Biancone Plots Derby Return With Lion Heart

It was hardly a scripted way for an internationally recognized trainer to break in at the Kentucky Derby.

Patrick Biancone saddled Brancusi last year at Churchill Downs and, although the colt led the race for six furlongs, he backed up badly on the far turn and finished last of the 16 horses, beaten by more than 20 lengths.

The French-born, 51-year-old Biancone, a third-generation horseman who trained champions in his homeland and dropped in to win North America’s horse-of-the-year title with the filly All Along in 1983, looks back on his baptismal Derby with regret.

“I wanted to make a champion out of Brancusi,” he said. “But the Derby is such a difficult race. Of all the horses that run in a Derby, only four or five of them come out of it in good shape. I would not go back there with a horse like Brancusi again. It hurts more than it helps.”

Brancusi emerged from the Derby with a cracked hoof, and was a nonentity the rest of the year. He had broken his maiden less than three months before the Derby, and then ran two demanding races, at Santa Anita and Keeneland, in less than a month’s time as he prepared for Churchill Downs. He was the only horse in the Derby field that had won only one race.

Biancone, who began training in the U.S. in 2000, hopes to bring Brancusi back to the races later this year, but meantime he’s of a Derby mind-set again.

He has two horses, Lion Heart and Pomeroy, who could earn their way to Louisville on May 1, but for now the focus is on the undefeated Lion Heart, the Hollywood Futurity winner and probable favorite in Saturday’s $200,000 San Rafael Stakes. The San Rafael is on the undercard of an 11-race program highlighted by the $1-million Santa Anita Handicap.

Biancone’s Derby blueprint for Lion Heart is virtually unprecedented. He will run him at a mile on Saturday, bring him back for the 1 1/8-mile Santa Anita Derby on April 3 and then, barring any banana peels, send him on to Churchill for the grueling 1 1/4 miles.

Not many Derbies have been won this way. The last horse to make his 3-year-old debut in March and win the Derby was Sunday Silence, in 1989. The last horse to win the Derby after running only twice as a 3-year-old was Sunny’s Halo, in 1983. Only two horses -- Fusaichi Pegasus in 2000 and Grindstone in 1996 -- have won the Derby off only five starts in at least the last 49 years.

But this was Biancone’s plan minutes after Lion Heart had won the 1 1/16-mile Hollywood Futurity, and he has been unwavering.

“This is a late-maturing horse,” he said. “I would like to have had him mature quickly enough so that he could have run in the Breeders’ Cup [Juvenile] last fall, but that did not happen. I could have brought him back this year by starting him out at seven furlongs, but I did not want to do it that way. He was a great 2-year-old. I hope he’ll go on as a 3-year-old.”

Lion Heart’s first two starts were sprint wins, in a maiden race at Santa Anita in October, the day before the Breeders’ Cup, and in the Hollywood Prevue Stakes on Nov. 15. He has been on the lead, or just off the pace-setter, in all three races, not a favorable racing style at Churchill Downs, where breakneck speed out of the gate can be exhausting in the Derby.

“My horse went to the front in the Hollywood Futurity because nobody else wanted to,” Biancone said. “But while he is a really fast horse, I’ve always said that you can’t have a horse with too much speed.”

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