THOROUGHBRED RACING : Kotashaan’s Bid for Horse of Year May Pull Up Short

Trainer Richard Mandella didn’t throw his binoculars, and storm out of the racetrack

That’s what Bobby Frankel did at Hollywood Park in June, when he felt a poor ride by Kent Desormeaux cost Jolphya a chance to win the Beverly Hills Handicap.

And the Beverly Hills was only a $300,000 race. When Desormeaux misjudged the finish line in Sunday’s Japan Cup, choking off Kotashaan’s stretch rally, the race was worth $3.6 million. Legacy World beat Kotashaan by 1 1/4 lengths, with first place paying nearly $1.6 million and second $635,000.

Mandella has an understated style, and that polite, buttoned-down manner was never more severely tested than on Sunday in Tokyo, before a crowd of nearly 180,000. When Mandella reached the unsaddling area after the Japan Cup, he looked up at Desormeaux on his horse. “ . . . happens,” Mandella said matter-of-factly.

For Kotashaan, who won the $2-million Breeders’ Cup Turf on Nov. 6 under French ownership and was running in Tokyo for the first time for Japanese owners, more might have been lost than just the lucrative first-place purse. The Japan Cup, despite the shadings that Desormeaux’s wrong-headed ride brings to the outcome, will make a tight vote even tighter between Lure and Kotashaan for the horse-of-the-year title in North America.

Lure, a middle-distance horse who never raced the long-winded Kotashaan during the year, has won the Breeders’ Cup Mile the last two years.

Kotashaan, who did all of his 1993 running in California before the trip to Tokyo, won six of his last eight starts. During that spell, his only loss besides the Japan Cup was by a nose to Luazur in the Del Mar Handicap. And Desormeaux, by his own admission, got Kotashaan beat that day, too.

The morning after Kotashaan had given Desormeaux his first Breeders’ Cup victory, the jockey still hadn’t erased the day at Del Mar from his mind.

“We got beat by less than an inch,” the jockey said. “If I move that less-than-an-inch sooner, then we win the race.”

There will be additional psychological baggage for Desormeaux to tote around if Lure draws more votes than Kotashaan. How can a jockey win more than 270 races, be third nationally with more than $12 million in purses, and still feel star-crossed? Desormeaux might be in a position to be asked that question.

California stewards, suggesting a concentration problem, suspended Desormeaux for five days earlier this year because he didn’t ride out a mount to the finish line. Desormeaux, fined once in 1992 and once previously this year in similar rulings, reluctantly served the suspension without a legal challenge.

In Tokyo, Desormeaux actually blew the finish line twice. He mistook the 100-meter pole for the wire in an earlier race on Japan Cup day. The local stewards reprimanded him for the first infraction before fining him the maximum $460 for the ride on Kotashaan.

Anything more severe would have meant a suspension, which was an unlikely penalty because Desormeaux was committed to remain in Tokyo this weekend, to ride in an international jockeys’ competition.

Before Desormeaux, the most famous case of a jockey misjudging the finish line involved Bill Shoemaker, who contributed to Gallant Man’s loss by a nose against Iron Liege in the 1957 Kentucky Derby.

The stewards at Churchill Downs were not as lenient as their counterparts in Japan. They nailed Shoemaker with a suspension that kept him from riding in the Preakness, two weeks later.

Ralph Lowe, who owned Gallant Man, was so furious that he skipped the Preakness, depriving Pimlico of the rematch against Iron Liege. Bold Ruler beat Iron Liege in the Preakness; Lowe gave Shoemaker a new car to take the sting out of the Derby, and Gallant Man, with Shoemaker back aboard, gave Lowe the last laugh by routing Bold Ruler and four others in the Belmont Stakes.

“I feel bad for Kent,” said Mandella, whose return from Tokyo matched the luck he and Desormeaux had in the Japan Cup. Not long out of the airport, Mandella’s plane lost an engine, circled and dumped fuel for about three hours before heading back to the airport, where the passengers were transferred to another plane.

Recalling the race, Mandella said: “Kent had the horse half pulled up. It wasn’t like he was up (in the irons) for just a second, and then went back down. I thought we were going to win before it happened, and people around me thought so, too.

“The horse had already had some bad luck, clipping heels on the backstretch. He was five or six lengths behind, and he made up most of that in the stretch. He was within a half-length of the winner, with about a sixteenth (of a mile) to go, when Kent stopped riding. It would be hard to believe that he wouldn’t have made up that last half of a length as well.”

Kotashaan’s nicked left foreleg was patched with three stitches after the race.

Mandella is still saying that Kotashaan deserves to be horse of the year. The electorate--about 275 voters from the Daily Racing Form, the National Turf Writers Assn. and tracks that belong to the Thoroughbred Racing Assns.--can look at the Japan Cup in a number of ways:

--As a throw-out race for Kotashaan because of Desormeaux’s boner.

--As a plus for Kotashaan, who traveled all the way to Japan and did the next-best thing to winning the race.

--As a race that diminishes Kotashaan’s Breeders’ Cup achievement and prompts the vote for Lure, who spread his six victories over six tracks.

--As a race that was meaningless even before it was run, on the theory that a race in Japan shouldn’t help determine a championship in North America.

The envelope with the horse-of-the-year result will be opened in New Orleans the night of Feb. 4. It will be worth waiting up for.

Horse Racing Notes

It’s likely that Star of Cozzene will run next year. After a poor start, the colt finished fifth, beaten by less than three lengths, in the Japan Cup, and for the year had six victories and four seconds in 12 races. . . . Richard Mandella continues to lobby for another year of racing for Kotashaan. . . . Now Listen, scheduled to run in the Hong Kong Bowl on Dec. 12, cracked a cannon bone Wednesday at Hollywood Park and his career is probably finished.