Preakness Field Down to Nine After Injuries : Horse racing: Champagneforashley, Pleasant Tap sidelined. Unbridled installed as 7-5 favorite for the second leg of Triple Crown with Summer Squall at 2-1.

A bad step by Champagneforashley and a leg injury to Pleasant Tap caused both to be scratched Thursday from the Preakness, reducing the field for Saturday’s second leg of the Triple Crown to nine.

Champagneforashley broke down during a morning gallop at Pimlico, his brief but bright racing career perhaps over.

Pleasant Tap, third in the Kentucky Derby and a son of Pleasant Colony, who won the Derby and the Preakness in 1981, was also declared out of the 1 3/16-mile race because of a strained ligament in his left foreleg.

After entries were drawn Thursday, Unbridled, the Derby winner, was made a 7-5 favorite, with Summer Squall, the Derby runner-up, listed at 2-1.

Here is the field, starting at the rail, with jockeys and morning-line odds: Music Prospector, Frank Olivares, 30-1; Land Rush, Angel Cordero, 10-1; Baron de Vaux, Joe Rocco, 20-1; Kentucky Jazz, Kent Desormeaux, 15-1; Fighting Notion, Alberto Delgado, 30-1; Unbridled, Craig Perret, 7-5; Summer Squall, Pat Day, 2-1; J.R.’s Horizon, Mark Johnston, 50-1; and Mister Frisky, Gary Stevens, 3-1. All of the horses will carry 126 pounds.

Despite his third place in the Derby, Thomas Mellon Evans’ Pleasant Tap would have been a longshot Saturday, but Champagneforashley’s odds would have started at 6-1 and he was considered dangerous. Undefeated in his first five races, Champagneforashley ran a solid third, a length behind Thirty Six Red, in the Wood Memorial.

After that race, Howie Tesher said a prep race only eight days before the Wood had probably compromised Champagneforashley’s chances against Thirty Six Red, and the trainer and the owners--Robert Baker, Howard Kaskel and Leon Feinbloom--decided to skip the Derby and shoot for the Preakness.

Most racing people applauded the decision as the horsemen, not succumbing to Derby fever, considered the future of the horse rather than the urgency of the occasion.

But Champagneforashley’s racing future is bleak. He suffered a fracture of one of the sesamoid bones in his right front ankle. The injury ends the career of about three of every four horses that incur it, Tesher said.

The incident occurred at the eighth pole, after Champagneforashley had already galloped 1 1/2 miles. Jacinto Vasquez, who had ridden the colt in all of his races, was scheduled to be on him but didn’t show up for the workout. Mick Colfer, who has frequently exercised the horse, took over.

Colfer was to gallop Champagneforashley to the finish line, then pull him up shortly after that. In the grandstand, Tesher borrowed a pair of binoculars to watch.

Champagneforashley may have injured himself when he switched leads, shifting weight from the left to the right front foot as horses usually do heading into the stretch.

“I knew immediately something was wrong, and I got down off him right away,” Colfer said. “There was nothing during the gallop that told me something was wrong. He just pulled up bad. It surprised me more than anything else, because sometimes you get an indication in the gallop that things aren’t quite right. It was quite good, and the next minute--boom.”

Tesher noticed Champagneforashley shortening stride. “That horse isn’t sore, he’s lame,” someone next to the trainer said.

Champagneforashley, trying to become the first New York-bred to win the Preakness since Margrave in 1896, will have three months of stall rest and then three more months of rehabilitation.

“You just hope the break knits,” Tesher said, standing near the stall where Champagneforashley’s sore foreleg was being iced in a bucket. It was three hours after the accident and Vasquez walked by.

“Where were you?” the trainer said out of the corner of his mouth. Vasquez, sensing friction, kept walking, stopping in front of Champagneforashley’s stall. The jockey spent a few minutes with the horse, then left without speaking with Tesher.

“The injury had nothing to do with who was riding,” Tesher said. “Mick has been on this horse a lot; he knows him as well as anybody.”

Champagneforashley, who won the Tampa Bay Derby this year and was the 3-5 favorite in the Wood, could have been Tesher’s best horse. The trainer’s biggest victory came in 1986 when Lieutenant’s Lark won the Washington D.C. International at Laurel.

“What is it that somebody said, comparing horses to strawberries?” Tesher said. “They’re both very perishable. Everybody will hear about this horse because he was about to run in a big race, but horses are getting hurt every day. You hate to think about the number of 2-year-olds that don’t even make it to the races every year.

“And the guy at Charles Town (W.Va.), he’d take it just as hard about a claimer as I’m taking it about this horse. But you just go on. Just because an Orel Hershiser gets hurt doesn’t mean that nobody plays baseball anymore.”

Champagneforashley had been fitted with a new right front shoe before he galloped Wednesday. Neither Tesher nor Colfer thought the injury was related to the reshodding.

“If they were going to beat him, it would take better horses, and I’m not sure that there are better horses in this race,” Tesher said. “This was the best my colt had come up to any of his races. He was training just right, and I was very comfortable with him going into a race for the first time this year.”

Tesher is still entering a horse on Saturday’s program, but it will be an anticlimax when I’ve Got Mine goes to the post in the $150,000 Maryland Budweiser Breeders’ Cup against Safely Kept, a champion sprinter who is considered invincible.

“The owner wanted to run this horse, I didn’t,” Tesher said. “Finally, I didn’t want an argument, so I just brought the horse down. That’s funny now. Now he’s the only one I’m running.”

Horse Racing Notes

Pleasant Tap was driven to Thomas Mellon Evans’ Buckland Farm in Virginia, about a 90-minute ride from Pimlico. “The injury is below the knee, like the bottom of your leg,” trainer Chris Speckert said. “It wasn’t the fast workout the other day that did it. These things come over a period of time. It is nothing really serious, but to compete in these races you want to be 100%, and there is no point going in 75%.” Pleasant Tap worked five furlongs in a blazing :57 3/5 Wednesday. Speckert estimated that the colt would be out of action less than two months.

When Pleasant Tap was scratched, Kent Desormeaux was freed to ride Kentucky Jazz in the Preakness. . . . Champagneforashley’s trainer, Howie Tesher, likes Unbridled. “He looks awful good,” Tesher said. “Of the Derby horses, it seems that the race took the least out of him. I think he’ll be very, very tough.” . . . Post positions don’t seem to be a factor in the Preakness, except for the No. 1 spot, which hasn’t produced a winner since Bally Ache in 1960. . . . “Beautiful,” trainer Laz Barrera said of Mister Frisky’s outside post. “I think you are in a position where you can see everybody and you don’t have to worry about anybody shutting you off.”

If all nine horses start, the Preakness purse of $686,000 will be a record, topping last year’s total by $11,800. The winner will receive a record $445,900. . . . Herman Cohen, who was president of Pimlico from 1952 until the track was sold to the current ownership for about $30 million in 1986, died Thursday at his home in Baltimore. Cohen, 95, had been battling cancer. Cohen and his brother, Ben Cohen, 90, bought Pimlico for $2 million in 1952. Herman Cohen also raced horses and considered himself an expert handicapper.

Two Moccasins, winless in four starts this year, including three stakes at Santa Anita, was a 19-1 upset winner of Thursday’s $150,000 Dixie Handicap at Pimlico. Two Moccasins, ridden by Randy Romero, beat My Big Boy by 2 1/2 lengths, with Marksmanship finishing third, another 1 1/2 lengths back.