stakes. As good a job as Garcia had done riding Dortmund, his most valuable work had been in the morning over the past month aboard American Pharoah.

  It was March 6, 2015, and the Rebel Stakes was eight days away. This would be the sixth workout for American Pharoah in thirty-three days, and Baffert was depending on Garcia to weigh the three-quarter mile that he was about to breeze with the previous five and tell him whether the colt was prepared for the Rebel Stakes. They were already late to the Triple Crown trail and had crammed a lot into a small period of time. There also had been a hiccup after an early workout, and Garcia sensed American Pharoah was uncomfortable on his left front foot rather than the knee. Baffert depended on Garcia to tell him this kind of information.

  “That’s the way he got the job with me,” Baffert said. “Usually, a lot of top jockeys aren’t good work riders. He’s got a good set of hands, really soft. Horses like him. They run for him. If a horse is a handful, he gets along with them. He’s got a lot of horseman in him. He really likes horses. He loves animals. He understands horses.”

  It turned out that Garcia was right and the colt did have a bruise on his hoof. Baffert was already on a tight schedule and could not afford to miss any more time with American Pharoah. He had a thin aluminum alloy plate cut to fit beneath the horseshoe to protect the triangular frog in his hoof and to act as a shock absorber when American Pharoah’s foot hit the ground. So far it did not seem to impact the colt’s stride.

  Garcia, thirty, was a natural horseman but an accidental jockey. He was born in Veracruz, Mexico, to a teenage father and mother whom he had never met. He was raised by his grandmother and was working in construction at age eleven. In 2003, he came to the United States from Veracruz and ended up as a cook at Chicago’s Metropolitan Deli in Pleasanton, California. He spoke no English but understood enough to figure out that the restaurant’s owner, Terri Terry, owned some show horses, and he immediately campaigned to get on one.

  “I grew up around horses, and I missed them,” he said. When Terry relented, she was stunned when Garcia leaped on a horse’s back by grabbing a handful of mane and was able to put the jumper through his paces without a saddle or bridle. She knew a former jockey who in turn introduced Garcia to a trainer on California’s fair circuit. His education began. He mucked stalls and walked hot horses to cool them down and eventually worked his way up to galloping them in the morning. Within nine months, Garcia was ready to become an apprentice jockey, and on August 17, 2005, he got his first victory in only his third official mount at the Bay Meadows Fair meet. On Mondays and Tuesdays, the racetrack’s dark days, he continued to work at the deli where his shrimp salad with jalapeño had quite a following. Within a year, however, Garcia had won the riding title at Golden Gate Fields and was ready to head south to Santa Anita and Hollywood Park to knock heads with California’s most accomplished riders.

  “He was a real aggressive rider when he showed up here, but he was raw,” Baffert said. “He was willing to listen and was a quick study.”

  The trainer invested hours in Garcia, a powerfully built 5-foot-1, 105-pounder, putting him up on his classiest horses during morning training hours and drilling him on the right and wrong ways to handle them in the afternoon. Baffert sent him to Texas and New Mexico to ride his second-tier stakes horses and he usually came back with the hardware and first-place check. By 2010, he was legging Garcia up on his big horses, winning seven stakes races for
Baffert, including the Santa Monica Handicap on Gabby’s Golden Gal and the Santa Anita Handicap on Misremembered. Both were rich Grade 1 races, which put him in the top ten in the national jockey earnings standings for the first time with more than $3.3 million in purses won.

  Baffert showed his faith in Garcia when he put him on Lookin At Lucky for the Preakness. Until then, Garrett Gomez, who had been the nation’s leading jockey in purse money for the previous four years, had the mount. He had won five of six starts to earn Lookin At Lucky honors as the two-year-old champion, but the wheels came off that relationship after Gomez and the colt found trouble in all three of his races as a three-year-old. The colt clipped heels with a rival and nearly fell in the Rebel Stakes; then Gomez tried to bull him through a nonexistent hole up the rail in the Santa Anita Derby. It not only stopped Lookin At Lucky cold but also culminated in a postrace fistfight between Gomez and Victor Espinoza. In the Derby, the duo were the betting favorite but lost all chance when Lookin At Lucky broke awkwardly out of the Number 1 gate and was bounced twice off the rail in the opening eighth of a mile.

  So Baffert fired Gomez, put Garcia on Lookin At Lucky, and met him in the winner’s circle at Pimlico Race Course to pick up the hardware, the first-place check, and Garcia’s first and only victory in a Triple Crown race.

  Baffert, however, is a demanding boss and expected Garcia to ride his important horses each morning, which left him little time to cultivate relationships with other trainers to drum up more mounts. In 2012, when Garcia told the trainer that he wanted to ride for other barns, Baffert fired him. Garcia fell out of the top twenty in earnings and later ended his estrangement with Baffert. He had made peace with the fact that he was the test driver to Baffert’s crew chief on the barn’s most important horses. It meant Garcia returned to near the top of the earnings chart, bringing in more than $10 million in purse earnings even though he had a third fewer mounts than the leaders. It also allowed him to ride extraordinary creatures like American Pharoah.