American Pharoah

by Joe Drape

  Now in the paddock, Baffert was not so sure.

  “Just do whatever you want,” he told Espinoza.

  In the jockeys’ room, Espinoza had planned to do that anyway. He’d put on his silks ninety minutes earlier, set the alarm on his watch, and tried to lie down for a nap like he often did. Stevens, who was sharing a locker with him, smiled, thinking his friend really, really didn’t give a shit. Espinoza, however, did not take a nap. He ran the race through his mind. He decided to ride American Pharoah like he was the best horse in the race. In Arkansas, the colt showed that he could wait behind other horses. Espinoza was intent on breaking cleanly. Then he would take whatever the rest of the field gave him. As spectacular a racehorse as American Pharoah had been so far in his career, Espinoza still did not believe that he had seen his true talent.

  “I really haven’t had a chance to push him, to see what he’s really got,” he had said before the race. “I know I ride him, but right now, I’m like everybody else. I don’t know how good he is.”

  When Baffert saw Stevens in the paddock, he gave Espinoza a nudge.

  “Gary’s got his game face on,” he said.

  Both trainer and jockey knew that Stevens’s horse, Firing Line, was a dangerous contender. In fact, he told both Espinoza and Martin Garcia that the colt was sitting on a big race.

  “It’s going to be you guys and Gary Stevens,” he told his riders.

  Firing Line had lost by a head twice to Dortmund. In the Robert B. Lewis, Firing Line actually got his head in front of him in the deep stretch before Dortmund rallied to win by a half head. The colt’s trip to New Mexico six weeks ago was a confidence booster.

  “He’s been out of sight, out of mind,” Stevens said earlier in the week, “but Baffert knows what I’m sitting on. This horse’s strength is his mind. He’s a great athlete, but he has the mind to go with it.”

  Baffert watched first Dortmund and Garcia disappear in the tunnel to the track, and then American Pharoah and Espinoza. He remained behind in the paddock with Jill and Bode and his older boys Taylor, Canyon, and Forest. He would watch the race there with them and a small group of journalists. When the opening chords of the “My Old Kentucky Home” sounded, he knew the horses were on the track and the hard work and triumphs of the past year would come down to this, the greatest two minutes in sports.

  “When I hear that song,” he said, “I know it’s almost over. My job is done.”

  Baffert had kept American Pharoah and Dortmund apart for five months. He could not do it any longer. In boxes near the finish line were the Zayats and the Shahs. They were about to find out soon enough which of their colts was Citation and which was Coaltown—the two-year-old champion American Pharoah or the undefeated Dortmund. The betting public landed on American Pharoah as the 5-to-2 favorite with Dortmund just behind him at 4 to 1.

  As the gate opened and Dortmund, followed by Firing Line, passed the grandstand, the record crowd of 170,513 knew that it would quickly find out which Baffert colt was better on this day. It was the usual Derby mayhem for the inside horses when the gates opened—the undefeated Materiality broke sideways and dropped far off the pace and found walls of horses instead of an open seam whenever he tried to get closer to the front. Espinoza and American Pharoah followed Mr. Z on an angle to the inside, settling into third, just off Firing Line’s flank, with Carpe Diem on the inside in fourth. As he angled in, Espinoza heard the riders of the horses that he was cutting off shouting at him. It was always a noisy brawl for position in the opening quarter mile of the Derby.

  “I bounced right out of the gate,” said Espinoza. “I didn’t care.”

  Behind them horses were getting stopped as Bolo and Danzig Moon were bouncing off each other. As they glided into the first turn, Dortmund was hugging the rail in first place with Firing Line behind and outside of him in his jet stream, and American Pharoah loping effortlessly in their shadow. Baffert was at peace. Garcia was on cruise control. American Pharoah was out of harm’s way.

  It’s our Derby to lose, he thought.

  Stevens was having to wrestle a bit with an eager Firing Line and thought about taking over the lead from Dortmund. When he saw that Garcia was strong-arming his colt as well, he decided to wait and try to relax Firing Line.

  “I figured if I dropped my horse’s head and went on by, Dortmund would start fighting me, and that would set it up for American Pharoah,” said Stevens.

