His Success Was No Longshot

How good a trainer is Dick Mandella?

Well, when I tell you his two horses ran a dead heat for the victory in a stakes race at Hollywood Park once, I might be telling you all you need to know about trainer Mandella. That had never happened before and hasn’t since. The only horse in the race Dick Mandella couldn’t beat was one trained by Dick Mandella.

Then, when I tell you that, at the Breeders’ Cup Day at Santa Anita this fall, trainer Mandella sent out four horses--and they each won a stake. His mounts picked up $3.25 million. He won the Juvenile Fillies (with Phone Chatter), the Turf (with Kotashaan) in the Breeders’ Cup competition--and then won the two stakes the track wrote to fill out the card. He was almost a one-man Pick Six. That, too, was a record.

They handicap horses; they should handicap trainers. Where the conditions of the race say “Non-winners of two races at one mile or over since Jan. 1 allowed 2 pounds, of such a race since Feb. 1, 4 pounds” they should add “Horses not trained by Richard Mandella, 6 pounds.”

The Breeders’ Cup this year had to be an embarrassment to the racing establishment. Here you had a card of the world’s finest race horses, as blue-blooded as the House of Windsor, every gate a champion.

And the biggest, richest race on the card was won by a 133-1 shot.

Now, 133-1 shots aren’t supposed to get in Breeders’ Cups. They’re supposed to get in Juarez. Calder Downs. Gypsy tracks in the Dakotas. Places where they don’t check pedigree too closely.

But to have a 133-1 shot win the most prestigious Breeders’ Cup race--to say nothing of $1,560,000--is a Disney movie.

And what do you think the connections of this darkest of dark horses did with him after the race? Turned him over to Dick Mandella.

Arcangues (pronounced “Are-kong”) is a French horse of such little distinction that he was syndicated for $11,000 a share--penny ante stuff in today’s horse market--before he was shipped over for the Breeders’ Cup. He had never run on dirt before, had never run in this country and, in fact, was kind of the equine equivalent of European prizefighters--not much horse. He had a history of being run down in the hind quarters, a pathology that tended to make him lose interest in the race in the late going (and sometimes earlier). But in the Breeders’ Cup Classic he went past the favorite, Bertrando, as if he were tied to a tree. Either he liked the dirt--or he liked California.

Whatever his motivation, Arcangues liked it over here and his principal owner, Alec Wildenstein, promptly shipped him back from France and in effect turned him into a green card track alien. And he turned him over to Mandella. “He seemed to me to be a trainer who knew how to train French horses,” Wildenstein explained.

No one is sure what that means. Mandella doesn’t speak French. Of course, neither does the horse. But, Mandella made his reputation by brilliantly conditioning the French-bred Kotashaan, who not only won the Breeders’ Cup but seemed on the point of being named horse of the year before he went to Tokyo for the world’s richest race, the Japan Cup, last month. He lost the race when jockey Kent Desormeaux stood up in the stirrups short of the finish line, the worst such gaffe since Willie Shoemaker did it in the 1957 Kentucky Derby on Gallant Man. If Kent Desormeaux hadn’t done that, Mandella would have become the trainer whose stock won $5 million in a month, another record.

Dick Mandella came by his horse sense legitimately enough. He grew up in a paddock. Dad was a blacksmith who used to plate horses for the Three Rings Ranch in Beaumont. Young Dick was around horses when his classmates were around hot rods. He got to know more abut horses than a Pony Express rider.

“What makes a successful trainer?” he echoes. “Well, I think it’s like anything: Some people are born for it--like playing the piano or singing. As far as horses go, they’re like youngsters everywhere--they require a lot of patience. You have to wait ‘em out.”

The lines of communication between horses and trainer are hard to define even for the most successful of handlers. Even though horses are meant to be the dumbest of God’s creatures, it has been pointed out they’re not dumb enough to bet on people. So, who’s ignorant?

Mandella, who sends Sacramentada out in the Silver Belles Handicap at Hollywood Park today, has hankered to co-author a book (with trainer Lefty Nickerson) titled “If Horses Could Talk . . .”

(“Whaddaya mean, ya want me to go out and run against Secretariat?! I’ll look like a guy chasing a bus! You go run against him!” Or “You want me in the Kentucky Derby?! Are you crazy?! Why don’t you go out and let (Eddie) Delahoussaye filet you through the stretch!” Or “Hey! Before you load Desormeaux onto me, ask him if A.J. Foyt would turn off the ignition 100 yards from the finish line! If he’s a channel swimmer, he drowns! Tell him the guy in the red coat’ll come get him when the race is over. Even I know that!”)

Or, we might get the ultimate Mr. Ed in the paddock who will turn on his handler “Call yourself a trainer! You couldn’t train a seal! Get me Mandella!”