Drysdale Takes Hawksley Hill’s Disqualification in Stride

On the rare day that Hawksley Hill finished first in a photo finish, he became another racing rarity, a disqualified horse in a $1-million race.

“The horse doesn’t know,” said Hawksley Hill’s pensive trainer, Neil Drysdale, trying to accentuate the positive. “The horse still ran a winning race.”

While Drysdale awaits shipment of the race videotape from Canada, he’s quietly accepting the stewards’ decision last Sunday at Woodbine. Hawksley Hill beat Quiet Resolve by a head in the Alto Mile Handicap, but his jockey, Hall of Famer Pat Day, was said to have struck another horse in the face during the stretch run, and Drysdale’s horse was dropped to fourth place.

The difference in the counting house for Hawksley Hill: $63,000 of the purse instead of $630,000, the amount that went to the moved-up winner, Quiet Resolve, who had never run in a stake before.

Drysdale had to hurry from Woodbine after the race to catch a plane from Toronto to Los Angeles.

“I’ll look at the films when they come,” he said. “If it was a fair disqualification, then it was a fair disqualification.”

Hawksley Hill hadn’t won all year before that race, his losing streak at seven, extending to last year. In many of the defeats, the margin was half a length or less. The first loss in the slump was in last year’s $1-million Breeders’ Cup Mile at Churchill Downs, where Hawksley Hill, coming from last place, made the lead with a sixteenth of a mile to go. Then Da Hoss came back on to beat him by a head. Before that, Hawksley Hill had won five of eight starts in 1998.

“Last year, he had good luck,” Drysdale said. “This year, all the luck’s been bad. He’s been running under different circumstances all year. He’s been caught in a lot of paceless races.”

Jim And Tonic, the horse struck by Day’s whip, finished a close fourth in a blanket finish. He was moved up to third place after the disqualification.

Day had ridden Hawksley Hill only once before, winning the Arcadia Handicap at Santa Anita last year. At Woodbine, Drysdale reminded Day about the horse’s tendencies.

“Neil said that he’d give me a short burst late,” Day said. “But he also said that he’s capable of bottoming out and hanging in on other horses. So last Sunday, when we came off the turn for home, I eased him way out, to get him away from the other horses.

“But I might have moved a little quick. At Woodbine, when you leave the turn, there’s still a quarter-mile to run. At the eighth pole, my horse began to lay in a bit. So I reached for my stick left-handed, to keep him away from the other horses, and I guess I hit the other horse a couple of times in the process. It was rider error.”

Day has won 18 races worth $1 million or more, more than any other rider but Gary Stevens. It’s ironic that he scored the first of these victories in the $3-million Classic in the first Breeders’ Cup, partly because he didn’t use the whip at all. Wild Again, the winner that 1984 day at Hollywood Park, resented being hit, one of the reasons that Day, a jockey not known as a strong whip rider, was hired by trainer Vincent Timphony.

Earlier that day, the Hollywood Park stewards made Fran’s Valentine the first winning horse ever to be disqualified in a $1-million thoroughbred race when they took her number down in favor of Outstandingly in the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Fillies.

Hawksley Hill, a 6-year-old Irish-bred gelding, will get another crack at the Breeders’ Cup Mile when it’s run Nov. 6 at Gulfstream Park. Day has retained the mount.

“We got the kind of early pace in Canada that this horse needs,” Drysdale said. “Things haven’t gone well most of the year for this horse. Maybe they’ll start going well on the right day.”