The 21st Century Seabiscuit

From my muses of prose at the NY Times, I felt this was one description of the events that actually gave some credit where credit was due (and personality to boot).

(The article may be found at this web address: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/03/sports/othersports/03derby.html)

Rob Carr/Associated Press

Jockey Calvin Borel celebrates Mine That Bird's win at the 135th Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs on Saturday.

Mine That Bird Uses Shortest Route to Win Derby

By JOE DRAPE

Published: May 2, 2009

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Sometimes this game brings you to tears. Sometimes it feels right to be wrong. And always it is better than O.K. when the tears streaming down your face are caused by a man in a black cowboy hat and an almost handlebar mustache, a Cajun jockey with more horse than book sense and a scrawny $9,500 gelding.

Chip Woolley, Calvin Borel and Mine That Bird, an improbable — no, impossible — 50-1 long shot, did just that Saturday, running away with the 135th running of America’s greatest race, the Kentucky Derby.

Horse racing has had some bad big days recently.

Last year, the filly Eight Belles was euthanized on the racetrack after finishing second here. When the 2006 Derby winner Barbaro broke down in the Preakness, he brought greater public attention to the sport’s safety and welfare issues. Early Saturday it appeared to be more of the same: I Want Revenge, the morning-line favorite, came up lame in his left front ankle and was scratched.

By 6:30 p.m., when Mine That Bird squirted through a hole in the rail and skipped from the muddy track into the lane all alone, the 153,563 at Churchill Downs checked their programs to see who the heck the No. 8 horse was.

By that time, Borel and this horse he hardly knew were on their way to the winner’s circle for the blanket of roses. In 2007, after Borel guided Street Sense to a Derby victory with a similar rail-skimming, last-to-first trip, the nation was introduced to this humble, emotional man with a grade-school education and a Ph.D-sized heart. Borel, in turn, was introduced to Queen Elizabeth II at a White House state dinner.

As soon as Mine That Bird crossed the finish line six and a quarter lengths ahead of 18 others, Borel’s tears flowed with the warmth and power of Niagara Falls. He patted, hugged, hollered and dripped tears on the gelding he met for the first time Monday. Finally, Borel kissed a rose and lofted it toward the heavens in honor of his late mother and father.

“I wish my mother and father were here to see what I have accomplished in my life,” he said an hour later, dissolving in tears once again.

While it took Mine That Bird just 2 minutes 2.66 seconds to cover the Derby’s mile-and-a-quarter distance, it took his trainer, Woolley, a lifetime and a couple of days to occupy horse racing’s most hallowed real estate below Churchill Downs’s twin spires.

The 45-year-old Woolley, a former bareback rodeo rider, loaded Mine That Bird in a van and hauled him behind his truck from his base in New Mexico, stopping at Lone Star Park in Grand Prairie, Tex., so his horse could gallop a couple of miles.

Those were hard miles, especially because Woolley is on crutches after breaking his leg in a recent motorcycle accident. In fact, last week Woolley and Mine That Bird’s owners, Mark Allen and Dr. Leonard Blach, were pointing Mine That Bird to the Lone Star Derby next weekend. Instead, they decided to dream big.

“I had no real feeling about how we’d do, but we came here to be competitive,” Woolley said.

On Friday, Woolley confessed that he was just happy to be here alongside Hall of Famers like D. Wayne Lukas, Bob Baffert and Nick Zito. He was amazed that horse enthusiasts stopped him in restaurants and knew that Mine That Bird was, indeed, the 2-year-old champion last year in Canada. Allen and Blach paid more than the $9,500 Mine That Bird fetched in the auction ring — $400,000, to be exact, after he won four races in a row.

Why buy a gelding? Mine That Bird does not have the cushy life of a stud awaiting him. Allen and Blach are not going to make millions in the breeding shed.

“We wanted a racehorse, not a stallion,” Allen said.

Couldn’t you at least get a deal?

“There was no haggling,” Allen said with a no-nonsense western twang. “They wanted $400,000. We paid it.”

It looked like a bargain when Borel started sanding the rail heading into the far turn, picking off one, two, three and, finally, 15 horses. The final hurdle came with an eighth of a mile left when Mine That Bird bulled through a sliver of a hole inside Join in the Dance.

“I wasn’t worried,” Borel said. “He’s a small horse and I knew I could squeeze him through.”

Baffert’s Santa Anita Derby winner, Pioneerof the Nile, was closing in the middle of the track, but it was much too late. He finished second.

“Those cowboys came with a good horse,” Baffert said.

The Illinois Derby victor Musket Man and the Arkansas Derby champion Papa Clem clunked up for third and fourth position. But all three are destined to be footnotes in one of the tallest tales about the Derby. Beyond the match race with War Admiral, no one remembers the many horses Seabiscuit turned back.

No, Mine That Bird earned a first-place check worth more than $1.4 million for his cowboy connections and returned the second-largest win payout in Derby history for his few and true believers — $103.20 for a $2 bet. Mine That Bird, a son of Birdstone out of the mare Mining My Own, has captured five of his nine career races.

Best of all, the little-gelding-that-could allowed Woolley to blink tears back from behind his sunglasses, tip his black hat and linger over how his improbable road to the Derby had ended. Before 6:24 p.m. Saturday, he was told, no one outside the tumbleweeds of New Mexico knew who Chip Woolley was.

He gulped, then swallowed.

“They’ll know me now,” he said, as prickly as a cactus.

Yes, they will.

John Gress/Reuters

Jockey Calvin Borel celebrating aboard Mine That Bird as they win the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs on Saturday.

Here's to the victor, quere es poder. Salud.