The Horse That Time Forgot

Gallant Fox, second of 11 horses to sweep the Triple Crown, is still strangely remembered for one of the few races he lost 75 years ago, to the longshot Jim Dandy in the Travers at Saratoga.

Jim Dandy was an ordinary horse -- he raced until he was 12, winning seven of 141 starts -- but Saratoga has been running a race in his name since 1964, solely because in 1930 he defeated Gallant Fox about nine weeks after Belair Stud’s brilliant colt had won the Belmont Stakes to sweep the Triple Crown.

Jim Dandy won one of 20 starts in 1930, the lone win still regarded as one of racing’s biggest upsets. There was no tote system at Saratoga, but legal bookmakers were paying off at 100-1 odds at the upstate New York track.

Gallant Fox’s loss to Jim Dandy haunted his trainer, the legendary Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons, for the rest of his life. In 1965, a year before he died, a 90-year-old Fitzsimmons was once more asked about the 1930 Travers.

“It was a fluke, by a fluke horse who had no business in the race,” Fitzsimmons said.

The shocker at Saratoga may have been what has kept Gallant Fox from a higher place in horse racing’s pantheon. He is the only Triple Crown champion to sire another Triple Crown winner -- Omaha in 1935 -- and was voted into the Racing Hall of Fame at Saratoga Springs in 1957, a year before Fitzsimmons’ enshrinement, but a 1999 poll by Blood-Horse magazine ranked him 28th lifetime, and the now-defunct Thoroughbred Racing Action publication listed him 35th after polling 100 turf writers in 1988.

“Bold Ruler was the best I had, up to a mile,” Fitzsimmons said in 1963. “Nashua was a nod better than Gallant Fox at a mile and a quarter, and Gallant Fox was the best at a mile and a half.”

Gallant Fox is the only Triple Crown champion to win the crown in a year in which the Preakness preceded the Kentucky Derby. The 1930 Preakness, run at Pimlico in Baltimore, was the leadoff race and for Gallant Fox the toughest of the three. Breaking from the inside post, Gallant Fox was shuffled back going into the first turn and found himself in eighth place, seven lengths from the front, after a half-mile.

According to “Triple Crown Winner: The Earl Sande Saga,” a book about Gallant Fox’s jockey written by Richard J. Maturi, William Woodward Sr., owner of Belair Stud, let his binoculars drop and gave up.

“It’s hopeless,” Woodward said to those around him. “Damn Preakness curse.”

Sande, one the best riders of his era, had won the Derby twice and the Belmont five times, but he had no Preakness wins. Down the backstretch, however, Gallant Fox, running in the middle of the track, began picking up horses. By the top of the stretch, he had taken the lead, and won by three-quarters of a length with no urging from Sande’s whip.

“I had my doubts for a while,” Sande said after the race. “I never experienced a horse close ground like he did in that run up the backstretch. He sure put an end to my Preakness jinx.”

Gallant Fox, a son of Sir Gallahad III, a European champion who had been bought for $125,000 and imported to Claiborne Farm in Kentucky by Woodward and three partners, and Marguerite, a mare whose career was cut short after one race, won only two of seven starts as a 2-year-old. But most of those races were sprints. Fitzsimmons said that maturity and longer distances would serve the horse well.

After three jockeys had ridden Gallant Fox in 1929, Woodward wanted to lure Sande out of retirement for the Triple Crown campaign. Sande was only 32, but he had quit two years before. Battles with weight, injuries and the death of his first wife had stilled his competitive flames. Woodward’s call was timely; Sande’s career as a trainer had stalled, and the 1929 stock market crash had wiped him out. Woodward proposed a monthly salary, totaling $10,000 for the year. Sande, convinced of Gallant Fox’s potential, instead signed a contract that would give him a flat 10% of the horse’s earnings.

The Kentucky Derby, the first to be run with an automatic starting gate, came eight days after the Preakness. Gallant Fox was even money, the same as he had been at Pimlico. Running in a light drizzle, over a track listed as good, “The Fox of Belair” had no trouble this time, winning by two lengths to give Sande his third Derby win. Only Isaac Murphy had won as many.

Damon Runyon, who had put Sande to verse throughout his career, sat in the Churchill Downs press box and wrote:

“Maybe he ain’t no chicken,

Maybe he’s getting along.

But the old heart’s still a-tickin’,

An’ the old bean’s goin’ strong.

Roll back the years! Yea, roll ‘em!

Say but I’m young agin,

Watchin’ that handy

Guy named Sande,

Bootin’ a winner in!”

Two nights before the Belmont, as Sande rode home from dinner with jockey Eddie Barnes, their car flipped over in a three-car accident.

Several people were injured, included Sande, who suffered lacerations to his nose, cheeks and hands.

The day of the race, Sande told Woodward that the cuts under his eyes only hurt when he smiled.

“Nothing will keep me from winning this race,” Sande said.

The 1 1/2 -mile Belmont, run three weeks after the Derby, drew only four horses, but one of them, Whichone, beat Gallant Fox in 1929, was champion 2-year-old and went off the 4-5 favorite. Gallant Fox, hurried to the front on a slippery track, beat him by three lengths.

Gallant Fox’s only loss in 10 starts in 1930 came at Saratoga. He earned a record $308,275, which meant that Sande tripled his pay by negotiating for 10%. As a stallion, Gallant Fox sired Omaha as well as Granville, the 1936 horse of the year, but after that his stud career fizzled.

Sande trained Stagehand, who beat Seabiscuit to win the 1938 Santa Anita Handicap, but he spent the rest of his life with money problems. He lived over a bar, tried to become a nightclub singer, had a second marriage fail and when he was 54 made a brief attempt at riding in 1953.

According to author Robert L. Shoop, when friends at Saratoga took up a collection so Sande could travel to Oregon to see his father in a nursing home, the Hall of Fame jockey insisted on signing a promissory note. Sande was 69 when he died in Oregon in 1968.

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Triple Crown Winners

The 11 thoroughbreds who have won horse racing’s Triple Crown (Kentucky Derby, Preakness Stakes and Belmont Stakes):

*--* Year Horse Jockey * 1978 Affirmed Steve Cauthen * 1977 Seattle Slew Jean Cruguet * 1973 Secretariat Ron Turcotte * 1948 Citation Eddie Arcaro * 1946 Assault Warren Mehrtens * 1943 Count Fleet John Longden * 1941 Whirlaway Eddie Arcaro * 1937 War Admiral Charles Kurtsinger * 1935 Omaha William Saunders * 1930 Gallant Fox Earl Sande * 1919 Sir Barton John Loftus

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Triple Crown Races

* Kentucky Derby: May 7, 3 p.m. PDT, Ch. 4

* Preakness Stakes: May 21, 3 p.m. PDT, Ch. 4

* Belmont Stakes: June 11, 2:30 p.m. PDT, Ch. 4