American Pharoah

by Joe Drape

  Instead, “American Pharoah” was the answer heard over and over.

  It was as if an immortal horse was in our midst. Some of it had to do with the final workout in preparation for the Derby three days earlier on Sunday. With Martin Garcia aboard, the colt went five-eighths of a mile in :58.40, the fastest of thirty-two similar workouts that morning. It was routine for Baffert and Garcia and anyone who had been associated with the colt the past nine months, but it blew the minds of clockers, horsemen, and professional bettors, many of whom were seeing American Pharoah in the flesh for the first time. He ripped through split times: 11.40 for an eighth, :23 for a quarter, :34.60 for three-eighths, and :46.40 for a half, and then galloped out three-fourths of a mile in 1:11 before pounding out seven furlongs in 1:27.

  “I have been doing this for thirty-five years,” said Gary Young, who clocked horses for betting clients as well as picked out horses for owners. “He might be the best horse I’ve ever seen. He’s simply like Michael Jordan and stays in the air like he did in his rookie year. He stays in the air longer than any horse and you get the feeling that there’s not one gear left, but he may have two, three, or four gears.”

  Mike Welsch has been called the E. F. Hutton of horseflesh. He writes the “Clocker Reports” for the Daily Racing Form, long the horseplayer’s Bible, and his observations about what goes on in training in the morning have led many a horseplayer to the mutuel windows on Derby afternoon. He looks for a workout from a horse that just screams, “Bet me.”

  He saw one in American Pharoah’s outing. He wasn’t just fast, but it looked like the colt did not want to stop: “It’s exactly what you want to see: a horse that feels good and you know that is just lengths better than the rest of them.”

  When he returned to barn 33, Baffert felt a shiver. American Pharoah was not breathing hard. Even a little.

  “He’s right where we want him to be. He hasn’t regressed; he looks great, so it’s pretty exciting to come in here,” he said. “From here on out, we just keep him happy.”

  As far as Derby weeks go, Baffert was having a better one than usual. Even though One Lucky Dane was injured in California a couple of weeks earlier and did not make the trip, American Pharoah and Dortmund were holding up well. Most Derby weeks, something pops up—a skin rash, a fever—to unnerve him. The post-position draw was early in the evening and soon Baffert and his rivals would have an idea if their colts had been compromised. So far, all he had to battle was his own neuroses. Baffert was very superstitious, especially about black cats. The morning Real Quiet got beat at the Belmont, a black cat had crossed Baffert’s path. The same thing happened with Point Given the week before the Derby.

  The other day, driving with Bode, a black cat jumped in front of them. When the trainer slammed on his brakes, Bode asked, “What’s wrong, Daddy?”

  Baffert hung a U-turn with traffic coming, rattling his son further. He explained his superstition to his son. They went and picked up Jill. Later, while still in the car, he got a call from the barn about Dortmund. He was uncomfortable after his workout. He was getting a little colicky, perhaps from not drinking enough water. After he got off the call, Baffert relayed the situation to his wife.

  “That black cat strikes again,” Bode Baffert said from the backseat.

  Dortmund came out of it and was in Kentucky in fine shape. So was Jill Baffert, keeping her husband calm.

  “Every time I start, she just says knock it off,” he said. “Come on. Get a hold of yourself. It’s nerve wracking. It is a nerve-wracking business we have to go through.”

  Still, there was an altogether different Derby vibe taking shape, one that had not been hijacked by bombastic owners as when Big Brown arrived to launch his Triple Crown assault. The usually voluble Zayat mostly avoided making any ground pronouncements. He had been smote down by the racing gods thrice before and did not want to think about another heartbreak. He was back, though. In fact, he had three horses here—El Kabeir had earned his way into the field of twenty along with Mr. Z, a colt that had finished third in the Arkansas Derby, a long way behind American Pharoah but good enough to get a shot at the roses.

  Every time Zayat got morose or anxious, he tried to think about what Baffert had told him before American Pharoah ever raced.

  “I’ve never seen Bob in the past hype a horse for me,” Zayat said, “and day one somehow this horse talked to Bob. He told me, ‘Oh my God, this is something. We’re going to have a lot of fun with this horse.’ He believed dearly in him.”

