Flatter: Has Sovereignty done enough to be horse of the year?

What if they rolled out a purple carpet and threw a party full of dubiously labeled world championships, but the best horse from the host nation RSVP’d regrets?

The racing year 2025 may have Sovereignty as its poster colt, but it will be framed in his untimely disappearances from a chance to win a Triple Crown and from a punctuating performance Saturday in the Breeders’ Cup Classic.

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“It’s not even a conversation,” trainer Bill Mott said Wednesday. “He made the decision. That (fever) made the decision. That is what we said from the beginning. If he re-spiked, he would be out.”

A retirement has not been announced, but to use a cricket term, it smells like Godolphin might pull up stumps, the quicker to perpetuate those Into Mischief and Bernardini bloodlines.

These disappointing and untimely scratches are getting to be too familiar. So, too, is the collective reaction that has evolved from shock to surprise to indifference. It is the gristle that comes from being around the game for very long, especially as its stars have evolved from touring the country to making rare cameo appearances.

How often nowadays do we hear that a horse spiked a fever? It has become racing’s answer to the NBA’s load management, the throwaway alibi that turns into shorthand to satiate us nosy media types.

This is not to say Mott is trying to pull one over this time. His description of Sovereignty’s symptoms this week have been far too specific to be lumped into others’ breezy and even disrespectful uses of the spiked-a-fever crutch.

Even Mott wondered aloud whether his star caught a bug while traveling in one of those God-awful crates FedEx uses to fly horses. Or maybe Sovereignty caught some virus going around in his circle.

“Something in the air?” Mott said. “Another horse? Something in the stall? Who knows?”

Whatever the case, Sovereignty suffered the misfortune of adding another blemish of fate to his 2025 ledger.

He really has had three. The first came when the pace was no better than middling in the Grade 1 Florida Derby, where Sovereignty came charging at the end only to come up 1 1/4 lengths short as the 8-5 favorite.

“This doesn’t have to be his best race,” Mott said that day. “Sometimes you can look at it and say maybe that’s a good thing. You don’t want their best race before the big event.”

Wise and prescient words, indeed, ahead of a Kentucky Derby triumph. But after winning U.S. racing’s most coveted price came the decision by Godolphin and Mott to thumb their collective noses at the Preakness.

“There was no reason physically why we couldn’t have run in the Preakness,” Mott told Daily Racing Form’s David Grening. “We had no excuse other than we didn’t feel like it.”

Just as it was in 2019 when Country House was promoted by stewards at Churchill Downs before he got hurt, the announcement that there would be no trip to Pimlico came three days after the big win. With apologies to Mitch Albom, these Tuesdays with Motty have not been a hit.

Then came this week’s scratch. Fair or not, it felt warmed over, and not just because it was the result of a body temperature that went above 101.5 degrees.

“I really think this horse was a fan favorite at this point, and I feel badly that they are not going to be able to see him participate,” Mott said.

Mott and Godolphin did wrong by the sport in May, but to be fair, they did right by the horse this week.

All this begs the question whether Sovereignty has enough on his résumé to be the horse of the year.

It would not be a first. Reported injuries pushed John Henry, Spend a Buck, Criminal Type, Charismatic, Point Given, Mineshaft and Justify into early retirements, which kept them out of the Breeders’ Cup but not from their championships. Holy Bull, who won the trophy in 1994, skipped the Breeders’ Cup partly because his connections neglected to pay the affordable, early-nomination fee. Rachel Alexandra was the 2009 horse of the year even though her late owner Jess Jackson begged out of racing on “that plastic,” his pejorative for the old synthetic track at Santa Anita.

It says here Sovereignty will be the 10th horse of the year to miss the Breeders’ Cup since the championships began in 1984. It also says here that his absence from the Del Mar racetrack this weekend is a shame and that this brilliant star deserved better.

And as racing fans, so did we.

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As noted in what we in the business call the shirttail paragraph below, I am turning off the 5 a.m. Friday alarm for good and saving my byline for less frequent occasions, perhaps as soon as Breeders’ Cup Saturday night. My podcast, a labor of love now in its ninth year, will continue apace.

To quote the late Van Amburg at the end of his last newscast in 1986 on KGO-TV in San Francisco, “I’m expected to say goodbye, but I’m not going to say goodbye. Just that I won’t be saying hello to you from here anymore.”

Ron Flatter will be semi-retired after the Breeders’ Cup. This is the last of his regular Friday columns at Horse Racing Nation. Comments below and at RonFlatterRacingPod@gmail.com are welcomed, encouraged and may be used in the feedback segment of the Ron Flatter Racing Pod, which will continue to be posted every Friday.