Desormeaux goes home
For those whose vision is post-nuclear, Pimlico is the racetrack of the future. It is cracked asphalt, corrugated metal, cinderblock and weathered wood. Parts of the once-bustling stable area on the north side are without barns, which were either razed or collapsed never to be replaced.
The neighborhood that abuts a second stable area on the southern perimeter can be a bit dicey. Sirens and gunshots can be unsettling to horses. People, too. But Pimlico is a place that, if you visit once a year and always in the spring, grows on you. A great deal of racing history has been written in Maryland, some by Kent Desormeaux.
It is difficult to get warm and fuzzy about Pimlico unless you happen to be Desormeaux, who grew up in the Cajun backcountry of Louisiana and cut his teeth as a youngster on the bush-track circuit, but came of age as a big-time rider while still a teenager in Maryland, his base of operation when rode 450 winners in 1987 and broke Steve Cauthen’s apprentice record with 20 stakes victories. Two years later, still in Maryland, he posed for 598 winner’s circle photos, a record that still stands.
He led the nation’s riders in victories three for three consecutive years, ‘87-’89 and at the tender age of 25, reached the 3,000-win plateau and $100 million in earnings, the youngest rider ever to achieve those milestones. He eventually moved to Southern California, where he spent more than 15 years, then, two years ago, to New York, put three Eclipse awards in the trophy case along with an equal number from the Kentucky Derby and was inducted in racing’s Hall of Fame.
During the first of three 10-weeks stints he has spent in Japan, Desormeaux became the first foreign rider to win a classic race in when he partnered Lady Pastel in the 2001 Japanese Oaks, won the Japan Racing Association riding title and at one point flew to California to win the Beverly Hills Handicap astride Astra on a Sunday, then flew back to Tokyo and rode the winner of the Teio Sho on Tuesday.
It has been a heady ride and, at 38, there is no sign that Desormeaux has lost a step.
On Saturday, Desormeaux returns to the place in which this journey took shape and form. He is anxious to make the trip. Big Brown, the undefeated Kentucky Derby winner Desormeaux calls the best horse he has ever ridden, will be waiting in Baltimore, a city of which he speaks with an unmistakable warmth, a city in which all he did was win.
Unless it’s winning the Triple Crown, but Desormeaux has a unique perspective from which he views the most rarely won title in sports.
In the 30 years since Affirmed reached within himself, regained the lead taken briefly by Alydar in the Belmont Park stretch and win the Triple Crown, 10 horses, including Real Quiet, have arrived in New York in position to join 11 winners of racing’s most exclusive fraternity. No rider has ever come as close and lost what appeared, if only for the length of time it takes to run a quarter-mile, to be a stranglehold on history.
“I know what it feels like to win the Triple Crown,” Desormeaux said at Belmont Park, three days away from the reunion with Baltimore and Big Brown in the Preakness Stakes. “Turning for home, I thought I had it.”
He was not alone. Virtually everyone who watched Real Quiet move powerfully form midpack to take the lead on the stretch turn of the ‘98 Belmont was standing and a deafening roar engulfed Belmont Park. “Thought I was home free,” Desormeaux said. But the roar subsided as Victory Gallop began to gnaw away, stride by stride, at the four-length advantage Real Quiet held leaving the furlong pole and, in the final stride denied what moments before seemed certain to be the 12th winner of the Triple Crown. The margin: A nose.
The ‘98 Belmont is widely regarded as the toughest beat in the history of the Triple Crown, perhaps in all of racing, considering what was at stake, but Desormeaux said he is not haunted by the memory.
“It surely was a tough beat,” he said. “It would have meant a different way of life the history, books, television, endorsements. I had a deal with Swiss Army. If I won the Triple Crown, they were going to make a Desormeaux knife. I was going to get half a million for that; bit me in the butt and the wallet.”
“But I didn’t do anything wrong in that race and Real Quiet never got tired, he just started gawking. The only time [Victory Gallop] was in front was the last stride. Beat me by a lip.”
Losing the Saratoga riding title to Cornelio Velasquez by one winner on the last day of the meeting a year ago, not the ‘98 Belmont, Desormeaux said, was a bigger disappointment. “The Belmont is two minutes. Saratoga was six weeks of work. There’s about five rides there I’d like to have back. That just gnaws at me.”
He will have the opportunity again to win the riding title at the Spa. First, though, there is another Preakness at hand, then the possibility of second chance at a Triple Crown. Big Brown has the tools. If he has limitations, they have not been exposed. But Big Brown’s rider, the picture of confidence before the Derby, approaches the Preakness with his own questions.
“We just don’t know how resilient he is,” said Desormeaux. “We don’t know if he gets into a dogfight that he’ll just say ‘not this time.’ That’s what is so awesome about the Triple Crown. It takes an absolute freak to be ready to go again in two weeks.”
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