  Garcia and Dortmund were clipping along at a comfortable pace, hitting quarter poles as if there was a carrot waiting at each of them, a half mile in 47.34 seconds. It was clear halfway down the backstretch that only three horses mattered in this race. Dortmund, Firing Line, and American Pharoah were on a conveyor belt, and the rest of the field was struggling to keep up.

  Stevens and Firing Line chased Dortmund into the far turn. Stevens’s colt had relaxed down the backstretch and was ready to implement the plan that he had devised to turn the tables on Dortmund and get the jump on American Pharoah. In their previous meeting in the Robert B. Lewis, Firing Line passed Dortmund in the stretch but was quickly reeled in.

  “Dortmund is like Silver Charm and likes a fight,” Stevens said. “The tighter you get with him, the more he likes it.”

  In the Lewis, Stevens had moved too early. He was not going to make the same mistake. As they turned for home, Dortmund cut the corner first. Firing Line moved to the middle of the track, and Victor Espinoza, aboard American Pharoah, chose the widest route. For the first time ever in a race, Espinoza felt his colt slowing down and struggling to find his motor.

  “So I got into him,” he said.

  The colt that had rarely seen a whip in his previous five races was getting well acquainted with one now. Espinoza was paddling him with both hands. Stevens and Firing Line hooked Dortmund first. They matched strides for 10, 20, 30 yards—and then, as if Stevens hit a booster, Firing Line blew by him for good.

  “He was on it,” Stevens said. “Coming for home, I thought I might get there.”

  Espinoza moved American Pharoah closer to Firing Line, shaking his reins, making up ground by inches rather than yards. He thought his colt was ready to quit—that he was not fit enough to finish the only race that mattered as he had the previous two.

  “That other horse was tough,” Espinoza said. “He wasn’t going away.”

  This was the test American Pharoah had yet to take, let alone pass. Espinoza crossed his reins and started fanning his whip. He knew he had to ride him hard. Espinoza whipped him at least thirty-one times. Stevens saw a shadow, then heard Espinoza chirping, and then the Zayat colors went by. He was not surprised. With a sixteenth of a mile to the wire, Firing Line finally buckled. Stevens knew the only flaw in his plan to win his fourth Derby was that American Pharoah may have simply been the better horse.

  In his box near the finish line, Ahmed Zayat was swinging his head from his wife, Joanne, who was sobbing, to his horse pounding down the stretch.

  “I knew that if he had the lead, nobody would catch him,” he said. “He has such brilliant speed. I started getting really, really nervous, and my wife started crying and I understood that they were tears of joy.”

  Behind him, Frances Relihan recognized in American Pharoah the baby that once took her breath away as he bucked and spun in a field.

  “He’s got it,” she said, digging her nails into Joe’s arm.

  American Pharoah was the horse that she, Espinoza, and Baffert knew that he was, and the horse that Stevens feared he was. The colt and Espinoza hit the finish line a length ahead of Firing Line, and Dortmund was three lengths behind them in third. Baffert did not match Jones’s 1–2 finish with Citation and Coaltown, but he came close. In the paddock walkway, Baffert raised his right fist into the air as his three older boys piled on top of him. Jill Baffert was hugging him, weeping and repeating, “I can’t believe it.” Bode Baffert was pogoing up and down and screaming at the top of his lungs. The trainer broke away and swept up his youngest son into
his arms. In his brief ten years, all Bode had ever witnessed along the Derby Trail was hard work and failure for his father. Three years ago, father and son were so inconsolable when Bodemeister was caught at the wire by I’ll Have Another that they fled the paddock in tears.

  Now, a few days after meeting his dad’s first Derby winner, Silver Charm, he had been with all of Baffert’s boys for his fourth Kentucky Derby triumph, one that put him into a tie for second place for the winningest Derby trainer behind Ben Jones and alongside D. Wayne Lukas and Derby Dick Thompson.

  Out on the track, NBC’s Donna Brothers, the network’s sideline reporter, caught up on horseback with an exuberant Espinoza, who was patting American Pharoah on the neck and smiling ear to ear.

  “I feel like the luckiest Mexican on earth,” he said with a cackle. “American Pharoah, he’s special, very special.”

