Dust Hasn’t Settled Yet From Kentucky Derby

No one begrudged Spend A Buck his convincing victory last Saturday in the Kentucky Derby. When a colt wins the Derby by 5 lengths and misses the track record by only four-fifths of a second, that’s a tour de force.

But there was a lot of grumbling after this Derby, a surprising amount of complaining considering Spend A Buck’s clear-cut victory. For example:

--Trainers and jockeys complained about the rock-hard surface at Churchill Downs.

--Some of Eternal Prince’s owners said that an assistant starter had something to do with their colt’s slow start.

--A Louisville columnist fretted about the comparatively small crowd and blamed Tom Meeker, the new track president at Churchill Downs.

--The racing establishment considers it a sacrilege that Spend a Buck is bypassing the Preakness and a chance to win the Triple Crown in favor of the $2.6 million in blandishments that come with the Jersey Derby.

--Trainer Wayne Lukas said that if Spend A Buck wins the Jersey Derby, the $2-million bonus should not be included in the horse’s record.

First, the condition of the track. It’s interesting that among the horsemen who commented about the hardness were Lukas, fellow trainers Mike Whittingham and Patty Johnson, and jockeys Eddie Delahoussaye and Gary Stevens. All are based in California, where hard tracks are common, yet they were struck by the unyielding nature of Churchill Downs. Whittingham’s horse, Skywalker, finished sixth and will miss the Preakness May 18 because of stress fracture in the left foreleg.

“What people forget is that this track was resurfaced a couple of years ago and it’s different--faster--than it used to be,” said Butch Lehr, who has worked at Churchill Downs for 18 years, the last four as track superintendent.

“The track was fast all week, but I don’t think it was hard. The horses were getting a hold of it real good. The part of the track that Lukas saw was the chute area, and it was hard there, but the rest of the track wasn’t that hard. The chute doesn’t get cut up the way the rest of the track does by horses running on it, because they’re just jogging back there.”

Lehr disagreed with Whittingham, who said that Skywalker had been training on one track for several weeks and then running on something else Derby day. “As far as I’m concerned, it was the same track,” Lehr said.

There was no confirming that Eternal Prince had been held too long by an assistant starter after the stall opened. Eternal Prince’s main problem was the crowd. He couldn’t keep his mind on business when 108,000 people started to roar.

Although Laffit Pincay, riding Stephan’s Odyssey, said that his horse tried to savage Eternal Prince at the start, Eternal Prince’s jockey, Richard Migliore, was unaware that his mount might have been bitten. Replays of the start are inconclusive, but a photograph in Sunday’s Louisville Courier-Journal indicates that Stephan’s Odyssey might have tried to nip Tank’s Prospect, not Eternal Prince, who dropped back quickly after the gate opened.

The Derby crowd was the smallest since 1971, when Churchill Downs began a turnstile count. It was also the smallest since 1970, when the estimated turnout was 87,000.

Churchill Downs installed across-the-board price increases for this year’s Derby, from programs to general admission to box seats to mint juleps. General admission was $30, double what it had been last year, and to roam the infield cost $20, up from $10 in 1984.

According to Billy Reed, writing in the Courier-Journal, there “were indications that the public thinks Churchill Downs and new president Thomas Meeker are guilty of price-gouging. . . . Why, that (Saturday’s crowd) was almost 18,000 fewer people than last year’s smaller-than-usual crowd--at a time when the Derby field seemed to shape up as one of the best in history, and when the weather was absolutely perfect. If Meeker is smart, he may want to consider dropping prices next year. Or perhaps going back into the practice of law. In five years, at this pace, the Derby will be just another horse race in early May.”

Will Farish, a member of the track’s board of directors, applauded the smaller crowd. “It was getting out of hand in the infield and had gotten difficult to police,” he said. “The big dropoff this year was in the infield, where we had too many people too close together, anyway. I thought it was easier to move around and was better for everybody there this year.”

With exactas on every race for the first time, betting reached $12.3 million, a Derby record, but that was still short of the national record of $12.6 million wagered at Santa Anita on Santa Anita Handicap day in March.

As for Spend A Buck’s going to the Jersey Derby instead of the Preakness, Meeker said: “This is the manifestation of the competitiveness of our industry. We’ve always feared competition from the outside (casino gambling, state lotteries), but this is competition from within (another track, Garden State Park, wooing away the Derby star from the Preakness).”

Churchill Downs tried fighting that competition recently, filing a lawsuit against Garden State Park when its advertising of the $2-million bonus suggested that the Louisville track was participating.

Said Meeker: “The suit was dropped when Garden State agreed to mention the name of the Kentucky Derby and nothing else in the advertising.”

Should Spend A Buck win the Jersey Derby, his career earnings will swell to almost $4 million. That would move him past Slew o’ Gold, whose $3.5 million is second on the earnings list to John Henry, who has won $6.5 million.

“Counting the bonus money in a horse’s totals isn’t right,” Lukas said. “The only thing that should count is money earned on the track. We’ve maintained three divisions in our stable this year, and have picked up almost $3 million with a record-setting pace. Now a horse comes along and just because of a $2-million bonus is going to pass us in one race. The only money that should count is the purses--the money that everybody has a chance to run at.”