Flatter: What do Kentucky Derby 2023 trainers really mean?

Louisville, Ky.

Breathless anticipation. It is going around. No vaccinations are necessary, unless they are. Or are not. Let me please leave that debate. Quickly.

As Kentucky Derby 2023 approaches, the symptoms are obvious. On the backside at Churchill Downs, the population is growing. Big-time trainers are descending on The ’Ville. So are us small-time journalists. There are fewer of all of us than there used to be, but the vibe is the same.

It is not just Derby fever. This week it is Forte fever. It was due to reach its first crescendo Friday morning, when trainer Todd Pletcher was scheduled to roll him out with Tapit Trice for their first breezes over the Derby surface.

And just what will we have learned? Seriously. There are some astute observers of horse flesh who will know what they are seeing. Then there are many of us media types who will not. I do not see many equine-husbandry degrees on our résumés.

Dutifully we will surround Pletcher outside his well-manicured barn with the T.A.P. signs, and he will say what he is going to say. All the while he knows he works for Mike Repole and Vinnie Viola and Mandy Pope and Antony Beck, not for we who brandishing recording software on our cell phones.

On Thursday he went through the routine after he worked Kingsbarns and Major Dude.

“Both of them went very well,” Pletcher said. “I thought it was a good, steady work with a strong gallop-out, and it looked like both horses did it well in hand, getting over the surface well.”

That would come to sound familiar.

“Very good move. Good gallop-out. We’ll have a good work next week as well. I feel like we accomplished what we needed to. They came back to the barn. They both looked great.”

That was what Brad Cox said a few minutes later about Wet Paint and The Alys Look, two of his Kentucky Oaks (G1) prospects who breezed Thursday. He offered similar comments about Flashy Gem and Botanical, two more of his Oaks fillies.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

After a while it feels like those long-gone days when every space launch was televised live. I guess they all are streamed live now, but they are not must-see HD. If you are my age, you might remember when mom and dad loaded up the station wagon with the kids for a drive to the airport to watch planes take off and land. That was back in the days when planes actually took off and landed.

It all became routine, and over time we stopped paying attention, at least until the extraordinary happened. And I do not even mean something wrong. The fire bell can go off if a horse scorches the racetrack. It sure did back in 2007, when Larry Jones sent Hard Spun out five days before the Derby, and he breezed – no, blazed – five furlongs in 57.53 seconds.

“The move was faster than I told him to go, but he was within himself,” Jones told reporters that morning. “He came off the track blowing just a little bit, but he recovered within 10 or 15 minutes, and he’s feeling pretty good.”

Jones’s accentuation of the positive was ignored roundly by bettors who decided Hard Spun had emptied his chamber that Monday morning. Going off at 10-1, he led the Derby early and finished a game second to Street Sense. No one else was within 5 3/4 lengths. Hard Spun paid $9.80 to place and $7.00 to show.

That was the first Derby I covered in person. A few Mays later I was working a national radio assignment, and I convinced D. Wayne Lukas to do a live interview. We exchanged bon mots before hand when I asked him, “Do you have a minute?”

Having heard that a zillion times before, Coach said, “You know you’re lying. It won’t be just a minute.”

Then he struck up the on-air chat in a year when he did not have a Derby horse. Before I asked him to do a snapshot handicap of the race, I recounted something a trainer had told me that week.

“You have to remember,” Lukas said, “we’re all lying to you.” There was a facetious context to that line, but the broader point was indelible.

At the end of Thursday’s media gaggle with Pletcher, it was mentioned that Lukas, his old boss, once explained the endless cycle that is this game. Win a bunch of Grade 1s one afternoon. Go right back to the condition book to find races the following morning.

“That’s pretty much the way it goes,” Pletcher said.

At that moment I flashed on a moment covering the Super Bowl six years ago, when the Patriots came from 25 points behind to beat the Falcons in overtime. I sat in the postgame news conference in Houston and heard Bill Belichick actually growl these words.

“As great as today is,” he said, “in all honesty, we’re five weeks behind 30 teams in the league in preparing for the 2017 season.”

Lather, rinse, repeat.

After Pletcher agreed Thursday about racing’s endless cycle, I cracked wise by saying, “You and Belichick.”

“Yeah,” he snickered. “On to Cincinnati.”

There is a skill to translating what we hear on the backside every morning. It was Jennie Rees, the longtime turf writer turned publicist, who said it was like “handicapping the people before we handicap the horses.”

Bruno De Julio, the respected workout analyst, was on my podcast this week to talk about separating what he sees from what he hears. He trusts his seasoned eyes with horses more than his ears with humans, especially if he sees something vulnerable in a workout that leads him to bet against a particular runner.

“If a trainer says, ‘I wish I had one more work,’ I double my bet,” De Julio said. “What they’re saying is, ‘I’m worried I didn’t do enough with him.’ They’re just scared to death to send in a short horse.”

We are not at that point yet with any Derby trainer. That might not happen for another week to 10 days. By then there will be more experts manqué wearing media credentials and strutting around the barns. We all will grow weary of one another. Horsemen will have dog-eared the verbal pages of their comments.

All the breezes will look fine. The phrase “he came back good” will be, in the words of Dr. Frasier Crane, “flaunted like a tattered boa.” We will be craning our ears to find those little morsels that may feed us something more vital.

For all the science that is applied to workout videos and all the analysis that is poured into figs and sheets, we continue to guess. Just look at what happened Thursday at Keeneland. The Stonestreet homebred American Rascal came into his debut with such lofty expectations, a drone could not have captured them. Sired by Curlin, the first Lady Aurelia baby ran off the screen by 10 1/4 lengths. The Twittersphere boiled over so much, blue check marks disappeared.

“American Rascal checks all the boxes.”

“American Rascal proves that greatness runs in the family.”

“American Rascal is a true star in the making.”

“American Rascal will be the next Flightline. You’ll see.”

Can we just tap the brakes a skosh? Maybe he will be the next big thing. No doubt he will be gawked at when Wesley Ward takes him to Royal Ascot this summer to show him off to the new king.

But let’s not forget, please, that for every Flightline, there is a Dunkirk and a Hidden Scroll.

So how are we to know? Horseplayers will get plenty of opinions served with man-speak and spiced with exclamation points. And there will be the parade clouds like me floating around with a snarl and a tamping tool.

Years ago Brent Musburger said something that continues to resonate with me when it comes to absorbing mass hysteria over a betting favorite.

“Flatterman,” he said, “whenever I hear the public line up with one overwhelming opinion, I look for every good reason to go the other way.”

He said he did just that with Danny and the Miracles, the Kansas Jayhawks team that was an eight-point underdog before beating vaunted Oklahoma in the 1988 NCAA title game. Danny was Manning before Peyton and Eli. And don’t forget Cooper.

The key part of Musburger’s advice, though, was not just being contradictory. It was the part about “every good reason.” It is a lot easier to lose money betting against odds-on favorites than it is to win, especially for genuflecting contrarians.

Which brings us all back to those conversations with Pletcher and Cox. If we are putting our money where their mouths are, we may as well be Luke Skywalker looking for Hans Solo to give us some cryptic advice, whether it is about the force or the horse.

If someone has published the Trainer-English–English-Trainer Dictionary, please let me know. In the meantime, I will be back on the Churchill Downs backside recording and typing. And analyzing. And overanalyzing.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

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