  There was no need to manufacture story lines. No, this time the horses were the genuine stars and there was a sense that America’s signature race was going to be one for the ages. Much of it had to do with American Pharoah and Dortmund. All week, horsemen had been trekking to Baffert’s barn as if it were the Louvre to take a look at what they consider to be the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo of a deep and talented crop of three-year-olds. These were hardboots who knew that even the great horses lose and who declare it often, but they had fallen like schoolboys for American Pharoah.

  “He’s special,” insisted D. Wayne Lukas, who trained Mr. Z for Zayat.

  Lukas was as legendary as Ben Jones. Like Baffert, he came from the world of quarter horses and overachieved. Even at seventy-nine years old, Lukas still rocked fringe chaps in the morning and wore a Stetson on horseback, looking as if he’d just galloped out of Monument Valley and a John Ford movie. In the afternoon, the slickest horse trainer of them all pulls a $3,000 suit from his closet, slips on his aviator shades, and turns the racetrack dining room into his office and salon.

  Lukas changed the nature of the sport, and his most envied talent was talking rich people out of their money. His passion and charisma had persuaded enough of them to plunk down more than $250 million at horse auctions. He had shed some of the flashier accessories that have been part of his Hall of Fame career. He no longer meets clients in his Rolls-Royce, and his corporate jet has long been replaced by commercial flights. Back in the 1980s, when his stable was 250 strong and he flew his horses all over to win the nation’s biggest races, horseplayers used to talk about betting on Lukas’s horses when it was a case of “D. Wayne off the plane.”

  No more. Lukas preferred to ride with his horses in the transport truck when he traveled away from his Louisville base. Two years ago, in 2013, his colt Oxbow won the Preakness, giving Lukas his fourteenth victory in Triple Crown races, making him the most successful trainer in the American classic races. It also ended a thirteen-year Triple Crown drought for Lukas, a string of futility that would have run most out of the game.

  “I’ve been left for dead so many times,” Lukas said.

  As Lukas had grown old, he had also grown up. He was always a proud man who disliked the suggestion that he ever lost his touch. In 1999, in one of those fallow periods, he came to New York with the colt Charismatic and a chance to win the Triple Crown. Instead of enjoying it, however, Lukas drove himself and his help too hard and continued a battle with the news media over whether he was good for the sport after Charismatic finished third and broke his leg in the race.

  Lukas knew his horses and was convinced that American Pharoah was the horse to lead the sport out of the Triple Crown wilderness. Mr. Z had finished third, less than a neck behind Dortmund in the Los Alamitos Futurity and eight and three-quarters of a length behind American Pharoah in Arkansas.

  “In my opinion, American Pharoah was lengths ahead of Dortmund,” Lukas said. “I have not been that impressed with a horse for a long time. We ran at him in Arkansas. We had a perfect trip. We ran right to his neck, and when Victor Espinoza just nudged him, he opened up four or five lengths on us, just wham! Looking at the replay, he lengthened his stride, just cruised. That impressed the hell out of me.”

  It is the way the colt floated like a cloud around the racetrack that earned Lukas’s respect.

  “Conformation-wise, just seeing him stand there, he doesn’t blow you away,” he added. “But when he moves and
gets in full flight, he’s got an amazing stride. I like the way he’s able to go from good speed and then kick it like that. That breaks horses’ hearts.”

  Lukas was not the only seasoned horseman to fall under the colt’s spell. Bill Mott, another Hall of Famer, had campaigned the great Cigar to sixteen consecutive victories against top-class competition from 1995 through 1996, the first horse to do so since Citation during a 1948 through 1950 run. When Mott brought Cigar west, Baffert, starting to make some noise with Thoroughbreds, asked Mott, whom he did not know, if he could have a look at his horse. Mott was gracious and let him spend as much time as he wanted with Cigar. Baffert wanted to see him because he had recognized something rarely seen at the racetrack: greatness.

