HORSE RACING : For U.S. 3-Year-Olds, Swale Provides a Clue for Class

Until Saturday, it was hard to muster genuine enthusiasm for any of America’s 3-year-old racehorses.

Dance Floor, the colt owned by the family of rap star Hammer, had won the East’s first important Kentucky Derby prep, the Fountain of Youth Stakes, but he enjoyed perfect racing luck and his winning time was mediocre. Technology defeated Dance Floor in the Florida Derby, but he benefited from an easy trip and his time was slow too.

Bertrando won the San Felipe Stakes at Santa Anita, but he ran no faster than maidens did on the same afternoon, and the front-runner didn’t look like a horse who will be able to handle classic distances. Only A.P. Indy, a California 3 year old, has won a major stakes in a reasonably convincing fashion.

If any U.S. runner is going to be able to challenge the French-based Arazi, the strong early favorite for the Kentucky Derby, it figures to be a late bloomer rather than one of the current big names. And now two such colts have started to bloom. Mark down the names of D.J. Cat and Binalong. They look like the bright new stars of the sport.

These lightly raced colts ran one-two in the Swale Stakes at Gulfstream Park, and they ran so fast that students of speed handicapping were agog. However, racing fans who are not devotees of speed figures might properly be skeptical. Can a single fast performance in a relatively minor seven-furlong race really point out a horse who is bound for glory?

I would argue that the answer is yes, in most circumstances. Exclude cases where the winner is a one-dimensional front-runner, or where the winner benefits from especially favorable circumstances, such as a strong track bias. When a young horse runs extraordinarily fast -- when he runs faster than high-class older horses would run over the same racing strip -- he usually will go on to stardom.

A few recent examples:

-- In 1988, the 2-year-old Easy Goer ran 6 1/2 furlongs at Belmont Park in a near-record 1:15 2-5. The feature race for older horses the same day went in 1:17. Easy Goer went on to win the Eclipse Award as the champion of his age group. In 1989, Go and Go and Robyn Dancer wound up in a photo finish in the Laurel Futurity, running so fast that the time looked like a fluke. (This suspicion seemed to be confirmed when they both ran poorly in the Breeders’ Cup.) But Go and Go won the Belmont Stakes the next season, and Robyn Dancer eventually matured into one of the country’s best sprinters.

-- That same year, Grand Canyon beat Farma Way in a spectacularly fast Hollywood Futurity, with both running faster than the ace 4-year-old Criminal Type did on the same day. Grand Canyon never ran again, but Farma Way developed into one of America’s best horses, capturing the 1991 American Championship Racing Series.

It is a rarity when a 2 year old or newly turned 3 year old can run faster than stakes-class elders, and that is what made Saturday’s events at Gulfstream Park so extraordinary. The Gulfstream Park Sprint Championship that day had drawn some of the East’s best older sprinters, and the winning time for the seven-furlong event was 1:23 4-5.

But an hour earlier, the 3-year-olds D.J. Cat and Binalong had waged a head-and-head battle through the stretch, with D.J. Cat winning narrowly in 1:23 1-5. In my system of speed figures, the rating of 115 they earned was so much better than those of Dance Floor, Technology, Bertrando, et al. that there is no doubt about their superiority.

Moreover, the two of them have overall records that seem to confirm that this one big race was no fluke. D.J. Cat is undefeated in four career starts for trainer Happy Alter. He won twice as a 2 year old at Calder, was sidelined for six months and returned to competition by breaking Gulfstream’s 6 1/2-furlong track record in an allowance-race runaway.

Binalong won his first two career starts before finishing second to D.J. Cat in that allowance race and the Swale Stakes. He has a solid pedigree and an outstanding trainer in Carl Nafzger, who developed the late-blooming Unbridled to win the Kentucky Derby and Breeders’ Cup Classic in 1990.

Because neither D.J. Cat nor Binalong has yet run past seven furlongs, both will be playing a tough game of catch-up to be ready for the 1 1/4 miles of the Kentucky Derby May 2. But sooner or later, one or both of these colts is going to show the world that he is something special. Arazi may not be the only superstar of this 3-year-old generation.