Kentucky Derby Diary : Spend A Buck and His Entourage Are Ready for Racing

One of the assignments Friday for Bobby Velez, the exercise rider for Kentucky Derby contender Spend A Buck, was to go to the Louisville airport to meet Pete Hall, who was flying in from New Jersey. Hall is Spend A Buck’s veterinarian.

Hall is an important part of the Spend A Buck team, as was Wayne McIlwraith, a Colorado State veterinarian who performed 12 minutes of arthroscopic surgery to remove a bone chip from the horse’s knee in November.

Arthroscopic operations--requiring only a small incision-- are commonplace now, for horses, as well as humans. More than 1,000 thoroughbreds have had arthroscopic surgery in the last two years.

Before arthroscopic surgery, horses would need as long as six months to recover from the removal of a bone chip in a knee. Spend A Buck was doing therapeutic swimming exercises three weeks after his operation.

“It’s a guess regarding what is the best way for a horse to recuperate from this surgery, because the technique is so new,” McIlwraith told Dennis Diaz, the Tampa, Fla., wheeler-dealer who owns Spend A Buck. “If anybody tells you a definite way for a horse to come back from this, walk away from him. Because he’s lying.”

Cam Gambolati, Spend A Buck’s trainer, suspects that the horse injured himself jumping the starting-gate tracks during the stretch run of the Young America Stakes at the Meadowlands in New Jersey last October. The injury went undetected, however, and Spend A Buck ran third in the Breeders’ Cup at Hollywood Park three weeks later.

That was the first time Spend A Buck had run consecutive non-winning races, and he was X-rayed from 12 different angles before the chip was spotted.

Although phenylbutazone, a pain-killer, is permitted by Kentucky racing rules, Gambolati said that Spend A Buck will not run on it today. “He’s never run on it,” Gambolati said. “We have given it to him between races a few times, though.”

Spend A Buck, who now runs with a shadow roll, also jumped some tracks in an earlier race. His problem since arriving at Churchill Downs after a 9 1/2-length victory in the Garden State Stakes April 20 has been Mike Battaglia, the track announcer. A loudspeaker faces Spend A Buck’s stall on the backstretch, and Battaglia’s race calls have been a distraction. Spend A Buck sticks his head out of the stall for nearly every race.

“He didn’t have a speaker to contend with at any of the other tracks where he’s stayed,” Gambolati said. “But he’s been better lately than he was in the beginning, so he’s starting to adjust to the noise.”

Most of the trainers are happy that there’s a relatively small field of 13 running in the Derby, but Gambolati would have preferred a 20-horse cavalry charge, which has been typical of the race in the last four years. That’s because with his blazing early speed, Spend A Buck is likely to be clear of traffic problems no matter how many horses he faces.

“You can look at it two ways,” Gambolati said. “A bigger field would have made it more likely that some of the horses we have to beat might get in trouble. But the Derby’s the Derby, and you’d like to see a cleanly run race, not one that leaves doubts in everybody’s mind about who the best horse really was.”

Although Gambolati is relatively unconcerned about his horse’s traffic problems, Spend A Buck will break from the No. 10 post, and trainers of the nine horses inside him see a potential danger at the start. There’s a good possibility that Angel Cordero, riding Spend A Buck as he seeks his third Derby victory, will angle him sharply toward the rail, making it open season on any horses in his path.

There has been only one disqualification on the track in 110 Derby runnings, that coming last year when Gate Dancer was moved from fourth to fifth for interference in the stretch.

Cordero doesn’t need a history lesson, though. One of the most determined, risk-taking jockeys in the game, he goes for the Derby’s traditional wide-open style the way a Kentucky colonel goes for bourbon and branch water.