Alysheba Wins Preakness; History 1 1/2 Miles Away

Alysheba, a colt who wasn’t given much respect before the Kentucky Derby and then brought out a new army of skeptics last week at Pimlico, won the Preakness Stakes more convincingly than his half-length margin showed Saturday as he moved within one victory of becoming the 12th horse to sweep the Triple Crown.

A 3-year-old hasn’t blitzed the Derby, Preakness and Belmont Stakes since Affirmed in 1978, but after Chris McCarron hustled Alysheba past Bet Twice in the last 50 yards Saturday, this late-running son of Alydar needs only to win at Belmont Park on June 6 to join the equine pantheon that started with Sir Barton in 1919.

Sir Barton earned $57,275 for his triple. Because of an insurance policy that Churchill Downs, Pimlico and Belmont Park took out this year, Alysheba can collect a $5-million guarantee with his Triple Crown. He’s already earned just more than $1 million with his Derby and Preakness pots, and a victory in the Belmont would be worth a total of more than $3.9 million.

Jack Van Berg, Alysheba’s trainer, will be 51 the day after the Belmont, and late Saturday, no one had to remind him about the $5 million at the end of the rainbow.

“I was thinking about the $5 million when I told Jim McKay (ABC broadcaster) that I was going to win it with this horse last October,” Van Berg said.

But even Van Berg must have had some doubts about Alysheba when he brought the horse out of California in April. Alysheba was a colt with a breathing problem that may have been corrected by minor surgery, and a horse who seemed to always come close but had won only one of nine races.

Since McCarron started riding him, Alysheba has done nothing but run first, although his Blue Grass victory, just before the Derby, was negated by a disqualification for bumping another horse in the stretch.

In the Derby, Alysheba was the sixth betting choice at 8-1, then survived repeated mugging attempts by Bet Twice through the stretch to win by three-quarters of a length.

Last week at Pimlico, a groundswell of pessimism surrounded Alysheba. For one thing, only three favorites in the last 23 Triple Crown races had won. Also, the Preakness was going to be Alysheba’s third tough race in less than a month, and the colt moved like a yak in his final workout Thursday. Van Berg didn’t seem to reek with the confidence that he had before the Derby.

After the Preakness was his, however, Van Berg said that the poor workout didn’t disturb him.

“It was a slow work,” he said, “but this horse was already so fit that all he had to be was sound for this race. I wasn’t worried.”

Five of the first six Derby finishers returned to run in the Preakness, and Saturday’s result was almost a carbon copy of what happened at Churchill Downs, without the medical report that stemmed from a bumper-car 17-horse field and Bet Twice’s rude antics through the stretch.

Alysheba ran a comparatively slow Derby, and his time of 1:55 4/5 over a fast track was the slowest for the Preakness in 12 years. Nevertheless, he has soundly beaten the best of his generation twice, and there appears to be no giant-killer lining up for the Belmont. Even trainer Woody Stephens, the Belmont winner each of the last five years, has a questionable 1 1/2-mile horse in Gone West.

The Belmont is a quarter-mile farther than the Derby and 5/16 of a mile longer than the Preakness, but Van Berg doesn’t expect the added distance to be a problem.

“This horse can run from here to California if you set him down on the road,” Van Berg said. “I know Woody will be sitting there on his home ground, and nobody brings a horse up to a race better than he does, but I’ve got my assistant--Charlie Whittingham--to gang up on him.”

The last was a facetious reference to Derby week. Whittingham, the Hall of Fame trainer who lost his Derby starter when Temperate Sil got sick 10 days before the race, remained at Churchill Downs and helped supervise Alysheba’s final preparations for the race.

Ironically, Bet Twice has been second in both the Derby and Preakness, and is also one race away from a rare feat, albeit a sheepish accomplishment compared to what Alysheba has going for him. The only horse to be runner-up in all three Triple Crown races has been Alydar, Alysheba’s sire, who lost to Affirmed by a combined margin of less than two lengths.

On Saturday, Bet Twice had 1 1/2 lengths on the third-place Cryptoclearance, who got a questionable ride from the usually able Jose Santos. Cryptoclearance finished 3 1/2 lengths in front of Gulch, and the rest of the order in the nine-horse field was Avies Copy, Phantom Jet, Lookinforthebigone, No More Flowers and Harriman.

The late money in a record Pimlico crowd of 87,945 made Alysheba the favorite over Cryptoclearance, and the winner paid $6, $4.60 and $3.40. Bet Twice returned $4.60 and $3.60, and Cryptoclearance paid $3. A $2 exacta on Alysheba and Bet Twice was worth $23, and a $2 trifecta on the first three finishers paid $80.70.

In one sense, McCarron has already had a personal Triple Crown of sorts, having won last year’s Belmont with Danzig Connection and then adding the first two races of this year’s series.

Asked if he was nervous Saturday, McCarron said: “Does Dolly Parton sleep on her back?”

Going into the Belmont, McCarron will be considerably more confident with Alysheba than he was with Danzig Connection, who was 8-1.

“Last year, I didn’t know with that horse,” McCarron said, “because the race was the first time I ever sat on him. This one has already shown that he’s the best 3-year-old in the country.”

McCarron, 32, said that Alysheba was so full of run Saturday that he could have rushed him into third place, behind the speedsters Harriman and Lookinforthebigone, coming out of the gate.

Instead, Alysheba was ahead of only three horses going into the first turn. Down the backstretch, McCarron and Alysheba started inching up, splitting horses while well away from the rail, which was the place to be, based on the first eight races Saturday at Pimlico.

Coming into the stretch, Bet Twice and jockey Craig Perret had gained the lead as the front-runners faded. Alysheba had passed everybody except Bet Twice by then.

“I knew I had a lot of horse left,” McCarron said. “But I was concerned about Bet Twice, because Craig looked like he was riding confidently and had been riding the horse conservatively until then.”

Cryptoclearance had come from last place on the rail to also rally, but he was running in a path that had been like quicksand all day. Santos knew that, but said that he got trapped at the five-eighths pole, because Bet Twice was in front of him and the horses on the outside didn’t leave him any room.

For a time, McCarron thought that Cryptoclearance was going to be his toughest rival the closer they got to the wire.

“He was running on the inside, and he was running handily,” McCarron said of Cryptoclearance. “He had saved ground, and I thought he would be the horse to beat if he got through.”

Santos’ ride sent Scotty Schulhofer, Cryptoclearance’s trainer, fuming into Baltimore’s cool night air. “If we had had a phone to the jockey, we should have shut it off after they ran the first half mile,” Schulhofer said.

Cryptoclearance had drawn the outside post position, which seemed to be a preferred spot after Saturday’s track bias had been established.

Cryptoclearance’s third-place purse of $35,000 wasn’t much consolation to Schulhofer and his owner, Chicagoan Philip Teinowitz, when it was placed alongside the $421,100 that Alysheba won for his owners, the mother-daughter combo of Dorothy and Pamela Scharbauer from Midland, Tex. They bought Alysheba as a yearling for $500,000.

By the time the Scharbauers get to the Belmont, though, Saturday’s purse will look like a trifle to even them. Sir Barton and the other 10 Triple Crown winners were several million dollars ahead of the right time.