Legendary jockey’s biographer Bill Christine looks back at the 1960 victory of Venetian Way – and a spectacular fallout between trainer and jockey that had begun even before the horse crossed the wire at Churchill Downs
65 years ago, on the first Saturday in May in 1960, the jockey Bill Hartack and the trainer Vic Sovinski were in the penthouse: their late-running colt Venetian Way had scored an upset win in the Kentucky Derby.
Two weeks later, Hartack was sent to the doghouse, and he and Sovinski would never speak to one another again. Sic transit gloria mundi.
“I’m a dedicated race rider,” hard-hearted Hartack said at a victory party hours after Venetian Way had finally squared a series of defeats to Bally Ache. “I’m dedicated to being a perfectionist. This was a good race to win. Winning the Derby is an accomplishment, not a celebration. One race doesn’t make a person. I feel this very deeply inside, and can’t help it.”
For Hartack, only 27, there was already Iron Liege’s Derby win in 1957, and to follow were his three more Derby wins: Determine in 1962, Northern Dancer in 1964 and Majestic Prince in 1969.
Only Eddie Arcaro has also won the Triple Crown’s ne plus ultra five times; Bill Shoemaker won four. Hartack’s five-bagger came in the first nine tries he had in the race, a batting average that would even make Ty Cobb blush.
Venetian Way, a colt that his trainer, Vic Sovinski, had bought for 73-year-old Isaac Blumberg at auction for $10,500, paid $14.60 for $2 (or 6.3-1) on his white-blazed nose. Not many handicappers thought the Derby winner would turn the tables on Bally Ache, who had the lead at the Churchill Downs quarter-pole before Hartack and his mount unleashed a devastating rally that brought a 3½-length decision.
One Venetian Way supporter was Leo O’Mealia, a 76-year-old cartoonist for the New York Daily News. But on the day before the Derby – several hours after O’Mealia submitted his pen-and-ink rendition of Venetian Way reaching the wire first (right) – he died in his sleep of a heart attack at his Brooklyn home. He was never to know that his Derby prediction had materialized.
The 53-year-old Sovinski, once a minor-league ballplayer, once a baker in the A&P grocery chain, once a staff sergeant during World War II, also died of a heart attack, only seven months after his Derby win.
Sovinski had hinted after Venetian Way’s Derby that Blumberg had left him well off, in a financial position to quit the game while he was on top, but he also had a two-year-old in his barn who might be good enough for Louisville in 1961.
Two years before Venetian Way, Lincoln Road, another of Blumberg’s longshots and also named after a South Florida roadway, was saddled by Sovinski and came within a dirty nose of beating Tim Tam at Churchill.
Even before Sovinski’s death, the Venetian Way melodrama had taken an ugly turn. A love-hate relationship between Sovinski and Hartack was boiling over before they hung up Bally Ache’s winning number in the Preakness, the Triple Crown’s middle jewel, two weeks after the Derby.
While Sovinski was telling reporters at Pimlico that Hartack rode his horse like an apprentice, allowing Bally Ache to lope along on an uncontested early lead, Hartack was leaving the track and a fifth-place finish by suggesting that the trainer had sent him out with a sore horse.
The implication was clear: Venetian Way ran with Butazolidin, a legit analgesic, in the Kentucky Derby, but was forced to run clean in the Preakness because of Maryland’s no-medication rules.
“It was no secret around Churchill Downs that Venetian Way was getting the bute before the Derby,” leading journalist Red Smith wrote in his syndicated column.
“Presumably he was on the wagon when he went into the Preakness. Maybe there’s no connection. Perhaps the sauce doesn’t help a horse run fast. But it seems possible that W. Hartack had Butazolidin on his mind after getting off the horse in Baltimore."
Hartack signed his own walking papers when his rant against Sovinski continued: “He trained that horse like any baker would.”
Sovinski announced that he would hire another jockey for the Belmont Stakes, the Triple Crown wind-up in New York three weeks later. “Hartack will be lucky to get some bum for that race,” Sovinski said. “He’ll never ride one of my horses again.”
The Preakness brouhaha was the climax to the ill will that began well before the Kentucky Derby. A couple of days before the Florida Derby, after an all-night poker game, Hartack missed an important workout. Bally Ache won the race by a nose, then Hartack spread the word that he had ridden a ‘short’ horse – a colt ill-prepared to run a mile and an eighth.
When the horses were pulling up, Bobby Ussery, every bit as cocksure as Hartack, clucked to Bally Ache, looked over at Venetian Way and his rider, and said: “‘Tack, your horse just ain’t good enough.’”
Hartack shot back: "Your ass. He wasn’t fit, and we still nearly beat you.”
A week before the Derby, Sovinski came mighty close to replacing Hartack. Arcaro, after all, was still without a Derby mount. In the seven-furlong Stepping Stone Purse at Churchill, after Venetian Way ran second, Hartack was supposed to gallop out Venetian Way an extra distance. When he didn’t, the incensed trainer stormed off the track.
“It was too close to the Derby to be making a change then,” Sovinski said later.
Finally, Sovinski named Arcaro to ride Venetian Way in the Belmont, a race the jockey all but owned, having won it six times.
The injured Bally Ache was scratched the day before the race. Hartack had taken the call on Celtic Ash, an Irish import who was hardly a bum. He beat Venetian Way hands down and paid $18.80 (nearly 8-1).
Neither Venetian Way nor Bally Ache had much of a Triple Crown afterlife. Bally Ache, insured for $1m after he was sold for $1.25m, died in October 1960 from an intestinal blockage. Venetian Way, unsuccessful at stud, was seven years old in 1964 when he was put down at a Kentucky farm after fracturing a hip.
After the Belmont, several headline writers inevitably called the outcome ‘Hartack’s Revenge’. But a gracious Hartack used the high road for a change and took Celtic Ash’s upset win in stride, a 180-degree turn from his antics after the Derby win. That frigid, dank day at Churchill, he exploded in the jockeys’ room when somebody from the press called him ‘Willie’.
“The name is Bill, not Willie, for crissakes,” he said. Then he said he had no more time for “stupid” questions, and had to change silks for the next race, a pedestrian $3,500 event for older horses.
Hartack’s mount finished second, for which he was paid $70. His 10% share of Venetian Way’s Derby booty, just an hour before, had been $11,485. Heights and depths, that was horse racing.
• Bill Christine is the author of Bill Hartack: The Bittersweet Life of a Hall of Fame Jockey
• Visit the Kentucky Derby website
Kentucky Derby horse-by-horse guide: Journalism is the real deal – and that isn’t fake news
View the latest TRC Global Rankings for horses / jockeys / trainers / sires