Believe it or not, there was life in Thoroughbred racing before the Breeders’ Cup. Centuries, in fact. Thankfully, there also is life after the Breeders’ Cup, as each season dwindles and winter looms. And there are even worthy accomplishments to celebrate in spite of the Breeders’ Cup, which is supposed to settle championships but often falls short.
Take, for instance, a horse like Flawlessly, although there never was another mare quite like the daughter of Affirmed.
She was a radiant bay with a black mane and tail and a lopsided blaze that leaned right as she banked left around the grass courses of Southern California for four successful seasons. Her record of 16 wins and seven placings in 28 starts is close to impeccable, especially if you draw a bold, black line through her two Breeders’ Cup appearances.
Flawlessly began her career in New York for the respected trainer Richard Dutrow Sr, and her breeders, Lou and Patrice Wolfson, of Harbor View Farm and all things Affirmed. Flawlessly’s dam, La Confidence, was a daughter of Nijinsky who flowed from the female family of champion Tosmah, champion sire Halo, and Queen Sucree, dam of Kentucky Derby winner Cannonade.
In a portent of things to come, Flawlessly won the G3 Gardenia Stakes on the grass for Dutrow in her third start. But the real money was on the dirt, and that’s where she made her next five starts, including a floundering 12th-place finish behind Meadow Star in the 1990 Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Fillies at Belmont Park.
Undaunted, she won the G3 Tempted, but then, in her first start at 3, Flawlessly bled badly as the favorite in the Busanda Stakes at Aqueduct, splattering the pants of jockey Julie Krone with her very royal blood.
“I was so sad for her,” Krone said. “I had been working her a lot, and she was becoming one of my favorite fillies.”
Flawlessly was sent West to Charlie Whittingham, where firm turf, dry weather, and the diuretic Lasix gave her a chance to shine. She did exactly that over her next 13 starts, winning ten and running second in the other three. Whittingham then shipped her to Arlington Park to finish second by a nose in the prestigious Beverly D, but they took home the prize anyway on the disqualification of Let’s Elope.
These were the days before there was a Breeders’ Cup Filly & Mare Turf, which meant Flawlessly had to be shoehorned into a race that did not necessarily fit. As the 1993 Breeders’ Cup at Santa Anita drew near, Whittingham and the Wolfsons chose the Mile, figuring her first try facing males at least would be on home ground. Then again, those males included Lure, Paradise Creek, Barathea, and Fourstars Allstar, which made her odds of 3/1 that much more impressive.
Students of the Breeders’ Cup Mile know the trip means everything, and Flawlessly’s journey that day was rough. Chris McCarron had her forwardly placed aiming for the first turn, at which point a phalanx of runners crushed over from the outside. McCarron’s rear end hit the saddle as he checked his anxious mare, after which Flawlessly went through the motions before her rider wrapped up in the final sixteenth.
Three weeks later, Flawlessly stormed back into the limelight with a thrilling victory over arch-rival Toussaud in the Matriarch Stakes at Hollywood Park. She was hailed for the second straight year as champion turf female, rendering her Breeders’ Cup record to the heap of bad dreams.
Shug McGaughey’s deep breath
Vanlandingham was a formidable colt for John Ed Anthony’s Loblolly Stable and trainer Shug McGaughey, advanced enough to win four of his first five starts and earn a start in the 1984 Kentucky Derby. He was injured in the classic and placed in deep storage, after which he emerged the following spring to win the Stephen Foster Handicap and the Suburban Handicap as if the older division would be his playground.
Then the son of Cox’s Ridge lost to the speedy Track Barron twice during the summer and to the resurgent Chief’s Crown in the fall, while never embarrassed by good tries. Vanlandingham’s authoritative bounce-back score in the Jockey Club Gold Cup seemed to set him up perfectly for the 1985 Breeders’ Cup Classic at Aqueduct, just down the road from his Belmont Park stall. At least, that’s the way Anthony saw it, and the owner paid a $360,000 supplementary fee to find out.
In the Classic, Pat Day, concerned that Track Barron was getting away again, kept Vanlandingham close to a brisk opening half mile, but both colts paid a price. With a quarter of a mile to run, the leaders were swarmed by the long-winded hounds. Vanlandingham could not hold his position and was squeezed rudely out of the picture, eventually beating only one horse in his only poor finish of the year.
Fortunately, that was not the last of Vanlandingham.
McGaughey took a deep breath, brushed off the debris of his first Breeders’ Cup experience, and put his star colt on a van to Maryland, where two weeks later he took on an international cast in the Washington DC International that included the accomplished Jupiter Island, who went on to win the 1986 Japan Cup, and Irish Oaks winner Helen Street. Vanlandingham came through, leading at every pole, to score by a length from Prix Dollar and Oak Tree Invitational hero Yashgan. The effort was enough to erase the sour taste of the Breeders’ Cup in the minds of Eclipse Award voters, who selected Vanlandingham as champion older male of 1985 to give McGaughey the first of his ten champions, so far.
Dithering indecision
If Vanlandingham ran in the right Breeders’ Cup race with the wrong tactics, what happened to In Excess was a crime of dithering indecision.
For eight solid months of the 1991 season, from January to mid-September, the son of Siberian Express was the king of older males on the dirt. Trained by the low-key cowboy Bruce Jackson, In Excess won the San Fernando Stakes at Santa Anita, then ventured East to sweep the Metropolitan Handicap, Suburban Handicap, Whitney Handicap, and Woodward Stakes as if blessed by destiny.
