Day Quickly Proves He’s a Winner When Given Mount With a Chance

Before this year’s Preakness Stakes, a typical ride for Pat Day in a Triple Crown race was Flag Admiral.

Flag Admiral, a starter in the 1983 Preakness at Pimlico, was more known for his ownership than quickness afoot. Tom Gentry, the Kentucky owner-breeder who is equal parts P.T. Barnum and Bill Veeck, announced before the race that Jimmy Carter, of the Plains, Ga., Carters, was a partner in the colt.

Bettors at Pimlico ignored the “Carter & Gentry” owners’ line in the track program and sent Flag Admiral off at 26-1, which is just about what the horse deserved. Flag Admiral ran with all the speed of the former President’s down-home drawl, finishing 10th in a 12-horse field.

Day’s mounts in the Kentucky Derby have been every bit as spectacular as Flag Admiral. This year at Churchill Downs, against his better judgment, Day rode Irish Fighter, a 40-1 shot who hadn’t won a race in three months. Irish Fighter beat only two horses, finishing 11th, more than 24 lengths behind the victorious Spend a Buck.

Day’s previous two mounts in the Derby were just as dismal. In ‘82, in fact, he rode a colt given so little chance of winning that the horse was put in the mutuel field.

In two Belmonts, Day’s mounts have been 26-1 and 28-1. Somehow, he urged Pine Circle to a second-place finish behind Swale last year.

So when Day got the mount on Tank’s Prospect for last Saturday’s Preakness, he must have felt as though he had been handed Secretariat’s reins. Tank’s Prospect was 9-2, third in the betting behind Chief’s Crown and Eternal Prince, and represented Day’s first legitimate chance in a Triple Crown race.

After losing a stirrup for several strides just out of the starting gate, Day gave Tank’s Prospect a classic ride, the kind the colt needed to overhaul Chief’s Crown jut before the wire to win by a head. Regaining his iron, Day saved ground along the rail while Eternal Prince set a blazing early pace, then swung Tank’s Prospect around two tiring horses on the far turn before returning to the rail for the stretch drive and coming up outside Chief’s Crown in the final yards.

“It was textbook perfect,” trainer Wayne Lukas said of Day’s ride. “You could put the film in a time capsule, and in a hundred years, if somebody asks, ‘What’s a race rider?’ open it up and show them this one.”

There are conflicting counts on how many times Day whacked Tank’s Prospect through the stretch, but a consensus seems to be 22.

That’s a little unusual because Day is not considered to be a particularly strong whip rider. In fact, in his previous biggest win, the $3-million Breeders’ Cup Classic with Wild Again at Hollywood Park last November, he didn’t use the stick at all.

By now, Day shouldn’t have anything to prove, having led the country in wins for the last three years, a feat accomplished by only Bill Hartack before. But many of those wins have been at Oaklawn Park and Churchill Downs, not New York and California, and there will always be skeptics.

Lukas is not one of them. “Pat could ride anywhere, day in and day out,” he said. “He’s really got his act together. When you meet him before a race in the paddock, you realize that he’s got a confidence level that’s unbelievable.”

Now, Pat Day also has a Triple Crown win, after finally getting to ride a horse that had a chance.

Precisionist ran his near-world record time of 1:32 4/5 for the mile in the Mervyn LeRoy Handicap Sunday at Hollywood Park, just nine days after his sire, Crozier, had to be destroyed at owner-breeder Fred Hooper’s farm in Ocala, Fla.

Crozier, at 27, had already been removed from stud duty, and his last crop, 2-year-olds now, consisted of only five horses, only three of which survived.

“Crozier had a bladder problem,” Hooper said. “He had been passing a lot of blood and got awful thin last summer. He got through the winter pretty good, but then he took a turn for the worse again this year, and there was nothing that could be done.”

Hooper, who won the Kentucky Derby with Hoop Jr. in 1945, always believed that Crozier could have given him his second Derby win in 1961 but for a questionable ride by Braulio Baeza. Crozier finished second, three-quarters of a length behind Carry Back, a pattern that prevailed almost every time the two colts met.

Ross Fenstermaker, who trains Precisionist, once said: “I’ll take all the Croziers they can give me. They’re honest race horses who really try.”

Asked if there were any common characteristics to Crozier’s offspring, Hooper said: “They were all very kind horses. They were quiet and awful easy to train.”

Next for Precisionist, who missed Dr. Fager’s world record by three-fifths of a second, is the $300,000 Californian, which is also a mile, at Hollywood Park June 9.

Although Spend a Buck bled slightly after winning the Garden State Stakes April 20 and raced with a small dose of bleeder medication in winning the Kentucky Derby May 4, he will not be allowed to use medication in the $1-million Jersey Derby at Garden State Park Monday.

“He can’t be treated,” trainer Cam Gambolati said. “We didn’t put him on the bleeders’ list after the Garden State. The reason we didn’t is because there’s a 14-day waiting period before a certified bleeder in New Jersey can run again, a period honored by other states. If we had put him on the list, he wouldn’t have been able to run in the Kentucky Derby.”

Horse Racing Notes In intertrack betting on the Preakness, Tank’s Prospect paid the most at tracks that figured to know him best--$13.80 to win at Golden Gate Fields and $13.20 at Hollywood Park. He paid $11.40 at Pimlico and paid the least, $9.40, at Churchill Downs, where many fans had seen him finish seventh in the Kentucky Derby. . . . When Patti Cooksey rode Tajawa to a sixth-place finish in the Preakness, she became the first woman jockey to ride in two Triple Crown races, having ridden in the ’84 Derby. Cooksey plans to ride at Canterbury Downs, a new track near Minneapolis, this summer.