COMMENTARY : A ‘Gold’ Strike, but Just Once

Trainer Nick Zito was asked Sunday how he felt in the wake of Strike the Gold’s Kentucky Derby victory and he said, seriously, “For a moment I thought God was inviting me into his living room. That’s the exact thought I had: ‘Come in here for a little while.’ ”

The Derby generates strong emotions like this, and only a killjoy would want to render a cold judgment about the quality of the race. Who could say to the rapturous Zito: Nick, you just trained the worst Derby winner in at least a decade?

Yet it is hard to escape this conclusion, and a few years from now, when the field for the 117th Derby can be examined with the benefit of hindsight, we will probably look at the race as we now view the 1982 Derby that was won by the plodder Gato del Sol. There wasn’t a single top-class horse in that entire field, and Saturday’s race might not have had one either -- not even Strike the Gold.

The stretch-runner was winning only the third race in his career. Second-place Best Pal still hasn’t won as a 3-year-old. But it was the slow final time that defines the quality of this group. In the speed figures that I have been compiling for two decades, an average winner of a Triple Crown race might earn a rating of 112 or so; an exceptional performance like Easy Goer’s Belmont win might get a figure of 120. Strike the Gold earned a figure of 107 -- even worse than the lowly Gato del Sol. He had the good fortune to be born into the only equine generation in which he could possibly have won the Derby.

Yet even if it was not a brilliant race, this Derby was instructive, illuminating and worthy of study.

It finally exposed some of the blatant fallacies in the much-publicized Dosage System, which claimed a perfect record in separating Derby contenders from non-contenders on the basis of pedigree, but which decreed that Strike the Gold was not bred to go 1 1/4 miles. Dosage not only failed in this case, but it misled many bettors with its assurances that other members of the field were qualified to go the Derby distance when, in fact, they weren’t. Serious students of bloodlines wondered whether Best Pal or Sea Cadet, both the sons of milers, were Derby material. Scotty Schulhofer, the trainer of Fly So Free, admitted that he harbored doubts about the stamina in his champion’s pedigree. Yet Dosage gave these horses its stamp of approval while focusing all the pre-race questions on the son of a stallion, Alydar, who was a great 1 1/4-mile runner. Dosage deserves relegation to the ashcan along with any other system that pretends to offer easy answers in a complex game.

Another valuable lesson that bettors ought to have learned Saturday is the importance of scrutinizing horses’ excuses for losing efforts. Just about anyone who wagered seriously on the Derby had seen the film of the Blue Grass Stakes, where Strike the Gold scored an authoritative three-length victory over Fly So Free. There shouldn’t have been any doubt who was the better horse. Yet Schulhofer offered various, well-publicized excuses, blaming his jockey for restraining the horse too much in the early going, blaming the condition of the track, and bettors heeded these rationalizations more than the evidence of their own eyes, making Fly So Free 5 to 2 and Strike the Gold 9 to 2.

Evaluating excuses may be an important test for handicappers when the top finishers in the Derby meet again in the Preakness. One horse, Lost Mountain, encountered dramatic trouble; he was accelerating powerfully on the inside of the field, and was about to move to the lead when he got into tight quarters, was nudged into the rail and then dropped sharply out of contention. Could this misfortune have cost him the race?

An even more ambiguous case was the journey of Best Pal. Jockey Gary Stevens said upon dismounting that he had enjoyed “a perfect trip.” Trainer Ian Jory said Sunday, “It wasn’t the best of trips. I think we lost the race on the first turn. If Gary had stayed where he was (after breaking from an outside post position) he would have been eight wide, so he had to take back and in doing that cost us ten lengths. We were in big trouble then.”

There are so many interesting handicapping issues involved that the Preakness figures to be a fascinating race from the betting standpoint. I believe I already know who the winner is going to be -- and the horse is not Strike the Gold.

I will always feel affection for this colt who ended my 10-year losing streak in the Kentucky Derby. But history says clearly that it takes a great horse to win the Triple Crown, and a very, very good one to win two legs of it. Strike the Gold falls into neither category; he has already seen his one great moment of glory.