Flatter: Flightline is a hot ticket, even if that ticket is free

Lexington, Ky.

The hottest ticket in town this weekend is not for Kentucky football, especially since the Wildcats are playing at Tennessee. It is not even for a table at Jeff Ruby’s or Carson’s.

Just try getting a prime seat Saturday at Keeneland to watch Flightline.

No adjustment of your calendar is necessary. The bigger deal is another week later, when Flightline will go off at odds of 1-10,000 or something like that in the Breeders’ Cup Classic.

Those ticket experiences cost a nice pile o’ money. Some of the two-day packages for the self-styled World Championships had a face value of $1,568. Now those tickets are going for more than $5,000 apiece on StubHub.

But expensive does not necessarily equate to hot. In this case, the hottest ticket is free. As a matter of fact, tickets are not even required this weekend when Flightline turns in his last workout before the $6 million race – and maybe the last of his racing career. It will be festival seating Saturday for his breeze at 7:30 a.m. EDT, a half-hour before sunrise.

“It kind of gives you that American Pharoah-Travers feel,” said David Levitch, the Horse Racing Nation handicapper also known as the Paddock Prince. “When he ran in the Travers, they had a big crowd to watch.”

Not the race. The gallop the day before. Levitch, now 28, was a not-quite 21-year-old basketball player at the University of Louisville when Pharoah carried the first Triple Crown in 37 years into what would be the last loss of his career.

I was an all-too-cynical 56-year-old journalist working as a free-lancer that weekend for America’s Best Racing and for an international radio station owned by the Australian racing industry. Pharoah was such a big deal that even his gallops were must-see events. If there had been room at Saratoga to set up bleachers for his shed-row walks before that Travers, it would have happened.

Levitch made the comparison on my racing podcast this week, and he absolutely nailed it. Other than this time being a full workout vs. the gallop of 2015, the biggest difference between these free glimpses of Flightline and Pharoah is that this time it is on a Saturday a week before the race, not a Friday the day before. Most folks showing up at Keeneland this weekend will not be going to work right after. No need for that “traffic was slow leaving the racetrack” excuse for the boss.

Oh, yeah. This public workout is still a week before that next supposed public workout worth $6 million. The hype machine of which I am admittedly a part would have us believe the Classic will be a virtual walkover.

Levitch’s comparison to 2015 had me flashing back to some vivid memories. I actually was not at Pharoah’s gallop gaggle that day. I was somewhere on the New York State Thruway driving north from Manhattan. I am told there were 10,000 people who beat me to The Spa. Or 15,000. Or 20,000. Or whatever number is stoked by the inflated currency of distant memory and the perennially haphazard estimates of racing crowds.

Hindsight suggests that all that attention on American Pharoah that morning got him so keyed up that he ran his race that day. By the time he got to the Travers nearly 36 hours later, he was sweating bullets but not firing them.

There were other reasons American Pharoah lost that Saturday afternoon. Substitute jockey José Lezcano rode Frosted aggressively, getting him up in Pharoah’s grill throughout the race. After a Haskell victory the month before, there was first- and second-guessing of trainer Bob Baffert for shipping Pharoah back and forth across the country for three East Coast races in as many months. And Javier Castellano had Keen Ice perfectly poised to pick up the pieces for the most talked-about upset since Blame stunned Zenyatta five years before.

What all this tells us is that racehorses are human. Wait. I saw that, too. You know what I mean. If future Hall of Famers ranging from American Pharoah to Zenyatta can be upset, why not Flightline? He is only 5-for-5. Baaeed was 10-for-10 before he lost this month in his career finale at Ascot.

“I would say that in the Breeders’ Cup Classic, traditionally, the best does win,” FanDuel TV’s Caton Bredar said, also on the Flatter Pod. “It’s easy to get enamored with the idea of a super horse unnecessarily, but in this case I really think he’s earned that. I haven’t seen him in the flesh, but every time I see even video of him, I am bowled over.”

Then Bredar uttered two sentences that may hold the key to why Flightline may be less vulnerable than other superstars who were not so lightly raced.

“He’s been so carefully handled,” she said, “that it’s gotten him to this point. There’s no reason to believe that he’s not going to run his ‘A’ game.”

That sounds like bad news for horseplayers who are trying to find ways to win money on the Classic – aside from singling Flightline in horizontal bets.

“If you’re a real gambler,” Levitch said, “it’s going to be hard to swallow 2-5 on him.”

At this point it sounds like 2-5 might be an overlay, although time has a way of healing absurdly short prices.

The next week will seem like forever for Flightline’s trainer John Sadler. Like any good horseman he is most comfortable in the quiet of the morning at the barn. The next eight days will be far from that. The demands for his time have led the Breeders’ Cup to schedule him for a daily media briefing at 8:30 a.m. EDT from now through next Friday.

At age 66, Sadler has been through this sort of pressure before. At age 4, Flightline may be oblivious, even if he may wonder why 10,000 or 15,000 or 20,000 or a gazillion pairs of eyeballs will be on him in the dim morning light Saturday.

The reality of shorter days mean this weekend’s spotlight may not be bright from nature’s point of view. But it will be incandescent for us mere mortals. And it will stay that way right up until the last day of this Breeders’ Cup week.

One more thing. Seating for Flightline’s workout will be first come, first served.