THOROUGHBRED RACING : Northern Dancer Destroyed at 29

Northern Dancer, at 29 the oldest living winner of the Kentucky Derby and the stallion most responsible for the multimillion-dollar prices that were paid for yearlings in the 1980s, was destroyed at a Maryland farm Friday after suffering a severe stomach disorder.

Just a day after the death of Alydar, the current No. 1 sire, Northern Dancer was given a lethal injection at the Northview Stallion Station in Chesapeake City, Md. Alydar had to be destroyed Thursday at Calumet Farm in Lexington, Ky., after breaking a leg in a stall accident.

Northern Dancer was a yearling that his breeder and owner, E.P. Taylor, couldn’t sell for $25,000. Yet a couple of years later, in 1964, the small, 1,000-pound colt became the first Canadian-bred to win the Derby. Under Bill Hartack, who got the mount because Bill Shoemaker decided to ride Hill Rise, Northern Dancer ran the 1 1/4 miles in two minutes flat, which was the fastest Derby until Secretariat’s 1:59 2/5 in 1973.

Hill Rise, who took an eight-race winning streak into the Derby, had a troubled trip under Shoemaker and they missed running down Northern Dancer in the stretch by a neck.

Hartack also won the Preakness with Northern Dancer, but their attempt to win the Triple Crown was dashed with a third-place finish, sixth lengths behind the victorious Quadrangle, in the Belmont Stakes.

“Northern Dancer just couldn’t handle that mile and a half (in the Belmont),” Hartack said. “The most unusual thing about him was that he got the mile and a quarter in the Derby. He was small, but he seemed larger when you got on him, because he was very strong in front and had a thick neck. The one thing he did have was heart.”

A tendon injury ended Northern Dancer’s racing career later that year. The son of Nearctic and Natalma, a Native Dancer mare, won 14 races--10 stakes--in 18 starts and earned $580,806.

Taylor, trying to sell Northern Dancer as a yearling, put a $25,000 price tag on him, but there were no takers. Northern Dancer’s trainer, Horatio Luro, suggested gelding the colt because of his fiery nature, but Taylor remembered another horse that Luro had castrated, and he wound up running for a $1,500 claiming price.

“If it didn’t work before, why do it now?” Taylor said.

Northern Dancer went to stud in 1965 and became that rare Derby winner who was just as successful in the breeding shed as he had been on the track.

One of his sons, Nijinsky II, became the 15th--and last--horse to win the English Triple Crown, in 1970, and by the 1980s, oil-rich sheiks and Robert Sangster, the English soccer-pools magnate, flocked to auctions in Lexington to see who could outbid the others for Northern Dancer’s untested offspring.

Over a 22-year period, 174 of Northern Dancer’s progeny were sold for an average price of $919,621. Of the 19 highest-priced yearlings ever sold, 12 have been sired by Northern Dancer, and five others have been offspring of Nijinsky II.

The success of Nijinsky II in Great Britain convinced international horsemen that Northern Dancer was a grass sire, and consequently most of his progeny sold here wound up running in Europe, where the purses are substantially lower than the United States.

Northern Dancer sired 25 champions, but none in the U.S. His offspring earned $27 million and his leading American runner, based on purses, was the moderately successful Herat, who earned about 26% of his $771,415 for finishing second at 157-1 in the 1986 Santa Anita Handicap.

By 1987, Northern Dancer was having a fertility problem and he was able to get only two mares in foal. He was removed from the breeding shed and given a plush retirement on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. He suffered from a heart condition in recent years and a horse van was kept ready so he could be sped to a nearby clinic at the University of Pennsylvania in case of an emergency.

The van, it turned out, was not needed. Northern Dancer has died, but not because of any weakness in the large heart that served him so well on the race track.

He will be buried at the late E.P. Taylor’s Windfields Farm near Toronto, in the country of his birth.

Horse Racing Notes

Live The Dream, a grandson of Northern Dancer, is among the six horses entered in Sunday’s $100,000 Citation Handicap on the grass at Hollywood Park. Another entrant, Washington D.C. International winner Fly Till Dawn, is an iffy starter and may be held out for the $500,000 Hollywood Turf Cup on Dec. 16. . . . Expected to run Sunday are Colway Rally, Exclusive Partner, Phillippi and The Medic.