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Jock knows as well as anyone, 'Brown' can lose

Johnette Howard

May 17, 2008

BALTIMORE

Post time was still a day away, but jockey Kent Desormeaux was already talking in torrents Friday, almost as fast as his Kentucky Derby-winning horse Big Brown runs, talking about why there are no guarantees in racing and retelling how 10 years ago, he sat even closer to a Triple Crown sweep than he will be in Saturday's second leg, the Preakness.

Desormeaux was atop Real Quiet then. They'd just slingshotted into the straightaway at Belmont and the crowd of 80,000 was howling, trying to help pull them home.

What happened next - starting at the top of the final turn on through to a photo finish that took six agonizing minutes to announce - has been called perhaps the most exciting finish in the Belmont's 139-year history. Desormeaux, who remembers every detail as sharply as if it were yesterday, says before you crown Big Brown such a sure thing, listen to this ...

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"I can tell you, I have the feeling of winning a Triple Crown, because at the quarter pole, I had such a hold of Real Quiet, when I let him go, I knew I was the winner," Desormeaux said. "I held and held and held and held and held him 'til we straightened away. And there was one horse in front of him and I said, 'I have so much horse. See y'all later.'

"And then he got to the 3/16ths pole ..."

What happened next is the beauty or bedeviling thing about horse racing, take your pick. But it explains why everyone who says Big Brown is a lock to win Saturday should be ignored. It's not because there's something lacking in Big Brown or his team, or that Big Brown's trainer, Rick Dutrow, has been worrying about two weeks rest not being enough for his lightly raced colt. It's not even about how fast or wet the track will be after Friday's rain.

No. As Desormeaux explained: "It's still a horse race. Just like anything else, these horses show up on race day and 90 percent of them are nothing like the horse you breeze in the morning. And 50 percent of them are different on every race day. The same horse that bounces out on the lead one race might show up and decide he wants to be quieter this time, you know? They're race horses, and they have different feelings every time you get on them."

Real Quiet was like that. There have been only 11 Triple Crown winners and Real Quiet's chances looked good after he handled Victory Gallop in the Derby and Preakness. "The Preakness, I mean, he annihilated that field," Desormeaux said. "That was probably the best he ever ran for me."

Then, like now, Desormeaux was convinced he had the best horse. "And if you watch the replay," Desormeaux said of that Belmont, "Three strides [into the race], I was a length in front. He took off leaving the starting gate."

Dutrow has said Big Brown's chances Saturday depend on the same thing: If he gets a clean break, he wins.

Oh? Desormeaux on Real Quiet again:

"I was on the best horse, and he just never saw the competition coming ... He got to the 3/16ths pole and he started gawking. He was not tired. He pulled himself up ... The only time that Victory Gallop was ever in front of him was that instant at the wire, because that's the same instant Real Quiet saw him. And I knew it. I did not think I had won. He got beat a lip and pulled up for at least 3/16ths of a mile."

But why? Just because horses are horses, different from one day to the next? Because maybe, as Desormeaux suggested, "This horse [Real Quiet] had been trained to go full stride when he hits the three-eighths pole. [But] it's the five-eighths pole at Belmont," in the longest of the Triple Crown races at 1 1/2 miles.

Afterward, a devastated Desormeaux was accused by plenty of critics - though not Real Quiet's trainer Bob Baffert - of making his move atop Real Quiet too soon. Desormeaux doesn't completely disagree. In his determination to win the Triple Crown, once Desormeaux saw Victory Gallop closing, he admittedly tried to steer Real Quiet into the challenger's way a bit to hold him off. Desormeaux admits he probably would've been disqualified even if his horse hadn't been nudged out by a nose. And he'd have deserved it.

But they did get beat. And Big Brown can too, even if he probably won't. "It's a horse race," Desormeaux repeated. "You never know."