At the Belmont /RobertJ. Summers
There is no such thing as a sure thing
NEW YORK — If trainer Richard Dutrow Jr. has a mother who is anything like mine, she might have shaken her finger at him Saturday night and told him “Pride goeth before the fall” or something similar.
After all, it was Dutrow who barged his way into the national sports picture the last few weeks bragging (or “telling it like it is”) about how wonderful everything was going with Big Brown, his unbeaten colt that, until 6:32 Saturday night, stood on the brink of greatness as the next Triple Crown winner.
On Friday, when it was pointed out to Dutrow that 60 percent of the Belmont Stakes’ odds-on favorites had lost, he replied, in his usual way, “Ain’t going to happen this year, babe.”
But all that ended in about a minute and 38 seconds, a mile into the Belmont’s 140th running.
I had my binoculars focused on Big Brown and knew something was amiss when jockey Kent Desormeaux started moving his elbows back and forth, trying to urge his mount to run faster.
(When you watch a race, keep an eye on how active the jockeys are. When they are moving and bouncing and flapping and whipping in the early stages, you know the horse is probably not going to win.)
When it became apparent that Big Brown was done, the next question for most of the crowd became, “Oh no, is he hurt?”
But this time, unlike at other recent big races with major, tragic injuries, Big Brown didn’t limp, he didn’t stop, he didn’t fall down.
He just kind of jogged down the lane, far behind the rest of the field, while some of the jerks in the crowd booed him.
You could see on TV that Dutrow, who wore a blue dress shirt, was distressed and drenched in sweat as he tended to his horse at the finish line and on the way back to the barn.
It was, as Desormeaux pointed out on TV, 93 degrees in the sun (earlier in the day it had been as high as 96) and pretty miserable for man, if not beast.
It would be easy to come out now and hammer Dutrow for lots of things — for pointing out that everything he predicted happened in reverse.
Surely, some people will.
People who do this probably won’t be horseplayers, those who help keep the sport going by wagering money on a game that is chock-full of ups and downs every day, not just on the days that the whole world is watching.
Nick Zito won’t.
“This ain’t combat, it’s horse racing. We’ll have to see what happens,” Zito, trainer of Belmont winner Da’ Tara, had said the previous day.
“These [two horses Zito entered] are big long shots and rightfully so. But that’s what makes racing. That’s why they run the races.”
Underdogs win, favorites lose. It happens a lot. Ask somebody who bets on or owns horses.
“I said [to owner Robert LaPenta], ‘I think we are the only speed [frontrunner], so let’s take the shot,” Zito said after the race.
“I’m sure some people have seen the movie [‘First Saturday in May’]. . . . They have a song in there. I think it’s absolutely appropriate with what happened today — ‘Rain or Shine.’ ”
Zito certainly didn’t try to pile on Dutrow. He knows how he feels. Remember, Zito and LaPenta had War Pass, last year’s 2-year-old champion and highly regarded winter favorite for the Kentucky Derby. War Pass dropped off the Triple Crown trail back in the spring after he ran disappointing races in Florida and New York and then was taken out of training with a bad ankle.
In the post-Belmont news conference, Zito said he hadn’t had a chance to talk to Dutrow, but said, “I wish I did.”
The only contact reporters had with Dutrow Saturday night was a short transcript from the publicity department.
In it, Dutrow said, “I don’t really know how I feel. . . . Right now, I can say, it looks like he’ll live a good life if he never races again. He didn’t get the Triple Crown, but we got the Derby and the Preakness and that was great. . . . If we’re sure he is 100 percent getting back into training, we’ll go forward with him. If not, I’m sure we’ll just do the next thing, which is to retire him.”
This from a man who a day earlier talked about going beyond the Triple Crown to tackle the Travers at Saratoga and the Breeders’ Cup Classic at Santa Anita.
As my mother would have said, “Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.”