  Cigar was considered “America’s Horse.” He was a ham who posed for the cameras before beating the best of his generation from New York to California, from Massachusetts to Dubai. Cigar’s racetrack heroics throughout his streak were many. He was ridden by Jerry Bailey, a Hall of Famer turned broadcast analyst who had been by Baffert’s barn often over the spring and shared his favorite stories about the horse. At the Oaklawn Handicap in Arkansas in 1995, Cigar was accidentally hit in the face with a whip by a jockey aboard another horse. Instead of losing momentum, Cigar shook his head, pinned his ears, and spurted away for a sixth consecutive victory. Three months later in the Hollywood Gold Cup, a clod of dirt hit Cigar squarely in the head, making him angry and putting him in a tug-of-war with Bailey. His hands creased by the reins and fingertips numb, Bailey finally surrendered. They won by three and a half lengths anyway, to extend the streak to nine.

  Cigar was the inspiration for one of the greatest calls in the history of Thoroughbred racing when he jetted off to win the 1995 Breeders’ Cup Classic at Belmont Park to end a perfect ten-for-ten season.

  “Cigar! Cigar makes his move, and he sweeps to the lead with a dramatic rush,” roared the New York announcer Tom Durkin with a tremor in his baritone as his jockey, Bailey, turned him loose. “Here he is, the incomparable, the invincible, the unbeatable Cigar.”

  The horse had received a police escort through the streets of Manhattan—accompanied by the Clydesdales and the Knicks’ cheerleaders—to Madison Square Garden, where on November 2, 1996, he was thrown a retirement party before the white-gloved set at the National Horse Show. It didn’t take long for the great racehorse to demonstrate that he was comfortable among the upper crust. When Bailey lifted in his saddle, Cigar broke into an elegant glide as if he had competed for blue ribbons in a previous life.

  Bailey’s favorite moment was Cigar’s gentlest. After Cigar completed his perfect season in the 1995 Breeders’ Cup, Bailey took his son Justin, then three, to check on the horse in Mott’s barn. Bailey had the boy in his arms when Cigar suddenly stopped grazing, stepped over, and put his nose to Justin’s chest and chin.

  “He was just nuzzling on him,” Bailey said. “Less than twenty-four hours earlier he was on fire, just a machine, and now he was like a pony in the parking lot of Kmart. He really liked people.”

  As Baffert listened to Bailey tell his stories, he started to recognize the similarities his horse shared with Cigar. Each seemed to know they possessed star quality. American Pharoah accommodated the photographers who followed him from his barn to the track, stopping purposefully to strike poses, turning his head to insure everyone got a look. He was mellow everywhere but the racetrack, plucking carrots from the opened hands of young children.

  Now, on the backside of Churchill Downs, Mott asked Baffert if he could take a look at American Pharoah. Mott, too, recognized the makings of a great horse. He had watched the colt in the mornings and was transfixed by the efficiency of his stride. American Pharoah really didn’t hit the ground—he flew over it. Mott told him he had a great horse and to try to enjoy it as he did with Cigar. These were once-in-a-lifetime occurrences.

  “I knew what was going on was special and was never going to happen again,” Mott said of his run with Cigar. “The really good ones win races when they are not at their best. Whether he was coming off a layup, or had a foot issue, or got caught in a compromising position in a race. Cigar overcame all those.”

  He told Baffert American Pharoah would, too.

  Elliott Walden, a former trainer turned president and chief executive of WinStar Farm, bemoaned his luck for having a highly regarded colt in the same crop as American Pharoah. WinStar was the co-owner of Carpe Diem, who, like American Pharoah, won four of his five starts, earning $1.5 million in purses and decimating the opponents he had faced.

  “American Pharoah is a notch above everybody—he glides along so easily, like there isn’t any effort,” Walden said.

  Carla Gaines was saddling a horse named Bolo in her first Derby. She wondered why when she saw American Pharoah one morning at Churchill Downs.

  “He breathes different air than other horses,” she said. “He’s a spectacle to behold on the racetrack. It’s like his feet don’t touch the ground; he just floats. He kind of sprouts wings. He definitely could be a superhorse.”

  The closest thing to a flaw to be found in the colt was that part of his name was misspelled: pharaoh is correct; pharoah is not. How the colt become American Pharoah had become a mystery that was played out in public.

  A Missouri woman named Marsha Baumgartner had come up with the name and submitted it in a naming contest on Zayat’s Stable’s website. She had been a horse racing fan since Secretariat won the Triple Crown in 1973. She settled on American Pharaoh for the dark bay colt because his sire is Pioneerof the Nile and his dam’s sire was Yankee Gentleman. Even better, Ahmed Zayat is from Egypt. She believed she had submitted the correct spelling.

