Whittingham Uses Any Omen He Can : Preakness: Whadjathink draws same number Sunday Silence had in 1989. Strike The Gold the early favorite.

After the post-position draw for Saturday’s 116th running of the Preakness, trainer Michael Whittingham was on his way back to the stakes barn at Pimlico. He reached into a Manila envelope and produced a color photograph of the winner’s circle from the 1989 Preakness.

“Look,” Whittingham said. “No. 8.”

His legendary father, Charlie, won the 1989 Preakness when Sunday Silence was No. 8, and now Michael Whittingham, 45, will start another No. 8, Whadjathink, in the Preakness.

With saddlecloth numbers, the similarity ends between Whadjathink and Sunday Silence, who had already won the Kentucky Derby, beating Easy Goer by a nose in the Preakness in a dramatic stretch duel that called up memories of Affirmed edging Alydar 11 years before. Sunday Silence was 2-1, the second betting choice, and Whadjathink is 30-1 on the morning line, longest price in the eight-horse field.

The favorite, at 9-5, is Strike The Gold, this year’s Kentucky Derby winner, and while Ron McAnally, the trainer of Olympio, expects Strike The Gold to go off the favorite, he is extremely confident about his colt, who comes into the Preakness having skipped the Kentucky Derby after winning the Arkansas Derby in his last start.

Olympio drew the No. 7 post. “I think we’ve got the best spot,” McAnally said. “From there, we should be able to control the pace on the outside. The horses inside us have to go. We don’t.”

At the controls will be Eddie Delahoussaye, one of the most successful Triple Crown jockeys in the past decade. Delahoussaye has won the Kentucky Derby twice, with Gato Del Sol in 1982 and Sunny’s Halo in 1983, and in 1988 he won both the Preakness and the Belmont Stakes with Risen Star, who might also have been best in the Derby but didn’t benefit from the cleanest of trips.

Delahoussaye, 39, has ridden Olympio in four of his five victories and seven of his eight starts. McAnally used Tommy Chapman when Olympio won the Sausalito Stakes at Golden Gate Fields on March 9.

“What I feel best about going into this race is that Eddie will be riding this horse,” McAnally said. “When that gate opens, I have total confidence in him.”

Delahoussaye’s clever ride four weeks ago in the Arkansas Derby has other trainers trying to anticipate what he has up his sleeve Saturday. “Training in California, we all know what Delahoussaye’s like,” said Ian Jory, the trainer of Derby runner-up Best Pal. “He’s liable to look like he’s taking back, and then he’ll wind up on the lead. But no matter what he does, I don’t want my horse on the lead. We’d like to be pretty close to the lead in the first part of it.”

The only thing McAnally told Delahoussaye before the Arkansas Derby was that horses coming from too far off the pace hadn’t been able to make up much ground at Oaklawn Park.

“That made the speed horses, like Richman and (trainer Wayne) Lukas’ horse (Corporate Report), all the more dangerous,” McAnally said. “So Eddie had Olympio up close early, but when he saw they were running fast (:45 2/5 for the half-mile), he took back and had lots of horse left for the stretch.”

Olympio’s start-stop-start performance, which resulted in a 2 1/2-length victory over Corporate Report, was the most dimensional by any 3-year-old preparing for this year’s Triple Crown races. McAnally already had Sea Cadet revved up for the Kentucky Derby, so he left Olympio in the barn two weeks ago, saving him for the Preakness. Sea Cadet led the Derby for a mile but faded to eighth.

“We put Sea Cadet in the Derby when Dinard (the Santa Anita Derby winner) got hurt,” McAnally said. “The only way we would have run both horses would have been if Strike The Gold and Hansel had been scratched.”

Hansel went off the favorite in the Derby but finished 10th, and Strike The Gold had been McAnally’s pick to win the race.

Delahoussaye was here last weekend, finishing fourth with the McAnally-trained Festin in the Pimlico Special and working Olympio a handy 1:37 mile.

“If Olympio breaks sharp, I’m going to let him come out of there,” Delahoussaye said. “I don’t want to be on the lead--hopefully somebody will go on--but if he is very comfortable on the lead and doing it easy, I’ll just take advantage of it. But until the gate opens, you really don’t know what is going to happen. If we could lay second or third, it would be a lot better than being on the lead. It looks like he’ll have something to run at.”

Indeed, all of the Preakness horses have been training fast. McAnally sees at least three starters--Corporate Report, Best Pal and Mane Minister, the third-place finisher in the Derby--battling for the lead. Because the Preakness, at 1 3/16 miles, is a sixteenth of a mile shorter than the Kentucky Derby, it is easy to say that speed is a requisite at Pimlico, but this is a canard. Aloma’s Ruler, in 1982, was the last horse to win the race wire to wire.

The Preakness

Post positions for the 116th Preakness Stakes Saturday at Pimlico Race Course in Baltimore.

No. Horse Odds 1. Corporate Report 15-1 2. Mane Minister 12-1 3. Strike the Gold 9-5 4. Hansel 9-2 5. Best Pal 7-2 6. Honor Grades 20-1 7. Olympio 5-2 8. Whadjathink 30-1