Flatter: Breeders’ Cup dream can be inspiration for future

Lexington, Ky.

Finally, we are at the point where we can offer up the phrase that capsulizes the goal of every Breeders’ Cup bettor who shows up these next two days at Keeneland.

I came to Lexington and conquered.

Yeah, been saving that one all year. But seriously, folks.

All the talk about how the Keeneland ground will change when the fall weather finally arrives to interrupt the drought and balance the speed-favoring dirt and soften the asphalt-like turf vanishes now. We actually get to pay attention to past performances and the tote board.

WATCH: Breeders’ Cup Friday betting tips and picks.

Speaking of that, what is the over-under on when the TV commentators parachuting in for the most intense two days of racing in the world jabber about penny breakage?

“In case you’re wondering, the board isn’t broken. The winner really did pay $7.61.” And then how many people will point out that odd-numbered payouts are impossible for win, place and show? It’s a times-two thing, you know.

Hold that thought about the strange-looking numbers. It has some relevance here later.

In the meantime, it will be refreshing for actual races and actual bettors to finally overtake what a friend of mine calls the annual Breeders’ Cup “quote season.” You know. “The horse is training great, and it’s a tough field, but it’s supposed to be,” etc., etc.

There has been another set of quotes this week, and they involve this being the first Breeders’ Cup to come under the regulatory aegis of the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority. For the uninitiated, it is pronounced “high-sa” if you think it was an overdue means to solve racing’s look-the-other-way business as usual. It is pronounced “hee-sa” if you think the whole thing has been rolled out with government-issue cloaks and daggers.

I don’t know how to say it if you think both things are true.

Through all the noise, the 14 races dubbed as World Championships will go forward like the clockwork they have been for 39 years. Let’s just hope the clockwork for timing the races works better than it has at various times in recent Breeders’ Cups. Like when they could not get the times right for the turf races last year at Del Mar. Or when that bird or some-such flew in front of a tracking beam in 2020 and showed that Authentic went the first quarter-mile in 17.19 seconds, complete with the “Longines official timekeeper” logo on TV.

While racing still figures out how to hit the red and green buttons on a stopwatch, I submit for all to consider the curriculum vitae of Flightline, the greatest racehorse that mankind has ever bred. Or so the hype machine says. Or so the comments claim about my own proclamations since my vote for him for the 2021 Eclipse Awards.

Hey, when Flightline wins the Breeders’ Cup Classic on Saturday evening, I bet all those critics vanish into thin air. And if he loses, then I will vanish. I could claim I will be on vacation next week – and I will. But that is just a matter of convenience.

The Breeders’ Cup is so much more than all that falderal, of course. It is a bettor’s bacchanal. The average field size for the 14 races this week is exactly 12. The smallest field is eight. Oh, wait. The Classic has only one horse. I almost forgot my hype machine.

There always is some point during Breeders’ Cup week when I pause in my mind’s eye to observe an early Thanksgiving. That it happens as the fall colors are just past their peak here in central Kentucky makes it all the more appropriate.

We as horseplayers, horse lovers and horse fans owe a debt of gratitude every fall to John Gaines. He was the “Gaines” who owned Gainesway Farm.

In the spring of 1982, the story goes, Gaines, his wife and their son were on a drive from Lexington to Louisville. I have come to know that road extremely well this week, complete with its endless construction and enough abandoned cars to make one wonder why the shoulders are not lined for parallel parking.

Gaines spoke at a luncheon that preceded the week before Gato del Sol won the Kentucky Derby. During his speech, he said, “I have personally spoken to virtually all the prominent breeders in this country and several in Europe, and to a man they have endorsed the program as a means of our industry helping itself.”

The misogynistic vernacular of the ’80s aside, Gaines’s “program” was his call for racing’s version of the Super Bowl. Seven championship races in seven divisions on one day capped by a $3 million best-of-the-best championship.

Gaines’s keynote was to our game what Joe Namath’s 1969 “guarantee” to the Miami Touchdown Club was to football. One helped put America’s biggest sporting event on the map. The other was the cornerstone in the completely organic creation of a big-money racing event.

In another 2 1/2 years, the Breeders’ Cup was born. The original seven – the Juvenile Fillies, Juvenile, Sprint, Mile, Distaff, Turf and Classic – went off at Hollywood Park in front of a packed house that included Fred Astaire and Elizabeth Taylor.

The track and the movie stars are long gone, and the original seven have become a bloated 14. But the dream of a big, new, racing festival became a reality. And that is something that could be a touchstone in the 21st century.

Take HISA. Please. It was the very antithesis of the Breeders’ Cup. It was born not of the cooperation that Gaines rustled together four decades ago but, instead, the specter of animal-rights extremists turning racing’s divided house of inaction against itself in order to hasten its extinction. In other words, the government had to do what the racing industry would not.

It is not as if a good idea that germinates within the racing community has to be dead on arrival anymore. Consider this year’s magnum opus from Thoroughbred Idea Foundation. Its executive director Pat Cummings tirelessly pushed and prodded for the advent of penny breakage.

For the uninitiated, Cummings spoke the way Gaines did, wondering aloud why racetracks were allowed to round payouts down to the nickel and pocket the difference. It took him years to get a friendly legislature to see things his way. This summer, with the help of lame-duck Kentucky Rep. Adam Koenig, that penny breakage moved from track tills to bettors’ bankrolls to the tune of $1.1 million in the first 49 racing dates under the new state law.

When bettors across the country see these quirky numbers translate into more money in their ADW accounts, it will be only a matter of time before penny breakage is everywhere.

So there. Racing actually can fix itself when it puts its mind to it. I used to say Cummings’s organization was more talk than walk, but its efforts in Kentucky proved me wrong.

If I could turn back time and be in that room when Gaines made his pre-Derby speech 40 years ago, I probably would have shaken my head like the skeptic I am and snorted some cynical derision. Then my words would have been my lunch in the autumn of 1984.

The Breeders’ Cup these next two days at Keeneland are a reminder of Gaines’s dream and especially his indefatigability as a doer. Here’s hoping there are more of him to come. And that they are not limited to Cummings and Koenig.