Better late than never for Flightline to go 1 1/4 miles

Del Mar, Calif.

If John Sadler had his way, the questions about whether Flightline could win a 1 1/4-mile race or any race going two turns would have been answered by now.

In the affirmative, of course.

“He just got started late,” Sadler said while sitting on the steps outside his barn office at Del Mar on Thursday, another day preparing undefeated Flightline for Saturday’s Grade 1, $1 million Pacific Classic.

The late start was because of some sort of accident that left Flightline with a gash on his right hip. There was no video record of what happened at Saratoga in 2020. The best guess is Flightline made a bad move into some sharp object in his stall. A door. A gate. A fence. Whatever.

A lot of stitches later, his 2-year-old season was lost. But not his gradual stretching out from six furlongs to seven furlongs to a mile to 1 1/4 miles. Now at age 4, Flightline finally gets to his fifth race this weekend, barely 16 months after his debut.

“He’s had a kind of natural progression,” Sadler said in his interview for Horse Racing Nation’s Ron Flatter Racing Pod. “Ideally, you’d probably like to go from a mile to a mile-and-an-eighth, but this is what we have in front of him.”

One thing Sadler and lead owner Kosta Hronis did since Flightline finally was shipped from the New York sales ring to his current California home was to flex their trademark patience. It has been nearly three months since Flightline’s last race, an impressive, six-length victory in the Met Mile (G1) at Belmont Park.

“We’ve had a lot of time to train him into this race,” Sadler said, “so we think he’s going to be ready.”

Looking at his past performances, Flightline has one of those horizontal lines between each of his race dates. Four months from his Santa Anita debut until his allowance score almost exactly a year ago at Del Mar. Then nearly four more until he won the Malibu (G1) at Santa Anita. Then another five until the Met Mile.

Patience was the virtuous reason behind a lot of that stopping between starts. But not the gap early this year.

“He got a little hock soreness after the Malibu,” Sadler said, “so we couldn’t run him in March. So then you have to adjust, wait for the horse to come through it. He came through it fine.”

But back up for a moment. If the aches and pains from the Malibu had not shown up, what would Sadler have done with Flightline during the spring? In January he spoke of a possible, two-turn test. Then the target became the seven-furlong San Carlos Handicap (G2) in March. That was before Flightline’s leg barked no.

By then Sadler already was looking ahead to the main goal he had set for the spring, especially since the racing schedule left him with so few options.

“The Met Mile was his first mile race,” he said. “The calendar didn’t really put anything out there for us between this.”

Sadler faced a similar void this summer. Looking for something in a furlong size of 8 1/2, he looked at the San Diego Handicap (G2) on July 30. The other choice in his mind was to train up to the Pacific Classic – and the big leap from a mile to 1 1/4 miles.

“I really got to thinking once over this track is enough,” Sadler said, “so he’ll got Saturday and then go into the Breeders’ Cup after that.”

That means another one of those horizontal lines in the PPs, although Sadler did not completely rule out the possibility of one start in between Del Mar and Keeneland.

“We always have a prep here in California with the Awesome Again,” he said, referring to the Grade 1, 1 1/8-mile race at Santa Anita on Oct. 1, exactly five weeks before the Breeders’ Cup Classic at Keeneland. “But I would think with this horse we would more than likely train him up to the Breeders’ Cup.”

With so few races to his name, Flightline has become a must-see attraction in the morning. The most prominent of rival horsemen admitted to taking time out of his schedule to watch. Not just the colt but the trainer.

“I could just tell by John Sadler’s body language that he’s very happy with the way he’s training,” said Bob Baffert, who sends Dubai World Cup (G1) winner Country Grammer into the Pacific Classic against Flightline. “I’ve had heavy favorites that I knew going in that I’m not really as confident as I might be.

“The pressure is when you have the best horse, and maybe he’s not training as well as you’d like him to. That’s pressure. There’s good pressure, and there’s bad pressure, and I think John’s having good pressure.”

For the last eight Saturday mornings, Flightline has worked four or five or six furlongs. Once he breezed seven. Always with assistant trainer and exercise rider Juan Leyva up. Three times he fired bullets with the fastest works over the distance that day.

Usually, this Tapit colt flies solo. The better to conserve his abundant energy.

“You don’t want to work him in company so much, because it’ll make him go too fast,” Sadler said. “With him we just cruise him around there. He did have one work here when we worked him from the gate. We wanted to see him break better and sit behind a horse, which he did. That was one of the rare works where he worked in company, but company we don’t really need with him.”

There will not be much company for Flightline in the Pacific Classic. Only five other horses will line up against him. Baffert nominated 3-year-old Taiba for the race, but he only would have sent the Haskell (G1) runner-up in if Flightline had been ruled out. Instead, Taiba will head to the Pennsylvania Derby (G1) on Sept. 24 and face open company another day.

That is one thing Sadler did not wait to do with Flightline. Only in the Malibu was he limited to horses his own age.

The question now is whether he will face horses his own caliber. The National Thoroughbred Racing Association poll has mirrored what TimeformUS has said. That even with only one race all year, Flightline is America’s best horse in training.

Although Sadler said that encomium and the colt’s status as the 5-2 morning-line favorite in this weekend’s pool of the Breeders’ Cup Classic Future Wager are for others to decide. His job is to make sure Flightline is ready for the Pacific Classic.

To the trainer’s eyes, he is.

“He doesn’t need to improve,” Sadler said. “He just needs to keep doing what he’s been doing. He’ll run Saturday in another thing that’ll be new to him, the mile-and-a-quarter. Then he’ll have the Breeders’ Cup against more horses and everything like that. Everything’s a new challenge, and we’re looking forward to taking them on.”