THOROUGHBRED RACING / BILL CHRISTINE : Kentucky Derby, Not Eclipse Award, Is Trainer’s Primary Goal for Brocco

The worst-kept secret at last month’s Breeders’ Cup was Brocco, the talented but inexperienced colt running in the $1-million Juvenile at Santa Anita.

In nine years of the Breeders’ Cup, no horse had won the Juvenile with as few as two prep races. But this didn’t deter bettors at Santa Anita last month.

Many had seen Brocco begin his career with an easy victory at Del Mar in late August and repeat the performance at Santa Anita on Oct. 7, a month before the Breeders’ Cup. In the Juvenile, Dehere, the seasoned multiple stakes winner from the East, went off at 7-10, but Brocco was the strong second choice at 3-1.

While Dehere bled badly from the lungs and finished eighth in the worst performance of his career, Brocco remained undefeated with a five-length victory. That matched Arazi’s record, set in 1991, for the biggest margin by a Juvenile winner.

“There were a lot of questions about this colt before the race,” said Gary Stevens, who has ridden the Kris S. colt in all three of his victories.

“But he answered them all. It was his first time in a stake. It was the first time he had been around two turns. It was the first time he ran in front of a big crowd (55,130). It was the first time he experienced dirt hitting him in the face. And it was the first time he had come from off the pace.”

Dehere, winner of four stakes, including a rare sweep of the three races for 2-year-old colts at Saratoga, will still get some support for the divisional Eclipse Award, but the voters will be hard-pressed to ignore Brocco.

“My horse hasn’t done anything wrong,” said Randy Winick, Brocco’s trainer, “and he didn’t just win (the Juvenile), he won it convincingly.”

Instead of sitting back and waiting for Brocco’s Eclipse votes to come in, Winick is expected to run his colt once more this year, next Sunday in the $500,000 Hollywood Futurity.

“Running him in the Futurity has nothing to do with the Eclipse Award,” Winick said. “I think he’s already done enough to deserve that. It’s just that this horse is very good right now, the next race for him at Santa Anita is too far off and he’s had a light campaign compared to some of the horses he faced in the Breeders’ Cup.”

If Brocco bypassed the Futurity, which at 1 1/16 miles is the same distance as the Juvenile, the next spot wouldn’t come until Feb. 13 at the San Vicente Stakes at Santa Anita.

“I wouldn’t want to put this horse on ice for that long,” Winick said. “The San Vicente would be more than three months between races. I’ve seen horses get sour on you when they don’t get the chance to run more often than that.”

The Breeders’ Cup winner usually has won the 2-year-old championship. The exceptions have been Forty Niner, who won the title in 1987 without running in the Breeders’ Cup, and Easy Goer, whose overall record was so solid--a lot like Dehere’s, in fact--that most of the voters were willing to overlook his second-place finish against Is It True in the 1988 Juvenile.

“We want to do what’s right for the horse,” Winick said.

That means getting Brocco ready for the 1994 Kentucky Derby. Since Spectacular Bid won the 1978 juvenile title and the 1979 Derby, 14 consecutive divisional champions have failed to win the Derby. Half of them didn’t even make it to the race.

Winick, 44, has another Kentucky Derby hopeful besides Brocco in his eight-horse barn at Santa Anita. The other colt is Duca, a son of Fappiano.

“I think Duca’s a future stake horse, but he’s not nearly as good as the other horse yet,” Winick said. “He’s a little behind, and he’s greener. But he should get better the longer the races are.”

Winick trains for Albert and Dana Broccoli, who paid $215,000 at auction for Brocco and $360,000 for Duca.