Coronado’s Quest a Late Scratch

Maybe Real Quiet, the Kentucky Derby winner, would have been good enough to beat Coronado’s Quest anyway. Now, about 90,000 people at Pimlico today will never know. Coronado’s Quest, the favorite in the $1-million Preakness, will remain in New York because of a bruised hoof, and Real Quiet’s mountain in the middle leg of the Triple Crown series is getting to look like a whole lot less than Everest.

“All our horses move up one, and this helps Real Quiet a lot,” said trainer Wayne Lukas, who will saddle Cape Town and Baquero in what has become a 10-horse race. Real Quiet, the 5-2 second choice on the original morning line, behind Coronado’s Quest at 2-1, becomes the 2-1 favorite. Victory Gallop, who finished half a length behind Real Quiet with his late run in the Derby, is the second choice at 5-2. The rest are 4-1 and up.

Before his injury, discovered by trainer Shug McGaughey at Belmont Park after a 1 1/2-mile Friday-morning gallop, the speedy Coronado’s Quest was supposed to be a virtually uncontested front-runner in this 123rd Preakness. Now the pace horse, by default, becomes Baquero, who never has run farther than seven furlongs. Black Cash, whose only start this year was a third-place finish in the Derby Trial, can be expected to pass Baquero before they have completed the backstretch. Real Quiet, who came from sixth place to win the Derby under a smart ride from Kent Desormeaux, no longer has to worry about Coronado’s Quest running away from the field. The fast horses ahead of Real Quiet now are what horsemen refer to as cheap speed.

No trainer has won the Derby and the Preakness two consecutive years, and Bob Baffert, Real Quiet’s trainer and winner of last year’s first two Triple Crown races with Silver Charm, appears to have only two horses to beat: Victory Gallop and Cape Town, who hasn’t finished first in a race in four months.

Learning about the injury, Baffert spent most of Friday empathizing with McGaughey.

“I hope the horse is all right,” Baffert said. “There’s no question that he was the horse I was most afraid of. But I can’t think about how the race might change right now. It’s unfortunate these things happen. I just hope that in the morning my horse is all right.”

This has been an especially harsh campaign for Triple Crown contenders. Early on, Time Limit broke down and was euthanized in the Jim Beam Stakes at Turfway Park. Before the Derby, Lil’s Lad and the undefeated Event Of The Year were sidelined because of injuries and will miss the entire series. Indian Charlie, winner of the Santa Anita Derby and third in Kentucky, will miss the Preakness because Baffert believed he was too tired, and Halory Hunter, fourth in the Derby, suffered what appears to be a career-ending leg injury last Tuesday during a workout at Pimlico.

Lukas, who has had 10 Triple Crown wins, saw one of his horses, Union City, suffer fatal injuries in the 1993 Preakness, and Time Limit was one of his contenders for the classics this year.

“These horses go through a grind just getting ready for the Triple Crown,” Lukas said. “They’re offering a lot of big purses in all those preps, and with a lot of horses running in all of them, injuries like [this year’s] are bound to happen. Running in the three races is tough enough, let alone getting the horses through all the preps.”

Coronado’s Quest, who was to be transported the 200 miles from Belmont to Pimlico early today, has a bruise about the size of a dime on his right hind foot. It is a common injury, not unlike the one Silver Charm suffered on the eve of the Santa Anita Handicap in March. Baffert said that had the Big ‘Cap been run a day or two later, Silver Charm had recovered enough to run. Instead, he was in the United Arab Emirates three weeks later, winning the $4-million Dubai World Cup.

“If this was a $5,000 claimer, you’d put a pad on the shoe and go on with him,” McGaughey said. “But this was a no-brainer. You don’t take a chance on a horse this good in a race as big as this.”

After a half-mile workout in 49 3/5 seconds Wednesday, Coronado’s Quest galloped a mile Thursday and 1 1/2 miles Friday. Coming back from Friday’s gallop, his exercise rider, Adolph Krajewski, said that the colt didn’t feel right and felt tight under the saddle. At the barn, X-rays of the pastern showed no break. But when the blacksmith, Bruce Scott, took off his right rear shoe, he noticed heat and redness. Minutes later, Coronado’s Quest’s owners, Stuart Janney III of Butler, Md., and Bob and Janice McNair of Houston, were told that their horse could not run.

McGaughey might not lose much time with Coronado’s Quest, who didn’t require medication. If he returns to the track and works out by the middle of next week, he could run in the Metropolitan Mile at Belmont on May 25. If McGaughey likes that performance, Coronado’s Quest would become a probable for the Belmont Stakes, the concluding Triple Crown race, on June 6.

“At least I’ve still got a horse,” McGaughey said. “This wasn’t an injury like [trainer Nick Zito] went through [with Halory Hunter]. We’ve had two weeks of off tracks at Belmont, and those are the kind of tracks that are conducive to bruises. We’re lucky this came in mid-May, not mid-November. We’ll still have a lot of good races ahead of us with this horse.”

Coronado’s Quest won the Wood Memorial five weeks ago in a near-record time of 1:47 2/5 for 1 1/8 miles. He was withheld from the Derby because McGaughey believed the high-strung colt wouldn’t survive the crowd pressures at Churchill Downs. Coronado’s Quest has won six of 10 starts and earned $688,740.

McGaughey answered questions about the colt from a fourth-floor podium at Pimlico on Friday, the same spot where the horsemen behind the 123rd Preakness winner will be interviewed late today.

“Any other horse and you just catch the next maiden race,” the trainer said. “But you’re not going to catch the next Preakness with this horse.”

Horse Racing Notes

The temperature may reach 90 degrees and there’s no rain in the forecast. . . . Kent Desormeaux, who rides Real Quiet, is back in Maryland, where he rode many of his record 598 winners in 1989. Desormeaux moved to California in 1990.