Feather Box Is a Lightweight in Preakness

If experience could be equated to foot speed, an undistinguished colt named Feather Box would win Saturday’s Preakness by the length of the Pimlico stretch.

But that’s not the way horse racing works. The trainer and the jockey can’t get the horse to the wire first if the colt is not up to the task, and Feather Box is acutely overmatched against Cavonnier and Prince Of Thieves, the second- and third-place finishers in the Kentucky Derby. He doesn’t even figure to outrun the likes of Editor’s Note and Skip Away, horses badly outrun in the Derby.

Feather Box’s morning-line price is actually conservative. “When they made him 50-1, that made me feel good,” trainer Angel Cordero said. “I thought he’d be 100-1. He’s got ability, but I like his chances better going longer in the [June 8] Belmont.”

A trainer since 1992, the 53-year-old Cordero helped blow open the doors for his admission to the Racing Hall of Fame as a jockey with his imaginative, hell-for-leather rides in Triple Crown races. He rode in 51 of them, winning the Derby with Cannonade, Bold Forbes and Spend A Buck; the Preakness with Codex and Gate Dancer, and the Belmont with Bold Forbes.

To ride Feather Box, Cordero has hired one of his riding contemporaries, the 49-year-old Jorge Velasquez, who has ridden in 36 Triple Crown races and won the 1981 Derby and Preakness with Feather Box’s grandsire, Pleasant Colony.

Cordero retired from riding four years ago, after he was seriously injured in a four-horse spill at Aqueduct. He won 7,057 races, and it is the quest for 7,000 victories that has kept Velasquez in the saddle, several years past what should have been retirement time.

Velasquez, voted into the Hall of Fame in 1990, two years after Cordero, still has a couple of hundred wins to go, and he’s edging toward his goal slowly. At Gulfstream Park’s winter meeting, he won with only three of 87 mounts and was ranked 33rd in the standings.

Cordero and Velasquez are good friends, but Velasquez got the assignment on Feather Box only after Richard Migliore had chosen to ride Allied Forces--a mere 30-1--in the Preakness. Migliore has ridden Feather Box in his last seven races, including a sorry fifth-place finish in the six-horse Wood Memorial at Aqueduct on April 13. Allied Forces was an afterthought for Saturday, so on Wednesday, entry day for the Preakness, Cordero heard about Migliore jumping ship and made a desperation call to Velasquez, who was sleeping.

“I’ve got a problem,” Cordero said.

“What kind of problem?” Velasquez said.

“A jockey problem,” Cordero said. “I got no jockey for the Preakness.”

Velasquez, who hasn’t ridden in the Preakness since 1991, isn’t being overrun with offers to ride in stakes, or even claiming races, these days. He was interested.

“I asked 20 guys to ride my horse, and they all turned me down,” Cordero was saying on the phone.

“Thanks a lot,” Velasquez said.

“Hey, look,” Cordero said, “you and me and the owner have been together for 100 years. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

Feather Box was bred by and races for Buckland Farm’s Thomas Mellon Evans, who also campaigned Pleasant Colony. Evans missed a Triple Crown sweep when Pleasant Colony ran third in the Belmont while Summing, a fresh horse who hadn’t run in the Derby or the Preakness, beat out Highland Blade in a close finish.

“Jorge made him run,” Johnny Campo, Pleasant Colony’s trainer, said recently. “But then he grabbed him again. He might have moved too soon for a mile-and-a-half race, but he wasn’t going to win regardless. He had a hard race in the Preakness and came out of it a tired horse.”

Cordero hasn’t hit the ground running as a trainer--few former jockeys do--and his first Triple Crown race as a trainer will be run at the track where he rode in one of the most controversial Preaknesses--Codex’s 4 3/4-length victory over the Derby-winning filly, Genuine Risk, in 1980.

Codex, the Santa Anita Derby and Hollywood Derby winner, was ridden by Cordero, who floated Genuine Risk toward the center of the track, in the direction of the grandstand, as the horses came out of the stretch turn. The Pimlico stewards disallowed a foul claim by Genuine Risk’s jockey, Jacinto Vasquez, and later the Maryland Racing Commission, after a three-day hearing, upheld that decision.

At Feather Box’s barn Thursday, Cordero recalled that the FBI had given him protection before the 1980 Preakness.

“Somebody had found a napkin in a diner with my name and address on it and they thought I might be in danger,” he said.

But after the Preakness--with the headlines about Codex “mugging” the filly still fresh--there came the hate mail.

“The letters said they’d kill me,” Cordero said. “They told me to go home to Puerto Rico. They said things about my color, about my mother, and they said I was a disgrace to racing.”

Belmont Park, Cordero’s home track, assigned two plainclothes security men to him.

“After they followed me around for a week, I told them to quit,” Cordero said. “They killed a president in the United States, so it’s someplace where anybody can shoot anybody. Did they really think those two guys were going to stop anything? I told them to quit, because if they got me, they might get those two guys too.”

Horse Racing Notes

Although it has been raining in Baltimore, a clearing by Saturday, with temperatures in the 70s, should provide a fast track for the Preakness. . . . Mecke, winner of the Early Times Turf Cup at Churchill Downs on Kentucky Derby day, is the 2-1 favorite Saturday in the $200,000 Dixie at Pimlico. Warning Glance is the 5-2 second choice in the nine-horse field.

Cara Rafaela, winless in five starts this year but second three times and third in the Kentucky Oaks, is the 2-1 favorite today in the $200,000 Black Eyed Susan for 3-year-old fillies. She races for the trainer-jockey tandem of Wayne Lukas and Gary Stevens, who won the race last year with Serena’s Song.