Desormeaux not taking crown just yet

BALTIMORE -- Big Brown in today’s Preakness Stakes is similar to Tiger Woods in any golf tournament. The focus is all on him.

He is the early 1-2 favorite to win this 1 3/16th-mile race and even money to also win the Belmont Stakes on June 7 and become horse racing’s first Triple Crown winner in 30 years.

Big Brown’s chances got even stronger Friday when one of his legitimate challengers, Behindatthebar, was scratched because of a bruise on the inside of his left hoof. Trainer Todd Pletcher noticed it during a morning gallop.

Behindatthebar was supposed to start from post position No. 5. So Big Brown will now start from the No. 6 hole instead of No. 7 in a field of 12.

That doesn’t change the consensus among the experts who are picking the Kentucky Derby winner to win the Preakness. The track is expected to be fast under partly cloudy conditions after it rained Friday, and Big Brown is expected to breeze his way to his fifth victory in five races and take home the $600,000 first prize.

However, Big Brown’s jockey, Kent Desormeaux, offered a couple of reminders that anything can happen.

In 2000, he rode favored Fusaichi Pegasus to victory in the Derby. It was the first time the favorite had won a Derby since Spectacular Bid in 1979. Then Fusaichi Pegasus went into the Preakness as a 1-5 favorite -- and got beat by Red Bullet, who ran the race of his life.

“We went from the third-fastest Derby to the third-fastest Preakness and got beat,” Desormeaux said.

Two years earlier, Desormeaux was on Derby and Preakness winner Real Quiet in the Belmont and was confident of a Triple Crown as they approached the finish line.

“I knew I was the winner,” Desormeaux said. “Real Quiet pulled himself up. He never saw Victory Gallop.”

Victory Gallop won by a nose. “Victory Gallop was not in front of him except that last stride,” Desormeaux said.

Despite those cautionary tales, just about everything points to a Big Brown victory. Possibly having the best shot at an upset is Gayego, the only other Derby starter in the Preakness. Gayego, 17th in the Derby after a troubled start, is the 8-1 early second choice here.

Big Brown, however, doesn’t come into the Preakness without some baggage, courtesy of trainer Dick Dutrow Jr. He’s a charming man and obviously a good trainer, but there’s a checkered past.

Although he readily admits to his own drug use of years ago, of concern now is his use of drugs on horses.

The Baltimore Sun’s Rick Maese, citing a database maintained by the Assn. of Racing Commissioners International, reported Friday that Dutrow has been fined or suspended each of the past eight years for doping-related offenses at the racetrack. The most recent are a pair of $500 fines in January for illegal amounts of Phenylbutazone, an anti-inflammatory drug, at Gulfstream Park in Florida.

And the New York Daily News ran a story Friday that stated that Dutrow had told that newspaper a week before the Derby that he gave Winstrol, a steroid, to his horses on the 15th of every month. But he did this only in states that have no rules against steroids, and Kentucky, Maryland and New York -- the Triple Crown states -- are not among the 10 states that have such rules.

“I don’t care what anybody writes or says, we do things the right way about our horses,” Dutrow says.

The other day Dutrow was asked if it bothered him that the media brings up his past, particularly his own drug use. “I’m willing to answer the questions, but that was a long time ago,” he said. “I’d rather people ask me about Big Brown.”

It was 10 years ago that Dutrow was so strung out and broke that he was sleeping on a cot in the tack room of a barn at New York’s Aqueduct track.

In 1997, Dutrow’s former girlfriend and the mother of his daughter Molly, now 13, was murdered in a drug-related break-in. Molly spent the next decade living with Dutrow’s mother, Vicki, in Maryland but now lives with her father in Norwich, N.Y.

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larry.stewart@latimes.com