Reduced Horsepower, but Still Plenty of Zip

In the most recent national ranking of the top horses, Gentlemen was No. 1, Formal Gold was No. 2, Silver Charm was rated third and Influent 10th.

When Hollywood Park hosts the 14th running of the Breeders’ Cup on Saturday, all four will be absent.

Gentlemen will stay in his barn.

Formal Gold, injured during a morning gallop at Hollywood Park on Friday, and Influent, injured shortly before he was to be shipped to California, are also out.

Silver Charm, winner of the Kentucky Derby and Preakness, will remain at Santa Anita, where he is being prepared for a campaign as a 4-year-old.

Influent was to have been one of the leading contenders in the Breeders’ Cup Turf, the $2-million grass race. Before his injury, Rainbow Dancer and Marlin, two other grass standouts, were retired because of injuries suffered last month at Santa Anita.

The stories about horses not running in this year’s Breeders’ Cup have buried coverage of horses that are running. The fifth California Breeders’ Cup, and the first at Hollywood Park in 10 years, will not runneth over, it will hardly runneth at all.

Even many of the European horses are staying away. Pilsudski, winner of the last year’s Turf Stakes when the Breeders’ Cup went to Canada for the first time, is being saved for the Japan Cup, a $2.8-million race in Tokyo on Nov. 23. Peintre Celebre, winner of the Arc de Triomphe, France’s showcase race, is getting a rest before his 4-year-old season.

Breeders’ Cup officials, disappointed with these developments, are still trying to keep a stiff upper lip. D.G. Van Clief, president of the Breeders’ Cup, is hoping that a crowd of 50,000 comes to Hollywood Park on Saturday. That would be better than the attendance at Woodbine last year and higher than 1995 at New York’s Belmont Park, where the Breeders’ Cup’s attendance meter dipped to its lowest with a crowd of fewer than 40,000.

Perhaps 10,000 more will bet and watch the races on television at Santa Anita Saturday, and there will be a large crowd at Del Mar, another satellite facility.

Before Formal Gold’s injury, Van Clief said, “We have 94 horses ready to run, and almost a third of them are Grade I or Group I winners from around the world. There’s not a great number of European horses here this time, but what they’re sending is an extremely strong group. We have a number of interesting matchups.

“We’re looking at the favorite in the Juvenile [Favorite Trick] who’s won all seven of his races. The numbers might be down, but the quality is as strong as ever.

“We’re disappointed not to have Gentlemen, but the event will sustain the losses. The loss of Gentlemen isn’t the kind of knockout punch it might be if this were only a one-race event.”

At midyear, responding to grumbling that had existed since the program began, and eager to rope in prominent horses that weren’t eligible, the Breeders’ Cup directors made sweeping changes in their supplementary rules. They made it more financially appealing for the owners of Gentlemen and Skip Away to run. R.D. Hubbard, chairman of Hollywood Park and principal owner of Gentlemen, was prepared to pay an unheard-of supplement of $800,000, but a virus at trainer Richard Mandella’s barn upended the plan.

Skip Away’s owners are in, at a penalty of $480,000, a Breeders’ Cup record, but the owners of other ineligible horses, Silver Charm and Free House, who made the Triple Crown series such a dogfight, are not. Silver Charm had a virus of his own and hasn’t run since Touch Gold beat him in the Belmont Stakes, scotching a Triple Crown sweep that would have been worth $5 million.

Even Touch Gold’s status has been race to race, because of a crack in his left front hoof. He has gone through more patches than a flotilla of pirates, but the most recent repair seems to be working. He’s set to take on Skip Away and maybe six or seven others in the Classic, which with Skip Away’s participation will become a $4.4-million race, the richest ever run.

David Hofmans, who trains Touch Gold, beat Cigar with Alphabet Soup in last year’s Classic, so he could become the first trainer to score consecutive victories in the day’s biggest race. Touch Gold’s jockey, Chris McCarron, also rode Alphabet Soup, and with a victory Saturday would match Jerry Bailey’s record of winning four Classics.

Bailey, who rides Behrens, could play the spoiler for the Hofmans-McCarron team, but he might have had a better chance had he kept the mount on Skip Away. Bailey rode both Behrens and Skip Away to victories in their last races, then made his commitment to Jim Bond, Behrens’ trainer, before he knew that trainer Sonny Hine was going to supplement Skip Away.

Hine could have gone back to Shane Sellers, who used to be Skip Away’s regular rider, but instead he picked Mike Smith.

“Mike’s won six Breeders’ Cup races,” Hine said. “He’s also based in New York, so he was available to work the horse before we ship to California. Shane was getting too hyper and was succumbing to the pressures of riding the horse.”

Skip Away-Formal Gold is now a matchup that’s not going to happen. Formal Gold had outfinished his rival four of six times this year, but with his injury, Skip Away will probably go off as the favorite. Two weeks ago, because of the expensive supplementary payment, Hine was talking about not even running.

This devastated Classic has little chance of duplicating the drama that accompanied the race in two previous runnings at Hollywood--there was Wild Again’s victory over Gate Dancer and Slew O’ Gold in a slam-bang finish in 1984, and Ferdinand’s nosing out of Alysheba in 1987. In fact, Saturday’s best race is getting to look more and more like the $1-million Juvenile, which features unbeaten Favorite Trick.

The field consists of only nine horses, the smallest ever, but it is a formidable group, and in an intriguing way it brings together Favorite Trick along with trainer Wayne Lukas’ Grand Slam, who won both of Belmont Park’s major fall stakes for 2-year-olds, and trainer Bob Baffert’s Souvenir Copy, winner of both the Del Mar Futurity and the Norfolk at Santa Anita.

Patrick Byrne, who trains Favorite Trick, might also win the Juvenile Fillies with Countess Diana.

“She could have been undefeated too,” Byrne said. “In the race she lost, she lost a shoe and still got beat by only a half-length.”

Richter Scale is Byrne’s well-regarded entry in the Sprint. Countess Diana, the first of his horses to work at Hollywood since their arrival from Kentucky, impressed clockers last week with a blistering 58 seconds for five furlongs.

“The track is playing fast,” Byrne said. “That would be the same as going a minute at Churchill Downs.”

If Countess Diana is any yardstick, that might put the lie to the theory that California’s harder surfaces penalize Eastern horses. When the Breeders’ Cup was last held in California, at Santa Anita in 1993, Eastern shippers took a beating. California-based horses won four of the five races on dirt, and only Lure, in the Mile on grass, saved the invaders from being completely embarrassed.

Lukas, who has won a record 13 Breeders’ Cup races, is stabled in California, but the best of his eight horses this year, Grand Slam, represents his Eastern division and has run all his races in New York.

“It might be a slight advantage to be stabled where the races are being run,” Lukas said. “But all eight of my horses will have trained at Santa Anita before they run at Hollywood, and I’m not concerned about it.”

Before Gentlemen was withheld from the Breeders’ Cup Classic, his trainer, Richard Mandella, was asked if the shippers were at a disadvantage.

“Only if they can’t run fast enough,” Mandella said.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

BREEDERS’ CUP 1997

SATURDAY

HOLLYWOOD PARK

Time: 10:30 a.m.

TV: Channel 4