  At first, Ahmed and Justin Zayat said The Jockey Club, which approves all names, had made a mistake. Officials there disputed that and said the name was submitted electronically and it was approved the way it was spelled. One of the more novel theories floated was that the a and the o were transposed deliberately so the horse would not be mistaken for an idol, especially a Pharaoh, who would not let the Jews go from Egypt.

  Even more perplexing was how the strapping and accomplished colt Dortmund had been totally eclipsed by his stablemate. He was one of two undefeated horses in the field, with a victory here the previous November, blitzing eleven rivals by nearly eight lengths. He was the only contender who had been challenged in the stretch when the race was on the line—twice—by a colt here named Firing Line.

  “We know that Dortmund is probably more battle-tested,” Baffert conceded. “He’s been in a fight.”

  Gary Stevens, fifty-two years old and riding with an artificial knee, had the mount on Firing Line. He was the last of the classic American West riders and a keen student of the sport’s history. He started his career in his native Idaho and rode in Washington State before establishing himself as a Hall of Famer in California. He had tried to retire three previous times—first to train, then to be a television commentator, and finally to be an actor. He was pretty good at all three and earned rave reviews playing the jockey George Woolf in the movie Seabiscuit. The racetrack kept beckoning him back, though. Beyond winning big races, Stevens missed the mornings at Clockers’ Corner and the afternoons in the grandstand after he had fulfilled his riding obligations for the day. He enjoyed drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette with the horseplayers who, like him, believed a bad day at the track was better than a good day anywhere else.

  Stevens rode his first Derby in 1986 and has won it three times—with Winning Colors in 1988, Thunder Gulch in 1995, and Silver Charm in 1997. He liked Firing Line’s chances. A lot. After the colt had lost those head-to-head duels with Dortmund, they went to New Mexico for the Sunland Derby and blew apart the field. Stevens knew it was going to take a monster effort from Firing Line, American Pharoah, or any other horse to win this Derby.

  “This is the best bunch of horses assembled for this race since I’ve been coming here,” he said. “What’s even better is most of them haven’t seen each o
ther before.”

  That, too, was adding to the intrigue. There were accomplished horses that could not be ignored and were coming here from all corners of the country. Materiality was the other undefeated horse in the field and had run away with the Florida Derby. In addition to Frosted, Sheikh Mo and Godolphin had sent over Mubtaahij from Dubai. The colt won four of his previous starts on the dirt. His trainer, South African Mike de Kock, was here for the first time. He was not here for the mint juleps, either. He sent only well-meant horses to the world’s biggest races and had won many of them.

  “I am very impressed by what I see, and I probably picked one of the worst years to try to come to the Derby from another country,” he said. “There’s some very serious horses. There’s not only American Pharoah, there’s some proper horses there, so, you know, a healthy respect for them, there’s no doubt.”

  Between the star power of American Pharoah and the depth and talent of his challengers, even the most practical horsemen and cynical horseplayers were finding it hard to shake the feeling that something magical was about to happen along this year’s Triple Crown trail.

  “Some Derbies, horses that win, no one thought they could,” said John Moynihan, the bloodstock agent who picked out Carpe Diem. “That isn’t going to happen this year. I don’t know if it will be American Pharoah, but a very good horse is going to win. Hopefully, when we get done with the Triple Crown, there’s going to be three or four horses that are considered warriors.”

  There were still seventy-two hours until post time, which was plenty of time for American Pharoah to get cast in his stall, step on stone, tie up his intestines, or any of the dozens of things that can, and do, go wrong for a racehorse as he readies for a big race. Of the most immediate concern for Team Pharoah was the post-position draw that was about to begin. Baffert, Zayat, and Espinoza had all been done in before by a blind draw that matches a horse with a stall in the starting gate. It mattered most here at Churchill Downs, in the Derby’s twenty-horse field. Baffert liked to say that the race—and history—was won or lost in the opening quarter-mile run to the first turn. The memory of Lookin At Lucky drawing the Number 1 hole was all too fresh. The colt’s chances were compromised as soon as the gate opened, as he was bumped and then pinballed among the cavalry charge before finishing sixth.