A Touch of Class on Turf

Usually when I talk to a horse trainer, he’s wearing a hat that looks as if it were taken off a member of the James Gang, he has lizard boots and, if he’s wearing one, his tie looks like a shoelace with a turquoise brooch in it and he speaks in a tongue that’s a cross between Kentucky hillbilly and Texas twang.

He has a stopwatch in his hand and, maybe, a chaw of tobacco in his mouth and he feels uncomfortable too far away from a barn. If he’s from Versailles, it’s the one in Kentucky, and it’s pronounced Ver-SAILS. He is of a breed most often known as “Plain Ben” or “Sunny Jim” and his office is a tack room.

But I talked to one of the great horse conditioners in the world at Hollywood Park the other day and if he were any more elegant, he would have shown up in a powdered wig and shoes with big buckles on them.

You look at Francois Boutin and you figure Louis Quatorze must have looked something like this. Maybe even the count of Monte Cristo. The patrician features, the elegant cut of the clothes, the imperious look all bespeak Gallic aristocracy. When he speaks, it is not in the burr of Kentucky or the drawl of the Southwest, it is in the champagne lilt of Normandy.

When he says Versailles, he pronounces it Ver-SIGH, all right. The last thing in the world you would call him is Plain Ben. He’s not exactly sunny, either. More austere in the grand Charles DeGaulle mold.

In this country, we expect horsemen to come out of the bunkhouses of the old West or the horse auctions of Missouri or the livery stables of Oklahoma. But horse racing was old in France before Napoleon came along.

At first, it only pitted the steeds of the nobility. Sport of kings was more than a catch phrase. The art of selective breeding probably began with the French. The term royally bred probably originated at Chantilly when we were still betting on the bobtail nags at camptown racing.

Monsieur Boutin has a touch with a horse you would have thought only Geronimo or a Pony Express rider might have. But he stunned the racing Establishment in this country last year when he showed up at the Breeders’ Cup with a 2-year-old French horse who proceeded to tow-rope the flower of American yearlings in such a fashion as to make them look like $10,000 claimers taking on a stakes colt.

Arazi was not only a precocious animal, he was so superbly conditioned that the jockey hand-rode him past the competition at the head of the stretch in a move the backstretch at Churchill Downs hadn’t seen since the great Secretariat.

Racing calls a horse this gifted “a freak.” Bear in mind, the field he was overcoming was the product of the most intense weeding-out in sport. To reach the majors in racing, you have to out-perform some 50,000 foals each year, and their owners all hanker to make a Kentucky Derby with them. They get the finest of training, preparation, planning, pampering to that end.

Arazi came along and humbled this cream of the crop so thoroughly that not even comparisons to Man o’ War and Citation were considered outlandish.

That he was able to do this virtually stepping off an intercontinental airplane flight and racing on dirt for the first time in his life was considered proof that this was the second coming of Pegasus. It was the stuff of Hollywood, a screenwriter’s--and a race writer’s--dream.

But, sacre bleu! Racehorses are the most fragile of God’s creatures and their spindly legs, ill-suited to the purpose of carrying 1,100-pound bodies at speeds of automobiles, break down. It happened to Arazi, and there is no telling how historic a figure he might have been had he stayed sound.

Even though the story had an unhappy ending, the racing world’s attention focused on Boutin. The fact that he won two Breeders’ Cup races and Eclipse Awards with the mare Miesque and won a Hollywood Derby with Procida went largely unheralded. But Boutin was no secret in France, where his reputation for getting horses ready rivaled that of any of the Jones boys or Charlie Whittingham or any of the great conditioners of the New World.

Monsieur Boutin’s training methods would shock the hardboots of the blue grass. He doesn’t even carry a stopwatch. He never clocks a horse. He never demands an all-out training run from the animal. He sizes up the horse’s pluses and limitations and proceeds to condition accordingly.

Monsieur Boutin does not exactly allow a horse to train itself, but he does try to program it within its capabilities. He never trains a horse at a racetrack, preferring the more natural environment. And, even though the emphasis is not on front-running ability in Europe, where courses are all grass and often up or down hill, he has had smashing success with other horses besides Miesque and Arazi on American courses, which often favor pace-setters.

“The horse is a very generous animal,” he says through an interpreter. “I would say I treat them like children, like adolescents.”

Brought up on a Norman farm, Boutin does not delude himself about the intelligence of horses.

“But you have to observe their instincts,” he says. “One of my faults is I train more by instinct than (by the book).”

The Arazi affair never reached its happy ending, he says, because an operation was performed too soon after the horse’s campaigning and his recuperation period was cut short to try to get him ready for the Kentucky Derby.

“It was a mistake,” he says with finality. “I was not in approval.”

Boutin is at Hollywood Park this month, as part of the track’s Autumn Festival, an attempt to further internationalize the sport.

On Sunday, Boutin sent out the lengthy, long-striding Nureyev filly, Trishyde, whom the bettors let get away at odds of 18-1 in the Citation Handicap. She very nearly caught the winner, the Argentine colt, Leger Cat, finishing only a head behind. No Boutin entrant should ever go off at 18-1.

It is Boutin’s hope that the ease of travel and the easing of immigration quarantining will make it less of a major happening when a horse pulls an Arazi--comes down an airplane ramp to drub his contemporaries.

American horsemen might be agreeable to the horses coming in. It’s that elegant foreigner in the Parisian tailoring they might want to bar. His horses obviously speak French. They certainly understand it.