Trainer Reed steps into Triple Crown whirlwind with Rich Strike

Louisville, Ky.

First thing’s first. Yes, the Preakness looks like it is next for the unlikeliest Kentucky Derby winner in more than a century.

“That’s probably the plan,” trainer Eric Reed told a cluster of reporters and photographers Sunday morning, less than 12 hours after 80-1 long shot Rich Strike made his stunning rail run to victory. “We’ve got to see how things go the next couple days, but that’s more than likely.”

“Probably” and “likely” were not supposed to be words uttered in the same sentence as “Rich Strike,” especially when it came to any notion of getting to the Churchill Downs winner’s circle let alone going for a Triple Crown.

Even Rushmoresque trainer D. Wayne Lukas, whose 11th-hour decision to scratch his horse out of the Derby allowed Rich Strike to get in, could not have envisioned this.

“I didn’t have any idea of that at all,” Lukas said. “With that horse scratching in, somewhere the racing gods must have thought that was OK. You can’t predict things like that. It just proves that anything can happen in the Kentucky Derby.”

“It just went a step further than we could ever dream,” Reed said.

The man who wore a bright red jacket Saturday that would have been the envy of yesteryear University of Louisville basketball coach Denny Crum said he had not slept Saturday night/Sunday morning. While family and friends enjoyed potent potables, Reed said he tried to restrain himself. Sometime in the intervening 12 hours, he watched the Derby video twice.

“I didn’t know where anybody else finished,” he said. “I didn’t hear the call of the race until about midnight, and I guess I got one call right at the end when he crossed the wire.”

Before that, the race calls from Larry Collmus on NBC and Travis Stone at the track were all about the smoking early pace. Summer Is Tomorrow, a sprinter miscast as a classic-distance horse, ran off to a 21.78-second opening quarter-mile that was the fastest in Derby history. That was not going to last. It certainly did not for the horses who tried to run with him.

“We just saw a pretty strong pace,” said trainer Tim Yakteen, who watched John Velázquez steer Messier to the lead with a half-mile to go only to wither nearly 20 lengths and finish 15th. “We might have to consider that there might be some distance limitations in him.”

Otherwise, Yakteen said there was nothing physically wrong with Messier or with Taiba, the colt who finished 12th in just the third race of his career.

“We broke really clean, and things were going really well,” Yakteen said. “I’m going to say it was Manny Franco (on Zozos) who sort of got a little aggressive and was pushing us down behind some horses so that we were going to take some dirt. ... We probably saw a horse that showed some of his inexperience by getting quite a bit of kickback. When you’re running, and you’re trying to breathe, and you’re getting kickback, it’s a lot to take in.”

The better for a stone-cold closer to hang back. With the suicidal early pace and the dust storm ahead of him, the stars were aligning for first-time Derby jockey Sonny León and Rich Strike to wait and wait and wait along the rail. And then pounce.

“Everything went right for him to win,” Reed said. “It was a crazy pace. And then at the quarter pole, the waters parted, and he got through. He just had to get by that one horse (Messier) in the middle of the stretch, and Sonny rode him like he rode him in every race. He was patient. He knew that to get any piece of it, he had to save ground.”

“It obviously set up for the winner,” said trainer Brad Cox, who saw Tawny Port finish seventh, Zozos 10th and Cyberknife 18th. “It was a hot pace, and we were part of it with a couple of our horses (Zozos and Cyberknife). Tawny Port finished up well; he was in the back.”

But not as far back as Rich Strike. It was not until Reed checked out the video replays that he actually saw his colt make up 17 1/4 lengths to win the race. In the maelstrom with family and friends, his feet and a bad back did not hold up as well as the horse he landed for owner Rick Dawson in a $30,000 claim last September.

“I fell down,” he said. “I didn’t see him hit the finish line.”

Reed said he would send Rich Strike back to his farm Sunday morning at the Mercury Equine Center in nearby Lexington. Presuming the horse checks out physically, he will be shipped to Pimlico Race Course next weekend. Not that he and Dawson saw this coming.

“We talked about this before,” Reed said. “Of course we didn’t think we would be the Derby winner. We were just trying to figure out what we would do in all three (classics). We wanted him to go to the Belmont. Hopefully that (1 1/2 miles) will be his best distance.”

Until Lukas decided an hour before scratch time Friday morning to take Ethereal Road out of the Derby, Reed, 57, figured he would be nowhere near Churchill Downs.

“I promise you I would have been on the lake fishing with my dad,” he said.

And if the Preakness were not in his future?

“I’d be at my track training horses at Mercury.”

What might have been. Just ask trainer Steve Asmussen, who came within Epicenter’s last 10 strides of breaking what is now an 0-for-23 Derby drought.

“Everybody knows we thought we were going to win this race, and we still do,” he said. “He moved where he needed to be very comfortably at the head of the stretch. That’s where you wanted to be. Zandon makes his run, but we hold him off. I saw the other horse, but he is not going to beat us. And then he did.”

Asmussen could have written it off to the hot, early pace. But he did not. He channeled what Lukas said Sunday about a higher power.

“I believe in divine intervention, and God is smiling on them,” he said. “All glory is through the grace of God, and we just witnessed it. Hats off to them. They won the Kentucky Derby. What a story.”

And oh, what might have been. If not for that decision by Lukas after he decided Ethereal Road “was flat (and) wasn’t doing well” on Friday morning. You better believe he knew how big a deal his decision turned out to be.

“I told Steve, ‘Gosh, if I don’t scratch, you win the Derby,’” he said. “It was one of those ‘Wow, how did this happen’ type of races. You can’t predict things like that.”