Cash the Absentee Ballots

Unbridled Elaine won the first Breeders’ Cup race of the day last Saturday, the Distaff, and her owner wasn’t there.

Then Tempera won the next race, the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Fillies, and her owner was also absent.

That was followed by Val Royal’s win in the Breeders’ Cup Mile, and his owner hadn’t been able to make it.

Obviously, there was a real trend at Belmont Park. Unbridled Elaine had paid $26.60, Tempera’s win price was $25.80 and Val Royal, yet another longshot, had returned $12.20 for $2.

Those horseplayers chasing the chalk had taken a king-sized tumble, and after Val Royal’s win, one said, “Did you notice something? If we’d been betting the horses whose owners weren’t here, we’d be rich and could go home.”

So yet another arcane Breeders’ Cup handicapping tool had been discovered: Scour the box seats and the turf club, find out which owners are missing, and bet those horses with both hands.

Just when the No Owner system was taking hold, however, Squirtle Squirt won the Sprint and David Lanzman, the Los Angeles mortgage executive who bought the horse for $25,000, sashayed into the Belmont winner’s circle, a large family contingent in tow. But then 35 minutes later, the overpowering British-bred Banks Hill won the Filly & Mare Turf, at 6-1, and the newly formed No Owner exponents were thriving.

As with most systems, though, No Owner got to be too much of a good thing. Johannesburg won the Juvenile, and his owner, Michael Tabor, was there, all the way from Monte Carlo.

Californian Mike Cooper, who never misses a Tiznow race, was at Belmont to see his colt win the last race of the day, the Classic, but at least in between there was another No Owner score when Fantastic Light bagged the Turf Stakes.

The tally for the day was eight winners, five of whose owners were elsewhere. On a chilly afternoon when the average Breeders’ Cup win mutuel was a juicy $17.10, No Owner had been the way to go.

The winners who stayed away all had their reasons.

David Milch, who bought Val Royal in France for $1 million in 1999, was in Los Angeles with a bad cold, said his trainer, Julio Canani.

Roger Devenport , who made his money in butter--45 million pounds of it a year--was at the Keeneland track in Lexington, Ky., watching on television as Unbridled Elaine won. Devenport, 80, is battling cancer, but was well enough to fire Unbridled Elaine’s trainer the week before the Distaff.

“He’s not feeling so good, but he still got very excited when she won,” Elaine Devenport Averill, his daughter, said the next day. “He’s a survivor and he’s a fighter.”

The other missing winners were Sheik Mohammed, the crown prince of Dubai, who owns Fantastic Light and Tempera, and Khalid Abdullah, the Saudi Arabian prince who races Banks Hill.

The sheik and the prince had done the prudent thing. Located only 20 miles from where the World Trade Center’s imposing towers once stood, Belmont Park had a fortress feel to it on Breeders’ Cup day, and the security would have been unimaginable had the Arabs shown up.

Wherever he was, Prince Khalid must have been beaming. A breeder of blue-ribbon bloodstock, his Juddmonte Farm has won four Eclipse Awards and major races all over the world, but had gone winless until it started its 32nd horse in the Breeders’ Cup. The day had started ominously for Juddmonte when the favored Flute ran a disappointing seventh in the Distaff.

The next day, John Chandler, who oversees the Juddmonte operation, was asked how Prince Khalid had reacted to his elusive first Breeders’ Cup win. Chandler said that the prince wanted him to confirm the victory over the phone.

“Is it true?” Prince Khalid asked.

“It’s true,” Chandler said.

And what did the prince do next?

“What’s the French word for ‘handsprings?”’ Chandler said.