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OUT OF LEFT FIELD |
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 A staff artist's impression of Rachel Alexandra's triumph |
The Doll and Two Guys
Had a Joyous Preakness
of TheColumnists.com
There were three story lines about the Preakness. And justice triumphed in all of them. Hooray.
# There was the angle of the filly Rachel Alexandra running against the male horses. Only four fillies had won the Preakness and none since the nicely-named Nellie Morse in 1924.
#A big part of the story was jockey Calvin Borel doing what nobody had ever done before, taking off the horse on whom he won the Kentucky Derby--Mind That Bird--to ride Rachel Alexandra because he thought she was the best horse in the country.
# The juiciest angle for those of us who like to see justice triumph was the failure of a scurvy little scheme some of the owners considered before the race. As Vic Ziegel of The New York Daily News wrote, Mark Allen, one of the owners of Mind That Bird, decided that life would be a lot less complicated for his gelding if the filly were kept out of the race. So he made a call to Ahmed Zayat, owner of the Derby runner-up, Pioneer of The Nile (terrible name), and suggested they each enter a second horse and fill the Preakness starting gate. That would keep the filly, a supplemental starter, out of the race because the field would have the maxium 14 runners.
In stepped Marylou Whitney, a grande dame of racing. She said she would scratch her horse, Luv Gov, out of the race to open up a slot for Rachel Alexandra. Her threat and complaints about this attempted skullduggery persuaded the schemers to back off. “Sportsmanship prevailed” NBC announcer Tom Hammond termed it.
Borel was nicknamed Bo-rail because he had made his place in history with two great daredevil rides, riding-the-rails to win the 2007 Derby with Street Sense and this year’s Derby with Mind That Bird. On TV former jockey Gary Stevens said over a replay of his Bird heroic, “There was no way I would go through that hole.”
Borel won this time with a front-running ride aboard Rachel Alexandra. He overcame a little trouble at the gate and the challenge of breaking from the outside post, No. 13, to quickly go to the lead before the first turn.
He opened up a four-length lead in the stretch and then held off an exciting, late-charging Bird. Borel is an ingenuous man who dared predict with authority that his filly would win. And afterward he revealed that his filly never liked the footing and struggled. He hit her with the whip twice to hold off the Bird, something he hadn’t done in her six previous winning races.
Though Borel shocked the world with his Derby ride, he earned the mount on Rachel Alexandra by going to the owner and asking to be put on the filly he had ridden to six straight wins. He got the mount in the Preakness, of course.
Owner Jess Jackson also came up big for his role in the affair. He put down something like $5 million dollars to buy Rachel Alexandra after she won the Kentucky Oaks for fillies the day before the Derby and then dared run her against males.
(I should point out here that Jackson owns the Kendall-Jackson winery, that he named a red wine “Curlin” to honor his horse of the year the past two years and that I have a bottle of Curlin because he sent them out to all the members of the National Turf Writers Association).
“She wants to run,” Jackson said. “Gender doesn’t matter. Champions should run against champions. If a filly is as good as a colt she ought to compete.” He pointed out that fillies often run against and beat males in Europe.
The NBC telecast took a chance in its pre-race presentation because it pretty much ignored all the horses other than Rachel and the Bird. We got only the post-parade rundown of the seven Derby returnees and five other non-Derby entrants. The top two ran one-two in a pulsating finish so there was no embarrassment for NBC.
NBC and pre-eminent track caller Tom Durkin bounced back from a spotty performance at the Derby. With 19 horses in that field, Durkin had trouble with his early call, trying to identify all 19 starters. And he was late picking up the late-charging Mind That Bird. I am probably only one of a half-dozen people who came about this nuance, but quick camera cuts from long shots to close-ups that didn’t match Durkin’s call made it tough for viewers trying to spot their particular horses.
The smaller Preakness field--13--made it easy for Durkin and the cameras. They stayed with the wider-view angles this time in order to track the late-charging Bird; Durkin and the cameras were synchronized as the Bird made his way through the field. He had one of his incomparable, exciting calls bringing the horses home.
TV host Bob Costas, no surprise, had a good day. In the Derby he said “The almost forgotten horse ran an unforgettable race.” When owner Jackson told him he hoped to mate Curlin to Rachel Alexandra to breed a super horse, Costas said, “We hope they find each other attractive.”
And at the end, though NBC will not be televising the Belmont Stakes, Costas did not shirk previewing the hot story of the next three weeks. We can anticipate the delicious treat of a mile-and-a-half duel in the Belmont between the two stars of the racing world, Rachel Alexandra (no relation to WNBC’s Rachel Maddow) and Mind That Bird. Hooray.
©2009 by Stan Isaacs. The Stan Isaacs caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. This column first posted May 18, 2009.
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