Lost Code, Trainer in Big Time

He is a 3-year-old colt with a clubbed foot who was first sold for $7,000 as a yearling. He won only two of his first nine races. He eats five times a day and is called “a fat little butterball” by his trainer.

Yet, here is Lost Code meeting Kentucky Derby/Preakness winner Alysheba and Belmont Stakes winner Bet Twice in today’s $500,000 Haskell Invitational at Monmouth Park. The winner of the 1 1/8-mile race will become the leader pro tem of this year’s 3-year-old division.

While it is unlikely that a colt with the modest beginnings of Lost Code would now be good enough to have a 2-1 chance as the third choice in the Haskell, it is even more of a longshot that Bill Donovan, a 53-year-old horseman who has been training mostly cheap horses for 30 years, would be here as his trainer.

For most of his career, Donovan has been closer to Tap City than having a horse with almost $1 million in earnings. Donovan bought Lost Code for $30,000 as a 2-year-old because he couldn’t afford another horse whose price was $60,000, and earlier this year he had to borrow $2,000 to get started with a six-horse stable at the new Birmingham Turf Club in Alabama.

The other day, Donovan remembered the last time he had raced horses at Monmouth Park, near the North New Jersey shore.

“That was 20 years ago,” Donovan said. “We couldn’t afford a hotel room.

“Now, they’re putting us up for nothing, and we can afford to stay anywhere.”

Donovan, his wife, Donna, and their 23-year-old son, Pat, who is an assistant trainer, became belated members of the nouveau riche after Lost Code started winning races at Birmingham in late March.

Since then, Lost Code has won seven straight stakes and become, according to Donovan, only the third horse to ever win four derbys in the same year, after Smarten in 1979 and Twenty Grand in 1931.

Twenty Grand won the Kentucky Derby, a race that Lost Code wasn’t even eligible to run in this year.

“I had the (nomination) blank on my desk for a long time,” Donovan said. “But after that race in New York, I threw it away.”

At Aqueduct in January, Lost Code beat one horse going a mile and 70 yards, and the first deadline to nominate for the Triple Crown races was only six days away.

In two subsequent races, Lost Code did nothing to make Donovan consider the last Triple Crown deadline in mid-March. The son of Codex and Loss or Gain, an Ack Ack mare, was a distant second in Maryland and ran sixth in his first start in Birmingham.

Donovan suspected that Lost Code might have bled from the lungs in the Aqueduct race, but two veterinarians examined the colt and could find no trace.

“I was beginning to think that this mustn’t be the kind of horse I thought he would be,” Donovan said. “Maybe we were expecting too much of him.”

After the race in Birmingham, there was no question about Lost Code being a bleeder. He bled the way Demons Begone visibly gushed in the Kentucky Derby.

Now able to be treated with a medication given to bleeders, Lost Code won two races in Birmingham, including the Alabama Derby. He has also won the Illinois Derby, the Ohio Derby and the St. Paul Derby. But, actually, the Haskell is only his second major race, coming three weeks after the first, which was a 2 1/2-length win in the Arlington. Bet Twice, who is today’s favorite at 6-5, and Alysheba, the second choice at 7-5, have had seven weeks off since they were first and fourth, respectively, in the Belmont.

“My horse is at his peak now, so I decided to try these real good horses,” Donovan said. “I think they’ll find out what he’s made of.”

Before Lost Code, Donovan had never run a horse in a major race. He had kicked around tracks from Florida to Pennsylvania, meeting his future wife in an elevator at Shenandoah Downs, a West Virginia track that’s isn’t open anymore.

It was another chance meeting that led to Donovan buying Lost Code. Early last year, he met Donald Levinson, the owner of an aluminum smelting company in Baltimore and a former member of the Maryland Racing Commission, while they were having their cars washed in Baltimore. The 75-year-old Levinson, who had once run a few undistinguished horses, told Donovan that he might like to return to the game.

Shortly afterward, attending a sale of 2-year-olds in Florida, Donovan saw two that he liked. Templar Hill, the one he preferred--and now a stakes winner who has been fifth in the Kentucky Derby and third in the Jersey Derby--was going to cost $60,000 privately if his owner was going to withdraw him from the sale.

“To be honest with you,” says Donovan, “Templar Hill was worth $60,000. But I had never paid more than $50,000 for a horse, and I didn’t have the kind of owners who would have gone for the $60,000. So I wound up with Lost Code.”

Before Lost Code got rolling, the Donovans were broke. They had sold their farm, and put the $50,000 in a Maryland savings and loan that collapsed, at the expense of its depositors. Donovan was thinking about leaving the horse business. One of his sons had a drug problem, and the other, Pat, kept wrecking cars--12 by his own count.

Donovan began to think that his nomadic life as a trainer was responsible for the family’s disarray. But then he wondered what else he was qualified to do.

Now he is saying: “Everything happens for the best. This has been the biggest break of my life.”

Since Lost Code became one of the country’s most important horses, the Donovans have been known to receive 200 phone calls in a single day. And not one from a creditor.

Horse Racing Notes

Others in the Haskell besides Lost Code, Alysheba and Bet Twice are Clever Secret and Born To Shop. Both won races at Monmouth Park in their last starts and Clever Secret, from the Gene Klein-Wayne Lukas barn, might be close to the front-running Lost Code at the start today. . . . Bob Levy, the owner of Bet Twice, says that the $1-million Triple Crown bonus has gone to pay for increased insurance coverage for the colt. . . . Craig Perret, Bet Twice’s jockey, is not taking Lost Code lightly. “He’s won $920,000,” Perret said, “and nobody gave the money to him.” . . . Favorites Danzig Connection, Spend a Buck, Slew o’ Gold, Linkage and Lord Avie have been unable to win the Haskell in recent years. . . . Codex, Lost Code’s sire, won the Santa Anita Derby, the Hollywood Derby and the Preakness in 1980, then died in 1984 from a stomach ailment. Lost Code is from Codex’s last crop. . . . Russ Harris of the New York Daily News says that the Haskell is the best race in New Jersey since Bold Ruler, under Eddie Arcaro, beat Gallant Man and Round Table in the 1957 Trenton Handicap at Garden State Park.