A Happy Ending for Winner Past His Prime

More than 17 years later, Arthur Hancock III still feels the elation of his Kentucky Derby victory with Gato Del Sol.

“I felt like I could walk on air when they were out there presenting the trophy,” said Hancock, a fourth-generation horseman. “It was almost like having an out-of-body experience.”

That day--May 1, 1982--was the high point of Gato Del Sol’s career. He would win only three more races; retired to the breeding shed in 1986, he was a flop, first in the United States, then in Europe.

His career was eerily similar to that of Exceller, the horse who beat Triple Crown winners Seattle Slew and Affirmed and earned nearly $1.7 million in his career, only to end up in a Swedish slaughterhouse after he had outlived his usefulness.

Gato Del Sol’s story, however, has a happy ending.

Fearing the worst, Hancock and his wife Staci spent nearly $25,000 to buy the stallion back and bring him home to Kentucky.

Gato Del Sol’s coat, a gunmetal gray on the day he won the Derby, has turned white at the age of 20. But his future is now secure--he spends his days in the stallion barn and paddocks of Hancock’s Stone Farm.

The expense of buying back Gato Del Sol was not easy for the Hancocks, who have six children and make their sole living from Stone Farm. Even so, Arthur Hancock has no regrets.

“The way I look at it, for what he did for us, emotionally and everything else--it made the farm, really--we owed him that,” he said.

He added: “I was the first Hancock to win the Derby, which meant a lot to me.”

Stone Farm was 10 years old in 1982, when Gato Del Sol went to the Derby off a second-place finish in the Blue Grass Stakes. In a 19-horse field, he drew the No. 18 post position and was a 21-1 longshot. No horse had ever won the Derby from so far off the rail.

As her husband described the race, Staci Hancock spontaneously exclaimed, “Whoo!”

“It was like a fairy tale, really,” said Arthur Hancock, who won the Derby again in 1989, with Sunday Silence.

Gato Del Sol, however, would never reattain such heights, on or off the track.

“We bred a lot of mares to him, pretty good mares. He just didn’t sire the runners,” Arthur Hancock said.

In 1992, a German breeding operation offered to buy Gato Del Sol for $100,000. The Hancocks agreed, hoping his offspring would be better suited to the longer turf races run in Europe.

“I just saw it as an opportunity for him,” Staci Hancock said.

But she was alarmed when, five years later, the Daily Racing Form revealed Exceller’s slaughter.

“Unless we kind of kept track of Gato,” she recalled thinking then, “there’s no guarantee that it couldn’t happen [to him].”

When she first checked, the Derby winner was in good shape and was being sought for his stud services. But earlier this year, prompted by Exceller’s selection to the National Racing Museum’s Hall of Fame, she checked again. No longer was Gato paying his way.

As luck would have it, Stone Farm was then fresh off Menifee’s win in the Blue Grass Stakes and second-place finishes in the Derby and Preakness Stakes.

After those windfalls, Arthur Hancock said, “I remember thinking, ‘Well, shoot, we have to do this.’ ”

Gato Del Sol returned home to Stone Farm in late August.