Gelding Now Is All Business

Anyone can win with four aces. Anyone can take a fight if the other guy can’t hit him. You win World Series with three-run homers if the other guys can’t throw the curveball and with three-hitters if they can’t hit one. You win Wimbledon when they can’t return your serve. Super Bowls are easy when the other guys have no pass rush.

Winning from ahead is easy. But you’ve got to like fighters who get up, pitchers who get the side out when the bases are loaded and the count on the batter is 3-and-0. You like a guy who is two sets down and pulls out the match. You like the quarterback who throws touchdowns with three linebackers laying all over him.

Dinard has joined Swaps, Sunday Silence, Alysheba, Winning Colors and Affirmed as part of a distinguished breed of Santa Anita Derby winners today because he’s a fighter who won’t stay down, or even take the count. He rallies when he’s down love-forty. He challenges the hitter with the bases loaded. In the old West, he would be a gunman who would spot you the first shot.

The Santa Anita Derby was hardly a bridle path canter for him Saturday. He got mugged on the first turn, shuffled out into the middle of the track all the way around, came into the stretch five wide (outside of four horses) and had to outflank rather than outrun the favorite, Best Pal. He had more trouble than a guy on a banana peel. If Paul Revere had had that wild a ride, we would still belong to England.

If there was any question whether he could run 1 1/4 miles, it was removed. He did. The race was 1 1/8 miles, but that was on the rail. The rail was a toll call from where Dinard spent the afternoon.

The time was 1:48, which is respectable. Only a handful of Santa Anita derbies have been run under that. But, if you deduct the time Dinard was running sideways, he probably would have turned in a 1:47.

In any sport, the one attribute better than speed is guts. If Dinard had one without the other, he probably would be a forgotten third today.

Murray’s Law of racing is “Good horses win--bad horses excuse.”

If Dinard had lost, he would have had the ultimate excuse--a bad trip. The Racing Form is full of them--”six-wide stretch, four-wide stretch, five-wide into lane, bumped, broke slowly, bumped at quarter, wide trip, wide in drive.” But that’s for plating horses. Champions ignore adversity. If you are going to win at Kentucky in May, you had better show you are a fighter who can take it. Even Muhammad Ali had to be that.

Dinard fought out of a corner. He didn’t say, “Well, there’s always tomorrow. Or next week.” He sucked it up and charged back into the fray, swinging.

A race horse is not always the stoutest-hearted of God’s creatures. He is easily discouraged, and most are not terribly interested in competition. He would rather jump shadows, spit bits--or, if it can be arranged, simply stop and eat the grass.

Dinard’s jockey, Chris McCarron, who is the West’s leading rider but who had never won a Santa Anita Derby, did not exactly give up on Dinard. But he thought his 12th consecutive defeat in this race was a distinct possibility.

In a trackside box, Dinard’s owner, Allen Paulson, who twice set the round-the-world air record in one of his company Gulfstream planes, is not a man who discourages easily, either. But he thought his horse would look like a guy chasing a departing bus the rest of the race. “Yes, I thought we were through,” he acknowledged after the race.

Dinard didn’t believe it.

He became the first gelding in 51 years to win this race and only the third in its 54-year history.

If he wins at Kentucky, he will be the first gelding to win there in 62 years and only the eighth in history.

Gelding is a dirty trick they play on a horse who has shown too much spunk to do what he’s told. It’s a tactic the sultans used to use on the guardians of their harems.

They don’t usually do it to a horse who shows great promise. Such horses are worth far more at stud than they are on the racetrack as a usual thing. It explains why Kentucky Derby fields are, to coin a phrase, barren of geldings of late when stud fees have grown so exponentially. Dinard was gelded without the knowledge or consent of Paulson. “I was out of the country at the time. I didn’t find out till his second race. When he won by six lengths, I whooped he’d be worth a fortune at stud and everybody looked at me strangely. “

Dinard, of course, doesn’t know it yet. They geld a horse not to make him run faster, simply more docilely. Dinard today is a perfect model of not only a well-bred but well-mannered young horse. If he were human he would be in the Sunday school choir, his hair would be combed and cut short, his pants would have a crease in them and he would always wear a tie and call people “mam” and “sir.”

He hasn’t had the fight taken out of him, simply the rebelliousness. Geldings are like Good Soldier Schweiks. They obey orders. They don’t bite, kick, swear or chew. They don’t defy authority.

And they don’t quit on the first turn.

Socrates said, “Release from sexual passion is release from a thousand raging masters.” Dinard has nothing on his mind except winning races.

It would be nice if he would win the Kentucky Derby. It would be the highlight of his life forever more. Trouble is, he won’t be able to tell his grandkids. He won’t have any.