They’re in a Sweet and Sour Soup

With Julio [Canani], you get two for one: an excellent trainer and a funny guy who gives you entertainment you can’t get anywhere else.

-- Marty Wygod,

Breeders’ Cup day, 2004

*

There’s a racetrack axiom that says all it takes to break up a good friendship is a good horse. It happens all the time, and it happened again this week with Marty Wygod and Julio Canani, who were standing together in October in the winner’s circle in Lone Star Park at Grand Prairie, Texas, and cracking jokes on the stage of a Beverly Hills hotel in January, the night their Sweet Catomine won an Eclipse Award.

Now, less than three months after the wisecracks, Wygod’s Sweet Catomine is in the barn of another trainer, John Shirreffs, and even Shirreffs’ role appears to be interim. Sweet Catomine seems likely to wind up in New York, and trainer Bill Mott’s barn.

It didn’t have to be this way, but when a well-heeled owner such as Wygod shoots for the moon -- trying to win the Santa Anita Derby, and then the Kentucky Derby, with a filly -- the downside can be devastating. Sweet Catomine won’t see Louisville. She was fifth in the Santa Anita Derby.Two days later, there was a vacant stall in Canani’s barn, and Wygod had all but been handed his head by the quick-moving California Horse Racing Board.

That board, however, dragged its feet for several years before recently clearing trainer Bob Baffert of a morphine positive. These days, in a racing world that’s more topsy-turvy than ever, racing boards all over are choking on hot potatoes, served almost daily.

The Santa Anita Derby debacle came during a meet that already had been marred by five sodium bicarbonate (milkshake) violations, including one by Canani and another by Jeff Mullins, who trains Buzzards Bay, the Santa Anita Derby winner. Mullins, in an interview with The Times that he’d like to forget, insulted bettors by calling them “idiots.”

Racing says it works hard at integrity, but skeptics have a right to expect more after Wygod and Canani danced around the facts leading up to last Saturday’s race. Wygod said he told his trainer at one point: “Julio, quit saying she’s 100%, when she’s not.”

Fillies and the Kentucky Derby make for a romantic twist, but seldom does the frog turn into the prince. In 1995, Bob and Beverly Lewis and their roll-the-dice trainer, Wayne Lukas, ran Serena’s Song, one of the best fillies of any era, in the Derby. She led for a mile before finishing 16th, beating only three horses.

“We were overzealous,” Bob Lewis said recently. “We got Derby fever just as bad as anybody ever got it.”

Never having been to the Derby, after about 40 years in the game, Wygod was ripe to be bitten by the same Derby bug.

“I never dreamed I’d make it to the Derby, let alone with a filly,” he said before the Santa Anita Derby.

In trying to get to Churchill Downs with Sweet Catomine, Wygod did too much, by turns said too little and too much, and in the end has been put on notice by a proactive racing board. The board, which has the authority to suspend Wygod’s license, said that he should have been more forthright about Sweet Catomine’s Santa Anita Derby-week problems, which, when you think about it, were a collection of minor setbacks that never did add up to an excuse for running poorly.

Sweet Catomine bled in a workout, but only slightly. She came into heat, a condition that’s treatable and with which fillies run all the time. And she had to be re-shod.

The 3 a.m. trip to a clinic on the other side of Santa Barbara, with Sweet Catomine masquerading as a stable pony, was ill advised.

“I wanted to make sure Julio was telling me everything,” Wygod said, a sign that their owner-trainer relationship had almost unraveled.

I sat with them at the breakfast just before the post-position draw, Canani on one side and Wygod on the other, and when they didn’t say one word to each other, I figured they had done all their talking at the barn. So much for journalist’s intuition. In what started out as a classy move -- the owner of the beaten favorite coming to the press box -- Wygod brought down his own house by admitting that he had almost scratched his horse. He lost both ways -- his alibis, any horseplayer will tell you, would have been betting deterrents had they been proffered before the race.

Racing has always been far removed from full disclosure, and although it would be nice to know whether every horse in every race had the sniffles, I can’t think of a system that would fairly transmit that information to the public.

Suppose Wygod had told us everything he knew, and Sweet Catomine, running against a less-than-stellar field, had still won, at 2-1 instead of even money. Wygod would have been accused of setting up a score, and the grandstand might have been reduced to ashes.

In 1990, at the Preakness, USA Today asked a bunch of us for our picks two days before the race. Unbridled had won the Kentucky Derby, but I liked Summer Squall at Pimlico. The paper ran my selection, but that morning Summer Squall bled from the nose, all over the grazing area in front of the Preakness barn. Dozens of us watched.

Later that day, the Baltimore Sun asked for my pick and I switched to Unbridled.

His nosebleed behind him, Summer Squall won. Anybody paying attention would have accused me of playing both ends against the middle.

My excuse was too much information -- indeed a dangerous thing.