A crowd of 50,155, a record for Keeneland, gave American Pharoah the roaring valediction he deserved on Saturday night, after a Breeders’ Cup Classic that was so one-sided it did not really qualify as a race. American Pharoah was the horse of a lifetime for his owner, trainer and jockey, and for countless American racing fans, both casual and committed. His final performance, fittingly, was one of his best.
As soon as their hero had left the stage, however, it was time to move on. Keeneland emptied in minutes rather than hours, thanks in part to a big college football game on the other side of town which was due to kick off an hour after the Classic. With the 12th Triple Crown winner on his way to Ashford Stud, American racing now sets off on what could be a long search for the 13th.
It is in the nature of the game that racing’s star performers come and go at a furious rate, thanks to the demands of the sport and also, on the Flat at least, the financial realities of the breeding industry. Racing will never have a Roger Federer or Rory McIlroy to pull in the crowds year after year.
But it is part of American Pharoah’s legacy that he has reminded many in the sport here that optimism, too, is in the nature of the game. It is often said that racing “needs” horses like American Pharoah, and also like the Derby and Arc winner Golden Horn, who was beaten by Found in Saturday’s Turf.
When a racing industry is as big as the one in America, however – or Britain’s, for that matter – the only real need is for patience. The 37 years that the US was forced to wait for its latest Triple Crown winner was, admittedly, a little extreme, but it was worth it when American Pharoah finally arrived. The 90,000 sell-out crowd at Belmont in June, meanwhile, included many thousands who were not even born when Affirmed completed the Crown in 1978.
The greatest horses will always be a rare treat but there is huge pleasure to be taken from all of the others too. What racing needs anywhere is interest and enthusiasm from a core group of big-money owners and also from enough fans to keep the turnstiles and betting turnover ticking over. The long line of private jets parked at nearby Blue Grass Airport on Saturday – they were forced to close a runway to find room for them all – and the sell-out crowd in the stands suggest that those writing American racing’s obituary in recent years were being a little premature.
It has its problems, of course, such as the near-universal administration of race-day drugs to its runners. The other star turn on Saturday was Maria Borell, the trainer of the Sprint winner, Runhappy, who does not use the anti-bleeding drug Lasix on her horse and is outspoken in her belief that it is not just unnecessary but poisonous to the long-term strength of the breed.
“You guys don’t need to run on Lasix,” Borell said. “It’s better for the long-term integrity of the breed. I want us to have stronger horses that can run 30, 40 times in the future, like they used to be able to, and not be masked by drugs.”
Sadly the “you guys” Borell was thinking about include Bob Baffert, the trainer of American Pharoah, every other American trainer with a runner on the card and, for that matter, Aidan O’Brien, whose two winners at the meeting, Found and Hit It A Bomb, both raced on Lasix. One winner, even in a punishing race like the Sprint, will not change the drugs culture. In fact, it seems unlikely that anything short of federal legislation ever will. Golden Horn did not race on Lasix on Saturday, though it would be stretching things too far to suggest that it made any difference to the result. A series of minor misfortunes, from the wet weather earlier in the week to an inside draw that steered him onto the worst of the ground, contributed to his defeat, but he still ran a fine race to finish a half-length second.
Both Golden Horn and Found, who was racing at Group One level for the third time in a month, deserve great credit for their efforts. So too does Ryan Moore, the rider of Found, who became only the second overseas rider – after Frankie Dettori in 2006 – to win the Bill Shoemaker Award for the meeting’s top rider.
Moore was out of Keeneland even faster than the punters in order to ride at Saint-Cloud in Paris on Sunday, where he took yet another Group One, the Criterium International, on O’Brien’s Johannes Vermeer. From there it was straight to the airport again for a flight to Australia, where he is due to ride in the Melbourne Cup, a race he won 12 months ago, on Tuesday.
Moore’s performance on Hit It A Bomb in the Juvenile Turf on Friday was so perfectly judged that it recalled Lester Piggott’s extraordinary performance on Royal Academy in 1990.
Moore is, quite simply, the best jockey we have seen for many years. As Flat racing prepares to hibernate before starting to search for the stars of 2016 it is good to know that Moore will be around to help ride them.
