SID FERNANDO
T
HE impetus to change had, without question, a firm behind-the-scenes push from powerful breeders and owners. They implied that the profile of the classic North American dirt horse, once celebrated for its speed up to classic distances, was being changed imperceptibly – but systematically – to a hybrid turf/all-weather type that lacked the brilliant speed that once characterized it. Developments over the years have bolstered this train of thought. The improbable leading General Sire in North America in 2013 was turf champion Kitten’s Joy. It’s notable, too, that during the height of the “synthetic era” from 2009 to 2014, the only older male champion to make a name for himself on dirt was Blame, in 2010. Most of the others were turf horses: Gio Ponti (2009), Acclamation (2011), Wise Dan (2012 and 2013), and Main Sequence (2014) altogether made only one combined start on dirt during their championship seasons, and that was Acclamation’s dead-last run in the Grade 3 Charles Town Classic. This turf “anomaly,” too, has now been institutionally rectified by the organizations that hand out the Eclipse Awards. Beginning this year, older male and female champions will be limited to dirt or main track horses only, wiping out turf horses by decree and all-weather types like Acclamation by opportunity. With this in mind, consider that Zayat Stable’s American Pharoah may be the last two-year-old champion to win a Grade 1 race on all-weather in North America, and there is a bit of irony in this. The brilliant colt debuted last summer in a maiden special on Del Mar’s artificial surface and lost, but his trainer, Bob Baffert, undeterred, wheeled him back in the Del Mar Futurity-G1, which the colt won by almost five lengths in the front-running style of a future classics contender. It says something about Baffert’s belief in American Pharoah that he raced him as a maiden in a Grade 1 – he told me it’s the first time he’d done something like that – but it also shows that all-weather didn’t hinder the 96
TRAINERMAGAZINE.COM ISSUE 36
All-weather kickback to dirt detractors This year’s Triple Crown preps were notable for producing a number of high-class contenders, and, coincidently, it was the first year of mostly all-dirt trials since major tracks in California, Kentucky, and Dubai abandoned synthetic surfaces for the real thing. colt’s brilliance one bit. Since the Futurity, the colt went on a winning streak on dirt as well and came to the Derby with wins in the Grade 1 FrontRunner Stakes at Santa Anita and the Grade 2 Rebel and Arkansas Derby at Oaklawn Park. American Pharoah is a homebred for Ahmed Zayat, who got into the business ten years ago with some notable high-priced auction purchases and who has enjoyed one of the best runs of any owner the last decade with classics contenders. His most expensive buy was the $4.6 million Maimonides, purchased at the 2006 Keeneland September yearling sale. Maimonides, too, was trained by Baffert but made his debut at two, in 2007, at Saratoga, in a race that he won by 11½ lengths with the world apparently at his feet. But he would only make one more lifetime start, a third-place finish in the Grade 1 Hopeful Stakes, after bucking his shins. He never stayed sound enough to continue his career and was subsequently retired to stud. Maimonides began his career at Saratoga because Zayat, who had a big chunk of his
“
It says something
about Baffert’s belief in American Pharoah that he raced him as a maiden in a Grade 1, but it also shows that all-weather didn’t hinder the colt’s brilliance one bit
”
stable with Baffert in California at the time, was unhappy with the synthetic surface at Del Mar and famously moved much of his stock to New York after a confrontation in the summer of 2007 with Del Mar’s Joe Harper one morning. Hank Wesch of the U-T San Diego reported on July 31st of that year: “The argument, in a chance meeting near the backstretch racing office, was over whether the new Polytrack surface, which has produced a perfect safety record through the first two weeks of the meeting, could and should be fine-tuned to better accommodate horses bred for speed and to produce faster times.” Maimonides didn’t stay sound on dirt, but Zayat’s homebred Pioneerof the Nile, a two-year-old of 2008 who also made his debut at Saratoga instead of Del Mar, relished the all-weather surface at Hollywood Park. He won the track’s Grade 1 CashCall Futurity in December by a nose for his first stakes score. In a blog post dated December 24, the late Jack Werk wrote of the colt, who was originally trained by Bill Mott at Saratoga but was switched to Baffert at Hollywood: “In the race, Pioneerof the Nile was under a sustained drive from a long ways out, and this particular ability has been the hallmark of superior synthetic runners.” Pioneerof the Nile later won Santa Anita’s three major Derby preps on all-weather and he would go on to run second in the 2009 Derby. He has since become one of the top young sires in the country, with American Pharoah his best to date. With that colt and others, Pioneerof the Nile is proving that perhaps the long-term effects of the “failed experiment” weren’t quite as bad for the breeding shed. After all, the synthetics – and turf – played to the stamina that had started to wane in North America, and now some of that is finding its way back into the speed. n