Arazi to Help Clear Derby Fog Today : Horse racing: Future-book favorite for Kentucky will have first race since undergoing major surgery last fall.

To Francois Boutin’s obvious displeasure, a thick fog covered the opposite side of the turf training ground, blocking his view of the half-dozen thoroughbreds as they began the 7 1/2-furlong workout on a recent frosty morning here. Anxiously, the stocky, irritable French trainer aimed his binoculars at the horizon.

But the fog was so thick that he heard the horses before he saw them. When a sleek, pale chestnut broke into view, running easily in the lead with jockey Steve Cauthen comfortably aboard, Boutin permitted himself a brief outburst of satisfaction.

“He stepped on the gas!” he shouted in French. “He woke up. He realized he had to work.”

The he in question was Arazi, the future-book favorite to win the Kentucky Derby and widely considered the best 3-year-old in the world. Boutin, France’s most successful trainer, was preparing the horse for his final race, the one-mile Prix Omnium II at Saint-Cloud today, before his Kentucky Derby appearance on May 2.

For Boutin, there is something more at stake at Churchill Downs than the first leg of the Triple Crown.

When it comes to sport, he acknowledged, he is something of a French chauvinist. During the recent workout, he took time out to relish the French victory the day before in the America’s Cup challenger trials against New Zealand off San Diego. He spoke nostalgically about the French victory over the United States in last year’s Davis Cup tennis final. And he complained bitterly about the French tennis team’s recent upset by Switzerland in this year’s Davis Cup competition.

“We should have quit after we beat the Americans,” he said. “That way we would have gone out a winner.”

Boutin, 55, is also outspoken about his preferences for European training techniques. In Europe, trainers seldom use stopwatches, run their horses on open practice grounds such as the magnificent Les Aigles spread here in Chantilly and, in general, are less data-based, more seat-of-the-pants, than their American counterparts.

The last horse to win the Kentucky Derby directly off a foreign prep race was the Venezuelan-based Canonero II in 1971, and no French-trained horse has won it. So this year’s race looms as a perfect opportunity for Boutin to make his point about European training.

Horsemen are looking for today’s Saint-Cloud race to answer some questions about Arazi’s condition after arthroscopic surgery to remove bone chips near the top joints of two knees last fall, days after his impressive five-length victory in the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile at Churchill Downs.

Boutin, who initially opposed the surgery--”In my opinion, when you have a perfect athlete you don’t mess with him”--no longer seemed concerned about the effects of the operation on his colt.

But before the workout here in the capital of French thoroughbred racing, he had been complaining to Cauthen that Arazi had grown lazy over the winter.

In Arazi’s last workout, he said, the horse had run even with a lesser steed named Ganges, a bigger but duller looking gray horse in Boutin’s stable of 190.

But this time, with Cauthen in the saddle, Arazi blew past Ganges, who, in comparison, looked to be proceeding at about the pace of his fluvial namesake.

Cauthen, who will ride Arazi for the first time in a race today, compared the colt to Affirmed, the horse he rode to a Triple Crown victory in 1978.

“He reminds me a lot of Affirmed,” said Cauthen, who rides in Europe for Arazi’s co-owner, Sheik Mohammed al Maktoum of Dubai. “He’s very intelligent and has very good action. He has the intelligence to be a superstar.”

Because of an agreement between Sheik Mohammed and American co-owner Allen Paulson, Arazi will be ridden in the United States by Pat Valenzuela, who has a contract with Paulson to ride all of his horses this year.

In between nagging the grooms to give Arazi a proper post-workout rubdown and finally grabbing a towel and bending over the colt himself to wipe sweat from his legs, Boutin said that Arazi’s strengths are his courage and class.

“It’s his heart. Above all it’s his heart,” Boutin said.

He said he spotted the quality when he first saw the horse in Kentucky during a short workout against a highly rated English horse, known for his speed.

“Arazi responded in an extraordinary way,” Boutin said. “That was the day he showed his great class. It was the day I realized he had a kind of deceptive speed. He didn’t really have the natural speed of the other horse, but he did what he needed to to do to beat a specialist.”

As the trainer and jockey talked about him, Arazi regarded them with a cool detachment. Not a particularly big horse, he has a fine head with alert eyes. The white blaze on his face is crooked, slanting from below his left eye to just above his right nostril. It lends him him a disconcerting, inquisitive appearance, as though a question-mark had been emblazoned on his brow.

Searching for a flaw, some racing authorities have questioned his size, suggesting that he has not grown enough after his successful season as a 2-year-old.

“He’s plenty big enough,” Cauthen said. “He’s a nice horse to sit on. I remember when they said Affirmed was too small. It’s just like in basketball, everybody thinks you have to be big and imposing to win.”

Boutin made it clear that, after racing in the Kentucky Derby, he would prefer to bring the horse back across the Atlantic to race in the English Derby on June 3. Boutin prefers English courses. From his European perspective, a never achieved “Derby Double” would be a bigger coup than the Triple Crown, despite $5 million in purses and bonus waiting for a Triple Crown winner.

But Boutin, caught between two owners, American Paulson and England-based Sheik Mohammed, is not a totally free man on this point, although both owners say that the final decision is his alone.

“Fortunately, it’s not something we have to decide today,” Boutin said. “To go for the Triple Crown, we have to win big at the Kentucky Derby. Not just win, but win big.”