THOROUGHBRED RACING : Two Old Friends Remember Alydar

“Hey, champ!”

There was a slight rustling in Alydar’s stall.

Again, “Hey, champ!”

The colt stirred some more.

“Hey, champ!” Jorge Velasquez shouted for the third time and by now, he had Alydar bucking and kicking.

Velasquez came out from behind the tree, where he had been hiding, near Alydar’s barn at Belmont Park.

When Alydar saw Velasquez, he quieted down. His regular jockey was simply having some fun.

“Alydar knew Jorge,” Charlie Rose said. “He recognized me, he recognized (trainer) John Veitch. He was the most intelligent horse I’ve ever been around.”

Velasquez, who was inducted into racing’s Hall of Fame in August, a year after Alydar, embellished what Rose said. “Alydar was the smartest and the best horse I’ve ever been on,” Velasquez said.

Alydar died Thursday, destroyed after mangling his right rear leg in his stall at Calumet Farm in Lexington, Ky., and Velasquez and Rose, the horsemen who were on his back the most from 1977 through 1979, were at Hollywood Park. Velasquez rode Alydar in the afternoons, Rose got on him for his morning gallops.

“I feel like a close friend has died,” said Rose, still an assistant trainer for Veitch.

Alydar’s name is on the license plates that Rose has on his station wagon back in New York.

“When I’d get out of my car in the mornings back there, Alydar would start nickering at the sight of me,” Rose said.

At Hialeah, there was a walking ring next to Veitch’s barn. One winter, Rose was in the ring, astride Alydar and waiting for Velasquez to arrive to ride the horse in a morning workout.

“When Alydar spotted Jorge walking down that shed row, he pulled me to him,” Rose said. “I was on him, but he seemed to know that Jorge was the guy (to get on him) before we got down to business.”

Veitch grazes his horses in late afternoon, around feeding time, but the meals of all the animals in the barn were delayed on the days Alydar raced.

“He’d usually be running in the eighth race, the time we’d be feeding and grazing the other horses,” Rose said. “If he saw those grooms coming, he’d demand to be taken out of the barn with the other horses. So the only thing we could do when he ran was to keep all the horses in the barn until we took him over to the track.”

In 1978, several hours before he won the Florida Derby at Gulfstream Park, Alydar was dragging his groom, Clyde Sparks, all over the barn.

Velasquez came over and patted the colt.

“Come on, champ,” the jockey said. “He’s an old man. You don’t want to do that with him.”

Alydar quieted down and Sparks was astonished at the transformation from bully to buddy.

“If I didn’t see it, I wouldn’t believe it,” Sparks said.

Velasquez might have called Alydar “champ,” but officially he never was one. In 1977, as a 2-year-old, Alydar had handed Affirmed his only two defeats, but Affirmed still held a 3-2 edge going into the Laurel Futurity in October. Affirmed beat Alydar by a neck and clinched the divisional title.

The next year, Affirmed won 3-year-old honors and horse of the year, and all Alydar got was the what if’s.

Horse Racing Notes

Gary Stevens, who suffered a broken right elbow in a five-horse spill at Hollywood Park Wednesday, said Thursday that he might resume riding as soon as the Thanksgiving Day weekend, and Dr. Robert Kerlan said that a quick return is possible. Stevens doesn’t need a cast or a splint for his injury. He is locked in a battle with Jose Santos for the national money title and would ride Cuddles in the $500,000 Hollywood Starlet a week from Sunday. Stevens had no trouble recalling the accident, which started when Rotation Speed, his mount in Wednesday’s first race, broke down. “I remember the whole thing,” he said. “I knew there was no chance of holding (Rotation Speed) up, so I just rolled and kept my head covered up the best I could. The first horse (Davey’s Squaw) struck me in the right arm. The second horse (Akrotiri) hit me in the middle of the back. The third one (Zone of Danger) got me dead center in the tail bone. In that split second when I began flying through the air, my first thought was, ‘there goes the whole year.’ But when I got hit on my tail bone, it hit a nerve and I couldn’t feel my legs for about 30 seconds and the rest of the year was the furthest thing from my mind.” . . . Stevens also said there was no warning that anything was amiss with Rotation Speed, who suffered multiple breaks of the cannon bone in her right foreleg and was destroyed on the track. “She was just breezing, pulling me out of the saddle,’ he said. “She never took one bad step before she broke down. You can’t blame anybody. The way she warmed up there was no question in my mind going to the gate that I was sitting on a sound horse.”