Making room for the ‘young lions’

The busiest person other than the mint-julep vendors Saturday at Churchill Downs will be trainer Todd Pletcher, who is poised to start a record-tying five horses in the Kentucky Derby as he tries to break his 0-14 skein and win the Derby for the first time.

Pletcher, only 39 but the winner of the Eclipse Award as the nation’s top trainer the last three years, will saddle a quarter of the 20-horse field but doesn’t have either of the top two choices.

Curlin, a Steve Asmussen-trained chestnut colt who has run only three races but won them by a combined 28 1/2 lengths, will break from post position No. 2 and was made a narrow 7-2 favorite over last year’s juvenile champion Street Sense Wednesday after the post-position draw for the 133rd Kentucky Derby.

Pletcher’s top contender according to the morning line set by Mike Battaglia was 8-1 Circular Quay. He’ll also send out Scat Daddy (10-1), Any Given Saturday (12-1) and Cowtown Cat and Sam P., both 20-1.

Saturday could mark a generational shift among trainers. For the first time since 1980, neither Wayne Lukas, Bob Baffert nor Nick Zito has a colt in the classic 1 1/4 -mile race for 3-year-olds.

Pletcher posed for a picture this week with a group Lukas called “the young lions” that includes Doug O’Neill, the 38-year-old trainer based at Hollywood Park who will saddle Great Hunter and Liquidity in his first Derby appearance, and Asmussen, 41, who has Curlin and Zanjero.

Lukas, Pletcher’s former boss, is squarely in Pletcher’s corner but was quick to point out that each of the three young trainers is still looking for his first Derby victory. He, Baffert and Zito have combined for nine. Lukas has won four. One of those was with Grindstone in 1996, the year Lukas saddled five.

“It’s a great achievement to get three or four or five in the race, like I did in 1996 and Nick Zito did a couple of years ago,” Lukas said. “But when you do that, the whole world is watching. So you need to make a good showing. I think you need to at least get on the board.

“You don’t have to win it, necessarily, but I think you need to run well.”

Pletcher is keenly aware of that, and said as he prepped his horses for the Derby that he has taken a different approach, most notably by training on synthetic tracks and by sending Circular Quay into the Derby eight weeks after his last race, a victory in the Louisiana Derby.

Before Barbaro won the Derby last year, much was made of the colt’s unconventional five-week layoff, but the new trend is more time between races.

“Just statistically, day in and day out, the horses that we train tend to do much better with time between races,” Pletcher said. “I just don’t see why that wouldn’t apply to the Kentucky Derby. I know you can take all the historical facts and stats and all that. But if I do that, I’m kind of ignoring the most important data, and that’s on the ones I train.”

Pletcher is what amounts to the CEO of the nation’s mega-stable, handling about 200 horses across the country, including a new string at Hollywood Park this year after a synthetic surface was installed there.

The son of a trainer, Pletcher learned much of his meticulous organization in the once-dominant operation run by Lukas. He also earned an academic degree at the University of Arizona, studying in the school’s Race Track Industry Program.

“Before Wayne did it, most people expected you at most to have 20 horses in your barn and be the night watchman, too,” Pletcher said. “I think he pioneered the way horse trainers do business today.”

Inside the offices of virtually every barn where Pletcher has horses is the telltale influence of Lukas, in the form of perhaps half a dozen carefully mounted clipboards annotated with such information as the workouts, medication and equipment for every horse.

“I think he got that from Wayne,” said Angel Cordero, the retired Hall of Fame jockey who now works as the agent to Pletcher’s top rider, John Velazquez, and works some of Pletcher’s horses himself.

“He’s very organized and he’s very dedicated,” Cordero said. “He spends most of the time on that telephone and that computer talking to people. Every day of the week, he goes to a different track. You follow him for five days, and you’re tired. I did it. I told him, I said, ‘No more for me.’

“He’s very sharp. He doesn’t win races just because he has good horses. He wins races because he’s good and works very hard.”

Jack Wolf, whose Starlight Stable owns Sam P. with Donald Lucarelli, joked that to differentiate himself from Pletcher’s other owners, “I wear a name tag.”

“Actually, when I moved to him, my advisors said I shouldn’t for that reason. But it’s not even a concern,” said Wolf, a former hedge-fund manager.

“I mean, he’s had 200 horses for some time, but it’s like he’s got a barn with 10 horses. Every one of my babies I’ve got with him, he knows where they are, what’s going on with them.

“Whenever I think I’ve got something that I think he hasn’t thought of, I pick up the phone and call him, and he’s already got it solved.

“This guy could run any business he had an interest in. His organization skills and his memory are really phenomenal.”

Pletcher’s organizational skills helped his stable amass a record $26.8 million in earnings last year. But he remains zero for the Derby.

“I guess I’m not as excited about having five in there,” he said. “I want to have one that wins. That’s more important.”

robyn.norwood@latimes.com

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Crowded field

Post positions and field for the 133rd Kentucky Derby. Weights: 126 pounds. Distance: 1 1/4 miles. Purse: $2,210,000 if 20 start. First place: $1,450,000. Second: $400,000. Third: $200,000. Fourth: $100,000. Fifth: $60,000. Saturday’s approximate post time: 3:04 p.m. PDT; TV: Coverage begins at 2 p.m. PDT on Channel 4:

*--* PP Horse Trainer Jockey Odds 1. Sedgefield Darrin Miller Julien Leparoux 50-1 2. Curlin Steve Asmussen Robby Albarado 7-2 3. Zanjero Steve Asmussen Shaun Bridgmohan 30-1 4. Storm In May Bill Kaplan Juan Leyva 30-1 5. Imawildandcrazyguy Bill Kaplan Mark Guidry 50-1 6. Cowtown Cat Todd Pletcher Fernando Jara 20-1 7. Street Sense Carl Nafzger Calvin Borel 4-1 8. Hard Spun Larry Jones Mario Pino 15-1 9. Liquidity Doug O’Neill David Flores 30-1 10. Teuflesberg Jamie Sanders Stewart Elliott 30-1 11. Bwana Bull Jerry Hollendorfer Javier Castellano 50-1 12. Nobiz Like Shobiz Barclay Tagg Cornelio Velasquez 8-1 13. Sam P. Todd Pletcher Ramon Dominguez 20-1 14. Scat Daddy Todd Pletcher Edgar Prado 10-1 15. Tiago John Shirreffs Mike Smith 15-1 16. Circular Quay Todd Pletcher John Velazquez 8-1 17. Stormello Bill Currin Kent Desormeaux 30-1 18. Any Given Saturday Todd Pletcher Garrett Gomez 12-1 19. Dominican Darrin Miller Rafael Bejarano 20-1 20. Great Hunter Doug O’Neill Corey Nakatani 15-1

*--*