Kentucky Derby Prep Races Offer Big Money, Little Value

A field of undistinguished 3 year olds will compete in the Jim Beam Stakes at Turfway Park Saturday for a $500,000 purse -- a prize much larger than any of them has earned in his career. The money is grossly out of proportion to the importance of the race because the Kentucky track and the sponsor wanted to create an event that would attract attention, and figured that a prep race for the Kentucky Derby would be the most effective way to do it.

Of course, Turfway isn’t the only track that has had this idea. At Oaklawn Park Saturday afternoon, another mediocre group of 3 year olds will contest the $125,000 Rebel Stakes, a prep for the $500,000 Arkansas Derby. Garden State Saturday presents the Cherry Hill Mile for 3 year olds. Sunday, little Tampa Bay Downs will put on its main event of the meeting, the $200,000 Tampa Bay Derby. Calder Race Course will offer the What A Pleasure Stakes, a prep for the Tropical Park Derby.

Why the overkill? Most of these early season 3-year-olds stakes are the product of the pre-Breeders’ Cup, pre-American Championship Racing Series era, when television networks seemed to think that the racing season ended with the Belmont Stakes in June. The Triple Crown was the only part of the sport that attracted significant attention, and so a race that could be billed as a Kentucky Derby prep was invested with far more importance than, say, a fall stakes for older horses that might be a genuine championship event.

The proliferation of these 3-year-old stakes has diluted the competition everywhere and spoiled a segment of the racing season that used to be filled with excitement. When there were only a few recognized major prep races, they could generate as much drama as the Kentucky Derby itself -- like the meeting of Devil’s Bag, Dr. Carter and Time for a Change in the great 1984 Flamingo, or the first Secretariat-Sham confrontation in the 1973 Wood Memorial.

Now it’s rare to have as many as two prime Derby contenders in the same prep race. The field for the Florida Derby earlier this month was pitiful. The same is true of Saturday’s Jim Beam, in which only one of 11 entrants has won a graded stakes.

There never has been a better time for racetracks to reconsider the way they deploy their purse money. With owners, breeders and trainers being driven out of the business in large numbers because ordinary purses aren’t large enough for them to survive, it is ridiculous for tracks to expend hundreds of thousands of dollars for bogus attractions like some of these 3-year-old stakes.

And tracks might show some imagination in their choice of big-money races, as Laurel and Pimlico do. Maryland’s most lucrative races -- the Preakness, Pimlico Special, International Turf Festival, Maryland Million and De Francis Dash -- are all distinctive, high-quality events that give the tracks plenty of bang for their bucks. A lot more bang than Turfway Park will be getting Saturday afternoon.

It is unlikely that all of this weekend’s activity will produce many serious contenders for the 3-year-old classics, but there are at least a few interesting horses to watch:

-- In the Jim Beam, a modestly bred colt named Lil E. Tee looks like a horse with a future -- and a good betting opportunity too. He last raced in a stakes at Oaklawn Park that was won, in excellent time, by Big Sur, one of his main rivals Saturday. But that track had a rail-favoring bias, and while Big Sur saved ground, Lil E. Tee was racing four-wide most of the way. He has drawn an inside post -- always important at Turfway -- which puts him in good position to score the most lucrative victory of his career.

-- Pine Bluff, who was regarded as one of last season’s better 2 year olds, should win the Rebel Stakes at Oaklawn. He suffered a disappointing loss in his 3-year-old debut, but he was compromised by the same bias that hurt Lil E. Tee.

-- Alydeed has already earned the distinction as the most overhyped 3 year old of the year. He ran away with an allowance race at Gulfstream Park -- in good but not spectacular time -- and has been hammered as low as 5 to 1 in Las Vegas’s future-book betting on the Derby. He’ll get a chance to run a distance for the first time in Calder’s What a Pleasure Stakes.

-- Pie in Your Eye made such a dazzling debut at Laurel that I proclaimed him the second coming of Secretariat. He hasn’t looked like an immortal in his last two starts, but Saturday he’ll get his first test in a distance race and in stakes company in the Cherry Hill Mile, which will be simulcast to Laurel and Pimlico. If he wins big, Maryland might have a contender for the classics.