Aging Super Diamond Still Super

Super Diamond is a walking catalogue of equine ailments.

His physical problems are so chronic that he is able to race only three or four times in a year. Trainer Eddie Gregson knows that any race could turn out to be the gelding’s last.

Yet, despite all his woes, Super Diamond accomplished an amazing, improbable feat at Santa Anita last weekend. He was entered against the best stakes horses in the West in the San Antonio Handicap and he beat them all--at the age of 9.

Super Diamond and John Henry are the only thoroughbreds ever to win a Grade I race at such an advanced age. Even great old geldings like Kelso, Forego and Exterminator never reached such a geriatric milestone.

If ever a horse looked unlikely to have a long, productive career in high-class company it was Super Diamond. The people who bred him, Roland and Ramona Sahm, owned one cheap mare, and knew nothing about the thoroughbred business. Super Diamond was born on a hillside and was raised on terrain more suitable to a goat than a prospective racehorse. His conformation was terrible.

This was hardly the sort of horse that Gregson--one of California’s ablest horsemen--would have sought out to train. But he and the Sahms had mutual friends, and he went to look at the horse when he was a yearling. “His ankles were very rough even then,” Gregson recalled, “and when I reached down to touch them, the horse struck me on the head. I told the owners, ‘I don’t think I’d want to train this horse unless you geld him.’ ”

Super Diamond was subjected to this common remedy for untractable behavior, and he showed immediate promise when he went into training. But his ankle problems wouldn’t go away.

“He won his first two starts and looked like a real Derby prospect,” Gregson said, but Super Diamond got a swollen, infected ankle and he was out of action.

A year later--early in his 4-year-old season--he stumbled badly out of the race and had to have a sizable chip taken out of his ankle. Early in his 5-year-old season he had a training injury and his ankle was down for the count again.

When he was 6, Super Diamond did what ailing athletes (both human and equine) are apt to do; having favored his left ankle for so long, he started developing problems in his right knee. Even so, Gregson was able to get him sounder and fitter than at any time in his life, and Super Diamond reeled off four straight victories in stakes--including the prestigious Hollywood Gold Cup--in the latter half of the year. He won stakes at the ages of 7 and 8, too, but Gregson finally thought he was losing the battle against Super Diamond’s maladies.

“Last year he came out of a race with some tearing in the tendon on the right knee,” Gregson said. “You can imagine the chances of a horse his age (recovering). I told the owners to consider the horse retired, though we’d go through the motions to see if he could come back. In mid-summer last year, the vet looked at him and told me, ‘You’re not going to believe this, but he might be able to come back.’ ”

Gregson put Super Diamond back into training--and never babied him. To be ready for high-class stakes competition, Gregson knew, the gelding would have to be perfectly fit. There couldn’t be any compromise. Despite his ailments, the gelding cooperated, and did what was necessary. “He likes his life and he loves the attention he gets,” Gregson said. “He has to rest in his stall a lot, but he’s a courageous horse. I’ve never seen one like him.”

And the racing world rarely has seen one with a record like Super Diamond. When he won the San Antonio, the victory was his 16th in 36 career starts and boosted his career earnings to $1.4 million. It also marked the 14th straight time he has finished fourth or better; the last time he raced without earning a paycheck was in April 1986. It would be rare for a physically perfect horse to run so consistently, and it is hard to imagine how an infirm one can do it. “He is,” Gregson said, “a freak of nature.”