Ahead of a potentially titanic showdown in the final leg of the Triple Crown, Patrick Lawrence Gilligan has fallen in love with the three main protagonists
Wake up. It is time to wake up. Are you not awake yet? Are your senses dull still? Do you sense what may be coming, what may be here now.
I spent the mornings of Kentucky Derby week watching the very good FanDuel morning show. The presenters in the booth and in the field were excellent and they and the producers should take a bow for an entertaining enjoyable and informative real time presentation.
But what I enjoyed most, of course, was watching the horses. The cameras silently guided our eyes from one contender to the next during their morning training. With the horses names written onto the saddle cloths each horse soon became familiar.
It didn’t matter whether they were walking or jogging, galloping or breezing I just took in the pleasure of it. The morning quiet, the background noise of birds here and there, the odd snippet of someone’s voice in the background, the sound of the horses feet as they splashed the dirt, It was like you were there.
I suppose that for a grown man to be so interested in watching horses go around in circles all morning – the same horses, for days – could suggest someone with perhaps a rather blunt mind and not necessarily the highest IQ.
Deep questions
As you might imagine, I would like to counter that. When I was a child I played as a child and thought as a child and spoke of childish things and I thought then that one day all the scientists and physicists would give us all the answers to the deep questions.
Now, according to the bibilcal precepts of Corinthians, as a man I should have put away my childish things – but I didn’t, and I think now that it may not be the scientists who may provide the deepest of answers, if they are ever found.
If anyone is to find the answer, then maybe it will be the artists, the ones who try to express beauty. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty – that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,” as the man said. The man being John Keats.
The tragic hero of the Romantic poets had a point with his fabled Grecian Urn, because I think there shall be an ultimate beauty to the ultimate truth and if we mere humans ever do come face-to-face with that, perhaps we shall both at once understand it and also be transformed by it.
Occupying quest for beauty
So where is this heading, you may ask? (Understandably.) Well, Journalism didn’t transform me in my occupying quest for beauty in equine form, but he did transfix me.
I remember being taken to a small local racing stable as a kid by my uncle who knew a worker there. It was a winter’s evening and we were in a stall with the first Thoroughbred I had ever encountered.
I was a novice pony rider and I thought he was, stood there under his blankets, the biggest and most magnificent animal I had ever seen, and then the worker legged me up onto his back (this was the 70s, when children were apparently considered either expendable or invulnerable). I saw the world from a different place that evening and only now as I write this I realize that I never really forgot it. In US terms, the horse in question was a nickel claimer.
So watching horses became my thing and then my career and I still find it fascinating and it still quickens my pulse by a paddock or at a sale if I think I have spotted a glimpse of diamond.
Journalism is more diamond than nearly any other horse I have ever seen – and I have only ever seen him on TV.
I am not alone of course, many many people seek beauty or its expression, as a passion or through their careers. Beauty is sought and expressed in many ways and forms and the Thoroughbred is well known to be one of them.
I remember Frankel training in Newmarket. I would see him as many mornings as not, in the sunshine, in the rain. He would walk by and you didn’t have to wonder who was the equine deity who walked amongst us.
Half-tolerating us, aware of us, but not really interested in us.
I watched Frankel devour Warren Hill twice a morning, many mornings, he devoured it like it was flat. He was perfection.
That is why I have come to call Journalism, in my mind, American Frankel.
Enter Maximus
Then we come to ‘Maximus’; that is how I know him. All power and strength, impossibly majestic and masculine dark eyes, a body bound in leather, all heart and courage.
Others know him as Sovereignty. He wins the roses on a sodden day when the warriors emerged from the mud and bested the American Frankel.
But the wounded one does not submit. He takes his next race as a wild animal stakes his claim to a mate over other foes, emerging between them, his shoulders and neck possessed of too much strength, too much power, with a mighty swing he shrugs them aside and the crowd go wild. That was the Preakness.
But who are you? Why are you here, ‘Spaniard’, so far from home? I have seen you. I have watched you train alone. You are beautiful too. But do you really think you can fell two kings each already ordained a crown.
Do you really believe you can fell two kings in one contest? I have seen you race, Baeza, you are still learning, but the time for learning is over now. I hope you digested your last lessons well.
I have spent a lifetime looking at horses. I have never seen three, on the same track, on the same day, training for the same races as beautiful as these three.
Are you awake to what might be coming?
• Read previous articles in the View From The Rail series
‘And down the stretch they come!’ – the story of Dave Johnson and racing’s most famous catch phrase
Buried treasure: The fascinating story of a $4m trophy and a horse called Preakness
Da Hoss and the ‘greatest comeback since Lazarus’ – Jay Hovdey on a Breeders’ Cup legend
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