On a 96-degree day in which the plumbing failed at Belmont Park, it was appropriate that the Triple Crown drought extended another year as Big Brown failed to fire and was eased in the stretch with Robert LaPenta’s Da’ Tara stealing the race on the front end to give Racing Hall of Fame trainer Nick Zito his second Belmont Stakes (G1) victory.
Da’ Tara led the field from gate to wire to win by 5 1/4 lengths in 2:29.65, the slowest time since 2002 when Sarava upset War Emblem’s bid in 2:29.72. He is the first gate-to-wire winner of the Belmont since Swale in 1984. Denis of Cork finished second, 2 3/4 lengths ahead of dead heat third-place finishers Ready’s Echo and Anak Nakal.
Big Brown broke alertly but “slipped” a bit leaving the gate. Jockey Kent Desormeaux put his 0.25-to-1 favorite behind Da’ Tara heading into the first turn. Da’ Tara under Alan Garcia came over on Big Brown, and the dual classic winner checked a bit going past the first quarter in :23.82. Desormeaux moved Big Brown off the rail and was 1 1/2 lengths back of Da’ Tara on the backstretch with Tale of Ekati in second to his inside.
Da’ Tara continued to control the race through fractions of :48.30, 1:12.90, and 1:37.96. Desormeaux said he had no horse turning for home and began easing his mount in the stretch.
By the time the field straightened out in the lane, it was clear that no one was going to catch Da’ Tara. The performance was the worst by a Triple Crown hopeful among the 11 who have tried since Affirmed swept the series in 1978.
“He always breaks hard, and he slipped up front,” Desormeaux said. “He was keen to go on, and I got him in a good spot early. In the first turn I thought I was riding the winner.”
“Nick told me to go to lead and slow down the pace, and when the time comes, do what you have to do to get this horse home,” Garcia said.
“I told Alan, if you can get away then get away,” Zito said.
Despite the poor showing, Desormeaux's confidence in the Kentucky Derby Presented by Yum! Brands (G1) and Preakness Stakes (G1) winner did not waiver.
“This is still the best horse I’ve ever ridden. He’s not lame; nothing was wrong,” Desormeaux said. “When I turned for home, I had no horse. I thought the race was playing into us, but when I asked Big Brown to engage, I had no horse. I was done.”
Desormeaux was aboard Real Quiet in that colt’s Triple Crown bid in 1998. He said that loss—by a nose to Victory Gallop—was more disheartening than this year’s Belmont because he does not feel any responsibility for Big Brown’s loss.
“I cannot imagine the freaks the 11 Triple Crown winners were,” Desormeaux said.
Da’ Tara paid $79 to win, $5 more than Birdstone paid to win in 2004 when that Zito trainee denied Smarty Jones the Triple Crown. Zito also finished third that year with Royal Assault, and the Zito trainee Anak Nakal was part of the dead heat third-place finish this year.
“The champ wasn’t himself today, but I said it a million times: I’m still going to play this game,” Zito said. “Both of my wins were equally surprising.”
Zito and LaPenta teaming to win the final leg of the Triple Crown is an appropriate coda on a Triple Crown season that began with all eyes on the duo’s champion two-year-old male War Pass.
After winning an allowance race, War Pass disappointed with a last-place finish in the Tampa Bay Derby (G3) before running second to Tale of Ekati in the Wood Memorial Stakes (G1). War Pass then missed the Triple Crown with a leg injury.
“We wish we were here with War Pass today, but Da’ Tara said he’d do it for him, and he did it very well,” LaPenta said. “Nick did just a phenomenal job here. This has been one of his favorite horses.”
Zito picked Da’ Tara out for LaPenta at the 2006 Fasig-Tipton Saratoga selected yearling sale. LaPenta went to $175,000 for the Tiznow colt, and while he sometimes pinhooks his yearling purchases, Da’ Tara was one horse Zito told LaPenta to keep.
WinStar bred Da’ Tara in Kentucky out of the winning Pirate’s Bounty mare Torchera. Da’ Tara has won two of eight starts and earned $664,067.
Big Brown’s trainer, Rick Dutrow Jr., denied requests for interviews immediately after the race.
“Please, not now,” he said.
First Funny Cide, now Da' Tara
By GLENYE CAIN OAKFORD
COURTESY OF THE DRF
LEXINGTON, Ky. - Da' Tara's front-running victory in the Belmont Stakes surprised a lot of people, including the colt's breeders, WinStar Farm. The race's longest shot at 38-1, Da' Tara denied a Triple Crown bid by Big Brown, who was eased to finish last. It also gave sire Tiznow, the stallion who launched the WinStar roster, his first classic winner.
