THOROUGHBRED RACING / BILL CHRISTINE : Futurity Entry Tropicool Has a Classic Look

The colt was bought as a yearling for a reasonable price, less than $100,000.

The new owner wheeled the horse back in an auction for 2-year-olds, but kept him when he didn’t fetch the estimated price.

Trained by John Kimmel, the horse ran third before breaking his maiden at Belmont Park.

In his first important race, he went off at a short price but failed to win the Cowdin Stakes.

A few weeks later, he won the Remsen Stakes.

This is the Thunder Gulch story, the early days, but it is also the story of Tropicool, the out-of-town threat in the $500,000 Hollywood Futurity on Sunday at Hollywood Park.

The parallel between Thunder Gulch, this year’s Kentucky Derby and Belmont Stakes winner, and Tropicool even extends to Ken Ellenberg, who has owned both horses. The big difference is that Wayne Lukas, not Kimmel, was training Thunder Gulch by the time he won the Remsen and went on to Triple Crown fame, Ellenberg and his partners having sold the colt to Michael Tabor for $475,000 after his third start.

After Tropicool won the Remsen, at Aqueduct on Nov. 25, Tabor presented the trophy to Ellenberg in the winner’s circle.

“They’ve become good friends,” Kimmel said. “There was an irony there, Mr. Tabor giving Ken something after Ken had given [sold] him Thunder Gulch.”

Kimmel seems comfortable working for Ellenberg, a man who gets as big a boot out of selling horses for profit as he does winning races. Tropicool, the first New York-bred Ellenberg has owned, is a son of Carr de Naskra and a much bigger horse than Thunder Gulch, who wasn’t foaled until May 23, 1992, and by the calendar wasn’t even 3 years old when he won the Derby. Tropicool was foaled in January.

“He’s big, strong and powerful,” Kimmel said of Tropicool. “He has an aptitude for the classics, and we’re bringing him to California to see whether that last race was an aberration or not.”

And to drive his price up. Ellenberg, a 55-year-old vending-machine manufacturer from Minneapolis, won’t be refusing any phone calls if Tropicool wins the Futurity.

“Ken does like to sell his horses,” said the New York-based Kimmel, who shipped another 2-year-old, Old Chapel, to California last month and won the $137,500 Generous Stakes. Old Chapel was the first horse Kimmel ever ran at Hollywood Park. And his father, Caesar Kimmel, owned I’m Splendid, who won the Hollywood Starlet for 2-year-old fillies in 1985.

The younger Kimmel, 41, was a practicing veterinarian until he switched to training horses eight years ago. The loss of Thunder Gulch to Lukas has been cushioned somewhat by the best year Kimmel’s barn has ever had. Old Chapel won at Hollywood Park the same day Tropicool won the Remsen. And the day before, at Aqueduct, Kimmel’s Twist Afleet won the $150,000 Top Flight Handicap for her 11th victory in 13 starts. For the year, Kimmel’s horses have won 12 graded stakes and earned more than $2.5 million.

Of course, Thunder Gulch alone earned $2.6 million this year, but Kimmel is philosophical about losing the horse.

“Hindsight is 20-20,” he said. “It was a fair price for a horse who hadn’t done much at the time and who then went far beyond any of my expectations. I figure that it’s to my credit that I picked him out when he was first bought, and that I got him started early in his career.”

Besides the cross-country air fare, Ellenberg is risking a $25,000 supplementary fee--$12,500 at entry time today and $12,500 to start--to see what Tropicool is made of. The probable field includes Ayrton S, who finished second on the grass to Old Chapel in the Generous, and Hennessy and Exetera, who ran 2-3, behind Cobra King, in the Hollywood Prevue Breeders’ Cup Stakes on Nov. 19.

Hennessy, trained by Lukas, put together a four-race winning streak earlier in the year and was once considered the best 2-year-old in the country. But then he ran sixth in the Champagne at Belmont Park and lost by a neck to Unbridled’s Song in the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile.

The Hollywood Futurity is 1 1/16 miles. Thunder Gulch had already won the Remsen, at 1 1/8 miles, and Lukas thought that gave him an advantage when the colt was entered in the Futurity last year. But Afternoon Deelites shot down everyone, winning by 6 1/2 lengths.

Tropicool was 31-1 when he won the Remsen. He had bled slightly the race before, a sixth-place finish in the Cowdin, and Kimmel was able to treat him with Lasix because of New York’s relatively new, more liberalized medication rules. After leaning on horses in the Cowdin, the colt also got a different set of blinkers--French cup, three-quarters closed, but with small holes punched in them--and Jorge Chavez rode him for the first time. Chavez has the mount again Sunday.

When Go For Gin won the Remsen in 1993 and the Kentucky Derby the next year, he became the first horse to win those two races since Pleasant Colony in 1980. Then Thunder Gulch parlayed the Remsen and the Derby, and Kimmel can only hope that the trend continues with Tropicool.

“He’s done well since the Remsen,” Kimmel said. “In his last work before we shipped, he went five-eighths [of a mile] in 59 seconds. If we didn’t send him to Hollywood Park, we would have had to wait for a race in January at Gulfstream Park [in Florida]. Now we just have to see if he continues to improve.”