HORSE RACING : Trainers, Bettors Need Patience to Succeed With Foreign Horses

The major turf races here have had a decidedly cosmopolitan look. The majority of the starters raced abroad before launching a second career in the United States.

This heavy foreign representation has become typical of the sport here. Since Marylanders have had the chance to bet on the California races via simulcast, many have noted that the most unfamiliar and confusing aspect of West Coast racing is the abundance of horses making their first U.S. starts. In the East, such horses are relatively rare and when they do appear, they don’t win very often. Here they win with such frequency that bettors can never ignore them.

Many foreign horses come to the United States because the purses are larger than in their homelands; many come to California because the climate makes year-round turf racing possible. But the main reason for the success of foreign horses is that California trainers have learned to take animals accustomed to a radically different style of racing and training and get them acclimated to the American sport.

“We all learned from Charlie Whittingham,” said trainer Bobby Frankel, paying homage to the 80-year-old dean of Western horsemen who developed champions such as Cougar II, the Chilean. “Everybody’s copied him.”

Frankel, Ron McAnally and Neil Drysdale have established themselves as masters of the art. And now a younger generation is copying them. Bob Hess Jr., a rising star of his profession, said: “You have to watch your peers and learn from them. Patience--as Drysdale and Whittingham show--is the key.” Hess won a division of the opening-day Oceanside Stakes at Del Mar with a French colt making his first U.S. start.

Patience has always been the hallmark of the Whittingham style, and patience is what foreign horses require. They need to spend time in this country before launching their careers in earnest. McAnally, trainer of Bayakoa and Paseana, two Argentine horses who became American champions, says the process depends on the hemisphere from which the horse comes.

“The European horses will come over and run one big race, then they’ll tail off for a couple of months before they get back into form,” McAnally said. “You can practically chart it on a graph. For South American horses, it takes a minimum of four months to get them acclimated to our style of running and training and, most important, our weather.”

Frankel said that the key to training the imports, who are mostly distance runners on the grass, is to not change their style too much. In New York, he said, trainers tend to give foreign horses a regimen of short workouts to sharpen their speed. Californians--despite their reputation for emphasizing speed--have learned to give these horses longer, slower works.

“Many people think these horses are slow and that they have to put speed into them,” Frankel said. “But most of these horses do have speed. . . . In Europe, they just take those horses back and let them finish fast instead of blasting them out of the gate the way we do. You don’t have to do anything different with these horses. If you try to change their style and make speed horses out of them, you’ll ruin them.”

Horseplayers in California have to cope so frequently with imports that they learn the basics of foreign form. It’s an axiom that horses who perform well in graded stakes in England and France will be tough here. But even horses who don’t look particularly good on paper will pull surprises.

A few years ago, many Argentine horses were shipped to Florida, and their past performances all showed victories in impressive-sounding graded stakes. Nearly all of them were flops. My rule of thumb was that a stakes winner at San Isidro was the equivalent of a $14,000 claiming horse. Yet McAnally managed to buy two filly stars at San Isidro and win the Breeders’ Cup with them.

The California trainers have learned to identify the foreign horses who are genuine and who can make the transition to U.S. racing. Many have developed a network of agents and contacts in other countries to spot prospects.

“You’ve got to have the right people advising you--people who know our style of racing here,” McAnally said. He means that any horse who comes here must possess some natural speed.

While many ready-made grass stars come to America, there is another, completely different market for imports. As large numbers of well-bred U.S. horses have been sold at yearling auctions and sent overseas, many have flopped in Europe without ever getting the chance to run on dirt. Jeff Siegel, co-manager of Team Valor, which puts together syndicates for horse purchases, said: “Our main play is to buy horses with American dirt pedigrees who failed on the grass.” Siegel and his partners won the $1-million Santa Anita Handicap with such a horse--the 50-1 Martial Law.

This continuous infusion of new blood is one of the reasons that California racing is so strong and so competitive. And it’s one of the reasons that betting can be so tough. In one race here, handicappers had to deal with shippers from Longchamp, Salisbury and Newmarket. California horseplayers, like California trainers, must develop an international perspective.