Had Jackson passed up the Breeders’ Cup for even the most remotely legitimate reason, there was a chance In Excess would have been acclaimed Horse of the Year. But his people were intent on running, despite pre-race signs indicating that In Excess was past his peak. Rather than the Classic, in which his horse would have been favored, Jackson opted to run in the shorter Mile. The trainer watched helplessly as his star finished in a desultory dead-heat for ninth.
Unlike Vanlandingham and Flawlessly, In Excess was at the end of his physical rope. There was no Breeders’ Cup coda to remind his audience of the brilliance that had gone before. When the season-ending awards were passed out, In Excess was not among the winners.
A BC trophy? That won’t be necessary
The lesson was clear. The one-shot opportunity of a Breeders’ Cup race can slip away for even the most accomplished runners, no matter what kind of a record they bring to the gate. Take Xtra Heat, for example, and behold a mare who tried hard but ultimately did not need a Breeders’ Cup trophy to cast her name in bronze at the Hall of Fame.
Her record is breathtaking – 35 starts, 26 wins, and seven placings for earnings of $2.1 million while running for relative peanuts in the female sprint division. She defeated the boys while giving them weight in the Phoenix Stakes at Keeneland and traveled to Dubai to finish third on the world stage in the 2002 Golden Shaheen. The only races in which the daughter of Dixieland Heat did not finish 1-2-3 were the 2000 Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Fillies at Churchill Downs and the 2002 Breeders’ Cup Sprint at Arlington Park.
The Breeders’ Cup Filly & Mare Sprint and Eclipse Award for the division were not available until 2007. To their everlasting credit, Eclipse Award voters found a way to honor Xtra Heat anyway. She was selected champion 3-year-old filly of 2001, when she started 13 times, all stakes, won nine and was second twice, most notably to Squirtle Squirt in the Breeders’ Cup Sprint at Belmont Park.
The story of the Breeders’ Cup as a fount of frustration would not be complete without the tale of Quiet American, a foal of 1986 bred by Florida’s Tartan Farms under the supervision of the master himself, John Nerud. Dr Fager, Nerud’s finest work, could be found both bottom and top in the second and third generations of Quiet American’s pedigree, along with a robust cross of the Princequillo mare Cequillo through two different daughters. That’s how John would roll.
Quiet American sold to Sheikh Mohammed for $300,000 as a yearling and ran three times in England before it became clear his destiny, if he had one, lay in the United States. His dirt breeding spoke for itself, but he’d also shown a tendency to bleed, and eventually he had to be carefully handled because of allergies.
Gary Jones got the job of making something out of the raw Quiet American clay. It didn’t take long. In a 2½-month whirl of activity at the end of 1989 and into 1990, the colt broke his maiden against winners, won a second-level allowance event, and lost the G1 Charles H Strub Stakes at ten furlongs by just half a length after a compromising break.
A poor performance as second choice in the Santa Anita Handicap followed by a bad race against easy competition in San Francisco convinced Jones that Quiet American needed time off. So he got it.
‘A bunch of mumbo-jumbo’
Four months later, a refreshed Quiet American defeated champion mare Bayakoa in the San Diego Handicap at Del Mar. That set him up for a trip East, where he was a strong second to Dispersal in the Woodward Stakes. Jones circled the Breeders’ Cup Classic at Belmont Park for the colt’s next start and waited for the call to come. With a limited campaign of a single Graded stakes win and a stakes placing, Quiet American did not have enough points to qualify automatically for the Classic field. But surely his form could not be denied by the selection committee of handicappers and racing secretaries. Oops.
“Quiet American didn’t get into the field at all,” wrote Andrew Beyer in the Washington Post. “A selection committee snubbed him in favor of seemingly less talented horses. He probably would have been no more than 5/1 in the Classic. Yet the committee preferred Ibn Bey, an English distance runner who has never raced on dirt, and Goodwood Stakes-winner Lively One, whose presence in trainer Charlie Whittingham’s barn seemed a factor.”
Jones, who usually operated dialed to eleven, hit the roof.
“I've been preparing for this race all year long,” Jones told Beyer. “I passed up races in California, where we’d be the 3/5 favorite in order to be here. I haven’t got the foggiest idea what the selection committee was thinking about. They’ve just given me a bunch of mumbo-jumbo. Maybe they didn’t see the Woodward.”
So the 1990 Classic transpired without one of the best horses in training. There were reforms made later in the selection process, prompted in part by Quiet American’s omission, and Jones did manage to enjoy a dish of retribution served cold, just seven days after the Breeders’ Cup. With Chris McCarron needed for little more than ballast, Quiet American reduced the 8 furlongs of the G1 New York Racing Association Mile at Aqueduct to 1:32 4/5 (see video above), eased at the wire nearly five lengths clear and just two ticks off the track record held by Easy Goer.
With the Breeders’ Cup wound still fresh, Jones had every right to take one last swipe at the selection process. Instead, he opted for diplomacy.
“I could blast everyone now and make a stink, but it’s over with, nothing more can be said about it,” Jones said. “I just hope it doesn’t happen to anyone again. I think the Breeders’ Cup is the best thing in the world, which is why I’m sorry I wasn’t in it.”