  With the victory, he now trailed only Bill Hartack, Earle Sande, and Willie Shoemaker for most Derby victories and joined Isaac Murphy, Jimmy Winkfield, Ron Turcotte, Eddie Delahoussaye, and Calvin Borel as back-to-back winners.

  In Zayat’s box, the family’s first victory after so much disappointment was met with a mosh pit of hugs—and a whole lot more. Joanne Zayat was a puddle. Justin Zayat had gotten sick, throwing up in front of network cameras. Ahmed, meanwhile, asked, “Who finished second? Who finished third?” He was either hoping that Mr. Z had hit the board or that he had hit the exacta or trifecta at the windows.

  In the news conference after the race, Baffert acknowledged publicly what he suspected all along: American Pharoah was the bigger of Baffert’s two big horses. It was Dortmund’s first loss, but he had been dead game.

  “He was tough,” Baffert said. “I’m proud of him.”

  American Pharoah was something else altogether, something that may transcend a single race. He was as good as Lukas and Mott had believed. He was a colt worthy of reviving real Triple Crown hopes. Baltimore and the Preakness was two weeks away, but there was a hint of inevitably in the air.

  Zayat commandeered the microphone and unleashed a long monologue that said as much about him as his horse. His conviction came through loud and clear. American Pharoah was a gift to him, his family, and the sport at large.

  “All this week I was very calm, enjoying it, relaxed,” he said. “My wife told me, you are unusually relaxed. I’m kind of a hyper guy. She told me, ‘How are you that relaxed?’ I said, ‘The horse is giving me that confidence, and Bob had that confidence all week.’ He trained on this track. He breezed on it. He was doing everything right. Now, comparing him to all the others, I came with good horses, but I felt today I came with a star. I was very cautious of saying that because I wanted the horse to do the talking. It is not about what we feel. It is about the horse.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  OLD HILLTOP

  May 16, 2015

  American Pharoah did what so many had hoped he would in the 141st running of the Kentucky Derby. He did not merely win. He lived up to his promise. The lesson Espinoza taught the colt in the Arkansas Derby had paid off as American Pharoah had stalked Dortmund and Firing Line for a mile before pouncing on them. He had shown fortitude running past them and proved that when challenged he could outwill and outrun tough rivals. Horse racing is a game of opinions, where analysis and hunches and tastes become interchangeable. The doubters saw an American Pharoah that had to run all out to beat Firing Line by a length after getting a perfect trip from Espinoza. The finishing time of 2:03.02 was not very fast. The colt was hard used, as they say, as Espinoza went to his whip incessantly in the stretch, at least 31 times, a fact that was not lost on casual fans and animal lovers who wrote to newspapers and called into radio shows, saying that it had looked an awful lot like abuse. The Kentucky racing stewards at Churchill Downs never questioned Espinoza’s ride, determining that he had offered the encouragement in rhythm with American Pharoah’s stride, had hit him on his shoulders and hindquarters per regulations, and had ridden well within the rules. The following morning, Baffert led American Pharoah out of his barn and let fans pet him and feed him carrots. The colt was as relaxed and docile as a barn cat and looked none the worse for wear the morning after running a mile and a quarter with a small but powerful man on his back hitting him with a stick.

  Now he was in Baltimore for the Preakness Stakes, carrying the heavy weight of Triple Crown hopes in his saddle. Every Derby winner does, but between his performances on the track and the hosannas he was receiving from horsemen and horse lovers alike off of it, the pressure was increased for American Pharoah to make a triumphant stop here en route to his date with history in New York at the Belmont Stakes. Baffert certainly recognized that.

  “You know what? I really feel a lot of positive energy because of this horse,” he said. “Because I know a lot of people are hoping—they put their hat on something big like this, a horse, like what he’s done, there’s a certain aura about him. He has caught everybody’s attention.”

  In recent years, the Preakness had been something of a walkover for the Derby winner. While the winner had to come here in pursuit of the Triple Crown, the owners and the trainers of the better horses that failed at the Derby mostly chose to rest their horses five weeks and wait for the Belmont. There they were inevitably joined by late-blooming three-year-olds and the trap was set to spoil yet another horse’s bid for immortality. The previous year, one of those, Tonalist, stopped California Chrome’s Triple Crown bid, much to the nationally televised chagrin of Steve Coburn, one of Chrome’s co-owners and a newcomer to the sport. He melted down before the cameras and called skipping the Derby and Preakness the “coward’s way out.”

