HORSE RACING : Road to Run to Roses Not What It Used to Be

Are the horses in this year’s Kentucky Derby a bunch of wimps compared to thoroughbreds of the past?

Top 3-year-olds such as Citation and Tim Tam used to tune up for the Kentucky Derby by running in the one-mile Derby Trial just a few days beforehand. But when this event was run on Saturday, no genuine contenders were in the field, because trainers now think it is too taxing to run a horse only a week before the main event.

The caution that has devalued the trial has altered other pre-Derby races as well. The definitive prep race used to be the Blue Grass Stakes, run nine days before the Derby; between 1962 and 1972 it produced six winners at Churchill Downs. But then trainers started bypassing the Blue Grass because nine days wasn’t enough time for their horses to recover, and Keeneland officials were forced to reschedule it.

Now the East’s major prep race is being similarly affected. The Wood Memorial Stakes at Aqueduct worked well enough as a tuneup for Secretariat and Seattle Slew. But even New York-based trainers are bypassing the Wood because it is run only 14 days before the Derby, and that, they say, is too tough on a horse.

Every trainer here frets that his horse isn’t quite fresh enough. David Cross is bringing his longshot Quintana into the Run for the Roses after a two-week layoff since the Arkansas Derby, and he said: “I wish I had three weeks. And I’d rather have four weeks or six weeks so I could train the horse up to the race.”

Pretty soon tracks are going to schedule their big prep races in February so these delicate thoroughbreds have enough time to recover.

To some extent, the change in pre-Derby schedules is a matter of fashion. In the 1940s, when Calumet Farm was dominating the sport, trainer Ben Jones liked to give his horses a race shortly before the Derby. “He wanted his horses to be mentally sharp,” said Joe Hirsch, the Daily Racing Form’s venerable columnist, “and he was a style-setter. Racing is a game of trends.”

But the trend has changed because so many trainers have observed that contemporary horses fare poorly when they don’t have enough rest between races. Last year trainer Nick Zito won the Wood Memorial with his speedster Thirty Six Red, then saw him wilt in the Derby 14 days later. He skipped the Preakness and then, with an ample rest, came back to run second in the Belmont.

Zito drew his lesson: “Being tired does mean something.” So when he found himself with another contender, Strike the Gold, this year, he skipped the Wood and gave the colt his final prep in the Blue Grass, 21 days before the Derby. “It looks like that’s the way to prepare a horse,” he said.

Wayne Lukas theorizes that the early-season races take more out of horses because they are so much more competitive than they used to be. “The purses in these ‘preps’ are so good that they’re no longer preps,” the trainer said. “Races like the Blue Grass and the Wood Memorial are career-makers; horses come from all over the country to run in them.”

Yet trainers agree that the main reason for the difference between current and past styles of preparation for the Kentucky Derby lies in the horses themselves. Thoroughbreds of the past were tougher. “Those horses that Ben Jones had for Calumet were all big and strong,” Zito said. “They had cannon bones like tree trunks!”

If the object of the breeding industry is to produce better and better horses, why are American thoroughbreds less robust than they used to be?

One theory is that legalized medication permits horses to race despite physical problems that might once have kept them on the sidelines; such horses have to be treated more delicately. Another explanation is the expansion of the breeding industry. In the era when Ben Jones was training those big, tough horses, some 8,000 thoroughbreds a year were being bred in the United States. Now the industry produces 50,000 a year, and the quality is obviously diluted.

Whatever the reason, the evidence is undeniable that thoroughbreds aren’t as tough as they used to be. Even though trainers are treating them so gingerly and spacing their races so carefully, the horses aren’t lasting any longer. The attrition rate before this year’s Derby has been dreadful. Cahill Road was sidelined indefinitely after making only six starts in his career. Dinard dropped by the wayside after racing only five times in his life.

It seems almost unimaginable that, in 1961, Carry Back came into the Kentucky Derby after making 28 previous starts, and then went on to a long and productive afterward. Modern-day trainers aren’t romanticizing the past when they talk about how tough horses use to be in the good old days.