Three-Week Gap Can Add Immeasurable Pressure

LOUISVILLE, Ky. —  For Karen and Mickey Taylor, the owners of Seattle Slew, the last hours leading to the 1977 Belmont Stakes seemed longer than the three weeks that had gone before.

“It started raining the morning of the race and it never stopped,” Karen Taylor said.

She and her husband suddenly had doubts about Seattle Slew, who had never failed them and their partners, Jim and Sally Hill, winning all eight of his races.

“All that rain--it seemed like it was about five inches of the stuff--changed the complexion of the race,” Mickey Taylor said from Idaho, where he and his wife live. “Slew had never run in the mud. He had never even worked over it. The horse had bounced out of the Preakness in good order. But we still thought that they might be raining on our parade. ‘Big Sandy’ [Belmont Park] was going to be a much different racetrack this day.”

Their trepidation, of course, was without merit. In muddy going, the first off-track for the Belmont in seven years, Seattle Slew continued to dominate his generation. Leading all the way, he won by four lengths. Twenty yards before the wire, jockey Jean Cruguet stood up in the irons and waved his whip triumphantly.

The Belmont Stakes, the last leg of the Triple Crown, is different than the other two races; there’s a three-week gap heading into New York, compared to only two weeks between the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness. If you’re a horseman who’s already won the first two jewels, three weeks might seem like an eternity.

“There’s pressure,” Mickey Taylor said, “but you just try to put it out of your mind.”

Trainer Bob Baffert, who’s preparing Real Quiet these days at Churchill Downs as they shoot Saturday at Belmont for the first Triple Crown championship in 20 years, seems to be passing the time here without nibbling on his fingernails.

There’s a $5-million bonus attached to this Triple Crown, like last year, when Baffert’s Silver Charm missed out by finishing second to Touch Gold in the Belmont.

Besides Real Quiet, Baffert has 16 other horses at Churchill to keep him occupied. All 17 have earned more than $11 million, so they’re all important. Baffert has distracted himself this year by carrying on, via the press, a long-distance dialogue with Sonny Hine, the trainer of Skip Away, who has suggested that Silver Charm has been ducking his horse.

After Saturday’s Massachusetts Handicap, won by Skip Away, Hine fired another broadside. “I really don’t want to start a controversy,” he said, proceeding to start a controversy, “but I guarantee [Baffert] wouldn’t accept 130 pounds as we did to run here. A coward never wins.”

At his Churchill barn Sunday morning, Baffert responded.

“A coward never wins?” he said. “He can’t be talking about me. I’m winning. I’d like to run in the Belmont with Real Quiet against the kind of horses Sonny’s been beating. All he’s been running against are $200,000 horses.”

Real Quiet’s final pre-Belmont workout will be Tuesday and the next morning he’ll be flown to New York.

“You take it day to day, just like you do any other race,” Baffert said. “If I was back home, my wife [Sherry] would be sending me out for the milk. All you try to do is go from day to day, and try to keep your horse sound.”

The 11th and most recent Triple Crown champion was Affirmed, in 1978. He raced for Louis and Patrice Wolfson and was trained by Laz Barrera.

“The time went very quickly for us between the Preakness and the Belmont,” said Patrice Wolfson, who lives with her husband on Long Island in Old Westbury, N.Y., not far from Belmont Park. “Laz took it very easy with the horse between those races. But there was tremendous pressure because the rivalry was with Alydar.

“He was owned by Calumet Farm, and they had already won a Triple Crown [with Citation in 1948]. What added to the pressure was the overnight brilliance of our jockey [Steve Cauthen, only 18]. He was such a sensation. And our horse had to win the Belmont, or he was going to be known as just another good, good horse.”

Alydar, beaten by 1 1/2 lengths in the Derby, a neck in the Preakness and a head in the Belmont, is the only horse to finish second in all three Triple Crown races. Victory Gallop could match that performance if he runs second in Saturday’s Belmont.

“Alydar,” Patrice Wolfson said, “would have been another Secretariat if it hadn’t been for Affirmed.”

In 1973, when Secretariat swept the series, there hadn’t been a Triple Crown champion since Citation, 25 years before. That’s been the biggest gap in the series.

“I didn’t think much about the Belmont until it was on top of us,” jockey Ron Turcotte said from his home in New Brunswick, Canada. “I was riding an awful lot at the time. When you’re riding a horse like Secretariat, you wind up getting all the business you can handle. I was riding whole cards, getting on planes to ride other places when I wasn’t in New York. Don’t you remember, I rode the race after we won the Belmont. Elliott Burch, who saddled the horse in that race, was a gentleman. He showed up in the winner’s circle after Secretariat won and said he’d excuse me from the mount. But I told him I’d go ahead and ride.”

Secretariat was a record 31-length winner in the Belmont, and years later Turcotte would be asked when he knew he had the race won.

“I’d always say, right after we won the Preakness,” he said with a laugh last week. “I had complete confidence that we were going to go all the way. I never thought the horse would break down, because he was big-boned and very solid.

“Of course, there’s always the chance that a horse can hit a hole. By the Belmont, I wasn’t worried about Sham. He was our test in the Derby and the Preakness, but he was losing weight from race to race, and my horse wasn’t.”

When Turcotte left the jockeys’ room for the Belmont, moving through the crowded paddock where he’d meet with trainer Lucien Laurin, people were sticking microphones in his face.

“They’d ask me if I was nervous, and I’d tell them no,” he said. “But the truth was, by the time I got to the paddock, I was nervous. I was nervous until my rear end hit the horse’s saddle. Then I was all right.”

Mickey Taylor and the Slew crew actually considered running in another race, the Metropolitan Mile, in the middle of the Triple Crown. In 1948, Jimmy Jones, the trainer of Citation, did run in another race. There was almost a month between the Preakness and the Belmont then, and two weeks before the Belmont, Citation won the Jersey Derby by 11 lengths.

“He just winked at them for $50,000,” Jones said on the phone from Parnell, Mo. “There was always the possibility of getting him hurt, but I didn’t think about that. I always found that you got less accidents in races than you did in workouts. I felt strongly that we’d win the Belmont.

“I told [jockey Eddie Arcaro] in the paddock that the only way we’d lose was for him to fall off. Then, didn’t you know it, the horse stumbled out of the gate and Eddie almost did fall off. He had to scramble like a squirrel to get back on.”