If they had seen Da' Tara's Belmont coming, WinStar co-owner Bill Casner acknowledges, he and partner Ken Troutt would never have sold the colt or his dam, Torchera. But the two men, who have known each other since Casner was a trainer and Troutt an owner at now-defunct Ak-Sar-Ben racetrack in Omaha, Neb., back in the 1970s, are well familiar with the vagaries of racing and breeding. In 2003, the gelding Funny Cide became the first classic winner bred by WinStar, which sold his dam for $3,500 soon after his birth. Similarly, WinStar sold Da' Tara's dam, Torchera, for $20,000 at Keeneland's 2006 January all-ages sale. Da' Tara himself, just turned a yearling, followed her in the ring and brought $100,000.
They have no regrets about selling either the mares or their now-illustrious foals, Casner said.
"We wouldn't have sold Funny Cide if we'd thought he was going to be the Derby winner," Casner, 60, admitted with a laugh. "Hey, nobody has a crystal ball in this business. You hope. But we sincerely want people do to well with our horses. We've sold five Grade 1 winners, and we want everybody to know that. We're in the business of selling horses, and the racing is a showcase. That's how you showcase your stallions."
The breeding program that produced Da' Tara began in 1999, when Casner and Troutt decided to re-enter the Thoroughbred business, this time at the top of the game. They had the means to do it: Since their Ak-Sar-Ben days, the men had partnered to develop Troutt's Excel Communications, now part of Bell Canada, from a one-room office into a communications company with annual revenues of about $1.3 billion in 1996 when it went public with about 10 percent of its stock.
Casner, a Texan by birth, had become friendly with fellow Texans and racehorse owners Art, J.R., and Jack Preston. When the Prestons decided to leave the Thoroughbred business in 1999, Casner and Troutt bought their Prestonwood Farm in Versailles, Ky., and renamed it WinStar. They bought all the stallions, too, including Funny Cide's sire, Distorted Humor. The first horse Casner and Troutt added to the roster themselves was two-time Breeders' Cup Classic winner Tiznow, whom they stand in partnership with Taylor Made Farm and Michael Cooper. His fee this year is $30,000, and that's expected to rise in 2009.
Before their deal for the farm even closed, Casner and Troutt were at auction scouting broodmares to put to their new venture's stallions. They paid $350,000 for Torchera, a Pirate's Bounty mare out of the very good producer Kaylem Ho (who also, incidentally, is the third dam of Belmont runner-up and Derby third-place finisher Denis of Cork).
"She was a young, pretty mare, she'd been a good racehorse, and she was in foal to Unbridled," Casner recalled. "She was the type of mare we were looking for."
But Torchera didn't pan out, at least at first.
"She had some bad luck," WinStar president Doug Cauthen, 45, said. "One of her foals was a little neurologic, one had a fairly major X-ray problem that compromised his sale. Another foal had a huge gash in her hip that eventually healed, but that hindered her development and sale. All the foals were fairly nice horses, and Torchera was a good example of a mare that could be used with a lot of stallions because she was more or less an outcross to a lot of stallions, and she had a good physical and some toughness in her race record."
The farm was in the market for some younger mares, and, at 13, Torchera looked like a good one to sell. WinStar did, even though it liked her 2005 Tiznow foal better than anything she had produced so far. In his notes on Da' Tara, penned not long before he sold, Cauthen wrote, "Nice colt, best foal so far for the mare."
Da' Tara's good looks actually were one reason WinStar decided to put him through the auction ring in January, about a month before breeding season opened.
"We are a commercial farm that is focused on profitability," Cauthen said. "The payback is in adding value to your stallions by aggressively supporting them with mares like Torchera. By selling Da' Tara when we did, we were trying to promote Tiznow's book for that year. We sold some really nice Tiznows from his first crop as weanlings and yearlings to show off the high-quality product. We want to sell the good ones to showcase that, especially. When we sold Da' Tara, we focused on selling yearlings by Tiznow that were good physical individuals to remind people how good they looked. When they see good physicals in January, it helps remind them to breed to your stallion.
"It's a good opportunity for breeders to buy off of us, because we're going to sell horses like that that can go on and do good things," Cauthen added. "Thankfully for us, we have the stallion."