  Now the Derby’s second- and third-place finishers, Firing Line and Dortmund, were here in Baltimore to try American Pharoah again. The trainer of Firing Line, Simon Callaghan, believed his colt had the edge in freshness. Callaghan, thirty-two, was an Englishman and up-and-coming trainer who was on the Triple Crown trail for the first time. He was enjoying it. His colt had had six weeks between his three races this year and Callaghan believed he would benefit as well from the Preakness’s shorter distance, a sixteenth of a mile shorter than the Derby’s mile-and-a-quarter track. His colt had battled deep into the stretch and was only a length behind American Pharoah at the finish.

  “I think the spacing that we had in our two prior races is going to help us out,” he said. “I think that should enable us to have a slightly fresher horse going forward. He’s got a very good cruising speed during his races, and I think that should lend itself to a slight cutback in distance. I think this could be an absolutely perfect distance for him. He earned the right to be here.”

  More surprising, however, was that Dortmund was here to take on American Pharoah again. Baffert had painstakingly kept the two apart until the Derby, and now they were a couple of stalls apart in Pimlico Race Course’s stakes barn and on a collision course once more. The trainer had no reason to discourage Kaleem Shah from entering Dortmund in the Preakness. The colt had run a tremendous race in Louisville in his first career defeat, and his free running style was perfectly suited to a track that rewarded handy horses like Dortmund. When you operated a big barn full of quality stakes horses with owners who wanted to run in the biggest races, inevitably a trainer had to square off with himself. In fact, twenty years ago, D. Wayne Lukas had come here with Thunder Gulch, the Derby winner, and beat him with stablemate Timber Country. He sent them both to New York, where Timber Country spiked a fever the day before the race and Thunder Gulch went on to win it. It meant a training Triple Crown for Lukas but left the owner of Thunder Gulch, Michael Tabor of Coolmore, with two-thirds of the series and wondering perhaps, “What if?”

  “It takes a great horse to win the Triple Crown,” Baffert said, “and if American Pharoah is great, you can’t worry about Dortmund or Firing Line. My job is to get them over here.”

  As much as Baffert may have wanted, and believed, that the twelfth Triple Crown champion was in his barn, he also
understood that horse racing would be just as well served by three competitive races featuring the best horses in training. When Baffert captured his first Derby with Silver Charm, he was part of one of the most thrilling Triple Crown chases ever as Free House and Captain Bodgit challenged the colt in the stretch in the first two legs and Touch Gold finally got by him in the Belmont. Three failed bids had made Baffert a student of the series.

  “If you look back at all the Triple Crown runners, they ran a lot,” he said. “I think a lot has to do with who you are running against and how tough it is. This was such a tough Derby. This was the toughest Derby I’ve been in.”

  In 1978, Affirmed was 12 for 14 coming out of the Derby. American Pharoah had five victories in six starts, which were not exactly golden age numbers but provided a stout foundation when put through the lens of modern times. The paradigm had shifted dramatically over the last fifty years when it came to the durability of a racehorse.

  The Hancocks, for example, had been raising racehorses for four generations in the Bluegrass and not too long ago, Arthur III kept to a rule he learned from his father, Bull Hancock Jr.: Never breed to a stallion with fewer than twenty-five career starts. That rule was good enough to produce the Kentucky Derby champions Gato Del Sol in 1982 and Sunday Silence in 1989. Both were strong, sound horses who could run all day. Gato Del Sol turned out to be a bust as a sire, and commercial breeders here ignored Sunday Silence, who had nearly won the Triple Crown but had to go to Japan to become one of the world’s leading stallions.

  By the time Hancock bred his third Derby winner, Fusaichi Pegasus, in 2000, he had long abandoned the twenty-five-start rule. FuPeg, as the colt was known, was a son of Mr. Prospector, who had raced fourteen times. His mother was Angel Fever, who made it to the track just twice before being hurt and then retired from racing. The match sacrificed heartiness for speed, but that was in demand in auction rings. Hancock sold Fusaichi Pegasus for $4 million as a yearling.