When Meadow Star Lost, Antley Gained Strike The Gold

The successful career of Chris Antley, which peaked Saturday when he rode Strike The Gold to victory in the Kentucky Derby, has frequently been interrupted by incidents on and off the track.

Antley, 25, tested positive for marijuana while riding at Aqueduct in 1988 and twice since then he has undergone rehabilitation for cocaine use.

At last year’s Breeders’ Cup at Belmont Park, one of Antley’s mounts, Mr. Nickerson, went down and the jockey suffered a broken collarbone that sidelined him for about 2 1/2 months. Mr. Nickerson died in the accident.

In between, Antley has won races in clusters. In 1985, he won eight races in one day, doing double duty at Monmouth Park and Garden State Park in New Jersey. In 1985, he led the nation by winning 469 races. In 1987, he won nine times in one day, four in the afternoon at Aqueduct and five under the lights at the Meadowlands. In 1989, coming off his first round of treatments for cocaine use, he won at least one race for 64 consecutive riding days at Aqueduct, which is believed to be a national record.

Antley didn’t ride Strike The Gold until his victory over Fly So Free in the Blue Grass at Keeneland on April 13. Craig Perret, who had ridden Strike The Gold to a second-place finish in the Florida Derby, was at Oaklawn Park that day for an assignment on Unbridled, his 1990 Kentucky Derby winner, in the Oaklawn Handicap.

After the Blue Grass, Giles Brophy, one of Strike The Gold’s owners, wanted Antley to make an immediate commitment about the Kentucky Derby. Pat Day and his agent were pressuring trainer Nick Zito for a ride on Strike The Gold in the Derby.

Antley was given a week’s grace period, however, allowing him to ride the undefeated filly, Meadow Star, in the Wood Memorial at Aqueduct on April 20. When Meadow Star was unable to win in her first start against colts, Antley accepted the Derby mount on Strike The Gold.

“There was a lot of pressure on him in the Derby,” Zito said about Antley. “I just hoped that he would keep his head screwed on straight. It’s like a baseball manager with a hitter, or a fight manager with a boxer, there’s only so much you can do. You can’t ride the horse for him. If he hadn’t won the Derby, all I could do was kill him. I could have taken a truck and run over him.”

Zito remembers a race that Antley rode not long ago against Angel Cordero, the Hall of Fame jockey, in New York.

“It was the kind of race that Cordero would always win,” Zito said. “But this time Chris beat him. That’s because Antley is a young Cordero.”

Antley said that when he raised his whip in the air after crossing the finish line with Strike The Gold Saturday, he didn’t want to put it down.

“I wanted to enjoy that feeling,” he said. “It’s something that’s really undescribable.”

Strike The Gold became the first horse in 63 years to win the Derby despite failing to meet the specifications of the “Dosage Index.”

Dosage is based on a horse’s breeding and is used to measure its stamina. For the past 62 years, no winner had a dosage index over 4.0 from the various criteria used.

But Strike The Gold’s index was 9.0, a number that indicates a horse bred for speed with little chance to last the 1 1/4 miles of the Derby.

While the forecast for rain was off the mark, the temperature for the 117th Derby was 75 degrees and the humidity was 87%. Jerry Bailey, who rode Hansel, the favorite who finished 10th, speculated that the heat could have been a factor.

“As I think about it, this colt’s best races have been when the temperature’s been 65 degrees or even cooler,” Bailey said. “Maybe this isn’t a warm-weather horse.

“By the time we got to the three-eighths pole, I was concerned and knew we were in trouble, because he was giving it a full run and didn’t have anything left. He didn’t have the punch that he’s shown before.”

Chris McCarron, aboard Sea Cadet, the pacesetter who wound up eighth, didn’t think the heat was that severe. “There was a pretty good breeze at track level,” McCarron said. “It was probably a lot cooler on the track than it was in the press box.”

Horse Racing Notes

Jockey Jose Santos didn’t use Fly So Free’s unfavorable No. 1 post position as an excuse. The Florida Derby winner broke to the outside, bumping Alydavid, the horse next to him, but was in good position early in the race before finishing fifth. “I didn’t have any horse left the last eighth of a mile,” Santos said. “I wanted to go to the lead at the eighth pole, but he couldn’t do it. He just came up empty.”

Pat Day finished ninth aboard Corporate Report, leaving him with nine winless rides in the Derby. Day won five other races on the Churchill Downs card Saturday, the second time he has done that on a Derby day. Day won five times in 1989, before he finished second to Sunday Silence with Easy Goer, the Derby favorite.

Greydar, a full brother to Strike The Gold and a year older, won the race after the Derby. Both colts are by Alydar out of Majestic Gold, a Hatchet Man mare. . . . Alydar also sired Alysheba, the winner of the 1987 Derby. . . . Lewis Burrell, the father of rap star M.C. Hammer and head of the family group that owns Lite Light, the winner of the Kentucky Oaks on Friday, made a serious bid to buy Strike The Gold after he finished second in the Florida Derby.

Even not counting what horses come out of the Derby, a large field is likely for the Preakness, the second leg of the Triple Crown, which will be run at Pimlico on May 18. Non-Derby horses expected to run are Burrell’s Media Plan, Olympio, Honor Grades, Kyle’s Our Man, Near the Limit, Tank and Subordinated Debt.

The on-track handle for 10 races was $15.2 million, second highest in Derby history. . . . Other stakes winners at Churchill Downs Saturday were Thirty Six Red in the Churchill Downs Handicap; Never Wavering in the WHAS-TV Stakes; Illeria in the Brown & Williamson and Foresta in the Capital Holding Mile.