Da' Tara brought the handsome price of $100,000, several times Tiznow's stud fee, that reflected his good conformation. The buyer was Gabriel Duignan's Foxtale Farm, which made a quick profit reselling the colt for $175,000 to current owner Robert LaPenta at the 2006 Fasig-Tipton Saratoga yearling sale.
Torchera, meanwhile, had left the Keeneland January auction ring and went to Florida, where she now resides at Peter and Karen Rosbeck's Hidden Point Farm.
"Even a blind squirrel sometimes runs into a nut," Peter Rosbeck quipped. He says he has had some calls from potential buyers for Torchera, who currently has a colt by Rosbeck's stallion Gimmeawink and is back in foal to him. Rosbeck hasn't decided to sell and thinks Torchera could become a new foundation mare for his operation near Ocala.
Back at WinStar, the farm is celebrating a Triple Crown turnaround. WinStar's team began the Triple Crown campaign with high hopes for Tiznow's other Grade 1 winner this year, Colonel John, who finished sixth in the Derby after a troubled trip and is now pointing for the Swaps. After Da' Tara's "pleasant surprise," as Casner put it, Tiznow's stock has boomed again.
"He's the second Grade 1 winner from that crop, the fifth graded performer, and the fourth Grade 1 winner overall," Cauthen said of Da' Tara. "It proves that Tiznow can get you the real-deal big horse. The fact that they'll go two turns just adds to it."
"I don't think any of us at the farm dreamed that that horse would run like he did," said Casner. "He really stepped up. We were just proud to have a rooting interest in the race. We thought he'd certainly hit the board. He's a Tiznow, so I thought the distance would certainly be to his liking, and, you know, that's why we run 'em, I guess."
6/14/08 - Fleur de Lis: Gomez Never Had it so Easy
(Hysterical Lady was a Four Star Sales graduate of Keeneland November 2003 )
COURTESY OF THE BLOOD-HORSE
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Hystericalady cruises to victory in the Fleur de Lis.
Photo: Anne M. Eberhardt |
Garrett Gomez was the envy of every jockey June 14 at Churchill Downs. Who wouldn’t want to pick up the mount for the first time on a horse that had won eight of her previous 18 starts? Not to mention that she loves the distance and the racetrack.
Welcome to Gomez’ life as he entered the gate aboard Hystericalady, who would dominate her opponents on the way to a 7 ½-length score in the Fleur de Lis Handicap (gr. II).
The on-track crowd may have showed up to get a look at the reigning Horse of the Year Curlin in the Stephen Foster Handicap (gr. I), but they saw a dynamite performance from Hystericalady, who continues to be at the top of her game for trainer Jerry Hollendorfer.
Hystericalady sat just behind Initforthekandy for the first half-mile (in :49.69) and the two would then switch positions and run one-two the rest of the nine-furlong race, Gomez letting the 5-year-old daughter of Distorted Humor out a notch at each pole as she coasted home the easiest kind of winner.
Sent off by the crowd at 1-2, she ran like those odds, being in hand the final sixteenth to cover the distance in 1:50.88 and return $3 and $2.20 to her faithful backers. Initforthekandy paid $7.20 to place as the longest shot (15-1) in the field reduced to five after the scratch of Cowgirls Don’t Cry. Kathleens Reel finished third but there was no show wagering.
"This is the first time I have ridden her and she is a nice, nice mare," Gomez said. "I thought there might be one or two more horses go for the lead. I eased her out at the half-mile and she moved on. At the head of the stretch, she gave me a little more kick than I was expecting."
Hystericalady has run well over the Churchill track all three times Hollendorfer has sent her there from his Northern California base. She won the Humana Distaff Stakes (gr. I) on the Derby day undercard in 2007 and finished third, beaten a head, in the same race this Derby day.
"This worked out good for us," Hollendorfer said. "I am not sure when her next race is going to be, but it probably won’t be at Del Mar. I would think she may run two more times before the Breeders’ Cup."
The Fleur de Lis was the sixth stakes win for Hystericalady, who races for Hollendorfer in partnership with George Todaro, Tom Clark, and Rancho San Miguel. On the board in 14 of her 19 starts, Hystericalady, who was bred in Kentucky by Abbott Properties from the Northair mare Sacramentada, increased her lifetime earnings to $1,510,025.
For Gomez, his cut of the $199,578 she made June 14 may have been the easiest score of his riding career.
