Flatter: Early exits, downgraded races are part of vicious cycle

The Kentucky Derby winner has been retired at age 3. That just does not look right.

The Grade 2 Cigar Mile. Oh, sorry. The Grade 2 Cigar Mile Handicap. That does not look right, either.

Change is inevitable in everything, but that does not mean it has to be accepted without a fight. If only Sun Tzu could come back and teach us how to deal with these particular sea changes in horse racing.

Kentucky Derby winner Mage is retired to stud.

In the absence of 2,400-year-old philosophy, there is the stated credo that was promulgated by the late Jess Jackson, who bought champions-in-waiting Curlin and Rachel Alexandra and built Stonestreet Stables around them.

“It’s good for racing for champions to run against champions.”

I still can hear Jackson saying that. Like a mantra, he uttered that sentence time and again for all of racing’s establishment to hear. Yet from the dog days of 2009 to the gloomy winter of 2010, Jackson found reasons like nascent synthetic tracks, a disdain for match races and even a surprise defeat in a forgettable wintertime stakes to keep Rachel from facing Zenyatta in what would have been the heavyweight championship of racing.

By comparison, the absence of Mage from any competition in 2024 seems like small potatoes. He is not even a champion. Neither is Rich Strike, who may or may not race again. Nor is Mandaloun, who was the last Derby victor to win a race. That actually was a month before the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission formally promoted him over the disqualified Medina Spirit in a Derby victory that still is not recognized by Equibase. Perhaps that bottled memo has not washed ashore yet at The Jockey Club.

Authentic and Country House and Justify did not race at 4. Backward and forward, it is clear where the arc of this story is going. The problem now is whether we as a racing community grudgingly accept it or figure out a solution.

It has been suggested that Kentucky Derby winners are like blue-chip players in the one-and-done era of college basketball. They know a little something about that in Lexington. Before anyone there really got to know John Wall or Anthony Davis or Devin Booker or Jamal Murray or De’Aaron Fox, those Thoroughbreds were long gone from Calipari U.

The problem with that comparison is all those ex-Wildcats are very watchable every night in the NBA. Granted, there are not a lot of Chris Livingston sightings these days, but for the purposes of this exercise, he would be more like Confidence Game than Mage.

Acceptance of this attrition may not be everyone’s option. So how does racing twist the arms of owners who want to cash in on their Derby dreams-come-true without kicking their vacation-home blueprints down the road?

The idea was floated this week on social media to put an age minimum on the sale of horses who have raced at least once. Keep them out of the ring until they are 5, it said. That looks fine in theory, but good luck trying to stop these animals from being sold overseas. That does not even take into account the pitter patter of litigious professionals who would break speed records to file papers containing the phrase restraint of trade.

At some point it would seem the whole racing-to-breed trend will tilt and topple like a Jenga tower. At the rate the sport is going with the foal crop roughly 2 1/2 times smaller than it was in 1990, races eventually will run out of horses and handle and human patience, thereby cutting off the financial incentive to perpetuate the Thoroughbred breed.

Presuming, however, this continues to be a mere theoretical problem for the faceless generations of the future, how do we prop up what is left of the present? Downgrading important races that are steeped in tradition is not the answer.

The Cigar Mile, the Woodward and the Clark were three of the five races that lost their Grade 1 status this year. So were the Starlet and Rodeo Drive, but come on. They do not have the cachet of the Cigar Mile, the Woodward and the Clark.

“It’s a race with a lot of tradition,” trainer Dale Romans said last week about the Clark. “Some of these grades that they drop off all these old races I strongly disagree with. They did the same thing with the Wood (Memorial). They did the same thing with the Blue Grass (from 2017 to 2021) and the Cigar Mile. I think there are races around this country that are Grade 1s no matter what. They still feel like a Grade 1 to me, and I think people should show them a lot of respect.”

Hell, the Cigar Mile survived a jockeys strike when it was run for the first time as the NYRA Mile in 1988. It is the last big race each year in New York. For crying out loud, taking away its Grade 1 is like forgetting to hang the UNICEF snowflake over 57th and Fifth.

I have it on good authority from someone who was in the American Graded Stakes Committee room last winter that the itinerant Arlington Million came within one vote of losing its Grade 1 status. Yeah, right. If Churchill Downs Inc. could turn its back while a wrecking ball leveled the most beautiful racetrack in the country, then let’s just scorch the earth. We’ll show them.

I know all the arguments. Smaller fields and lower quality do not a Grade 1 make. Out of 12 entrants, there are only four graded-stakes winners in Saturday’s Cigar Mile. Yet the same thing could have been said about the 2022 Belmont Stakes, which often looks more on PPs like a top-level allowance race. Come next year at Saratoga, to avoid starting the race on a turn, word is the Belmont will be run at 1 1/4 miles. Classic or not, would that not merit a downgrading, too?

Go back to where this train of thought began. If there are fewer and fewer Kentucky Derby winners showing up for racetrack encores, is it right to strip foundational races of their well-earned status? That only will provide further discouragement for owners already reluctant to risk their precious cargo on yet another two minutes of competition.

If I, codger, am stubbornly and repeatedly unable to cope with change, so be it. With increasing frequency it seems I have to chase wanderers off my metaphorical lawn. I leave the interpretation of that image to beholders.

In reviewing the minutes of Sun Tzu’s last meeting with us in The Art of War, he actually did write something about facing change.

“In the midst of chaos, there is opportunity.”

As a matter of fact, it comes next week. To all the movers, shakers and wannabes who have been deputized to assume their positions on panels at the Global Symposium on Racing in Arizona, welcome to chaos. Behold your opportunity.