Foreign-born horses are mystery at Kentucky Derby

LOUISVILLE, Ky. - One hundred years ago in a dimmer era, the Louisville Courier-Journal beheld the Kentucky Derby-record throng of 35,000 and described the "pretty women, ugly women and other women in pretty gowns and other gowns." A headline described "splotches of khaki mingled with crowds," meaning soldiers in a world at war. Actress Edna May turned up from London and said: "The first thing that I noticed was the automobiles. There were automobiles everywhere; I saw no other conveyances."

Across the sports page that week, Boston pitcher Babe Ruth recorded a seventh straight win, a 2-1 scrap in Detroit.

When a horse named for a Persian polymath, Omar Khayyám, stretched "his fiery nostrils" and then his "blaze face" showed in front to win the 1917 Kentucky Derby by two lengths, as wrote the Courier-Journal's Sam McMeekin, the equine Omar Khayyám had done more than outrun "the greatest field that ever strove for the blue ribbon event of the Bluegrass country." Foaled in England with blood so blue the newspaper dubbed his lineage "purple," he had become the first foreign-bred winner.

The next 99 springs would bring only three more, only one from across any ocean (Tomy Lee in 1959) and none at all since the Canadian Sunny's Halo in 1983. Those items dot the statistical backdrop for the colt who sleeps this week in the Churchill Downs quarantine barn marked "DETENTION BARN." For this 143rd Derby, the Ireland-bred Thunder Snow represents a whole heap of stuff: the rest of the world, the latest hope of that world's foremost stable, and some anniversaries.

One is centennial, another silver. It has been 25 years since the first Derby entry of 67-year-old Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, ruler of Dubai, vice president of the United Arab Emirates and the founder of Godolphin, the stable that has swept the world outside of the Derby and owns Thunder Snow. That 1992 entry was the Kentucky-foaled French sprite Arazi, for whom Maktoum paid $9 million to own half, and whose strolls from the barn to the track that Derby week drew such throngs of followers you'd have thought he'd discovered an effective anti-aging balm.

The previous November at Churchill Downs in the Breeders' Cup, Arazi had given jockey Pat Valenzuela "a feeling that no other horse ever has." He had caused expert hands such as those of The Washington Post's Andrew Beyer to type, "Not since Secretariat's 31-length victory in the Belmont Stakes (in 1973) has a racehorse delivered such an electrifying performance." He had prompted his half-owner, Allen Paulson, to answer a question about whether he had seen a better horse with, "No one has."

Arazi ran eighth in that Derby, and Godolphin, established in 1994, has tried here nine times since, including sporadic clusters with five entries between 1999 and 2002, two in 2009. It began with Worldly Manner in a primo spot at the top of the stretch in 1999 before an ebb to seventh, and it has continued without hitting the board. The best finish came in 2015 when Godolphin's excellent Kentucky-bred Frosted ran fourth behind American Pharoah, Firing Line and Dortmund, after prepping in the United States in the Holy Bull, the Fountain of Youth and the Wood Memorial.

Thunder Snow's route has been more typical: He raced to here through Dubai, at Maktoum's jaw-dropping spaceship of a course, Meydan. He won the UAE 2000 Guineas on Feb. 11, the UAE Derby on March 25. He won at 2 years old in England and France. He impressed hard-bitten railbirds with his work this week, but there's an overarching sense of we'll-believe-when-we-see. He opened as a 25-1 shot to win.

"Long time," the Emirati trainer Saeed bin Suroor said on Wednesday at his first Derby since 2009, when Regal Ransom ran eighth and Desert Party 14th. He said, "It is not easy to send a horse to the Kentucky Derby until you know the horse has something there." He said, "I know it's a tough race, the best horses in the world, but our horse has class."

That horse drew post No. 2 among 20 entries in a field especially Kentucky-heavy (with 16 Kentuckians among one each from New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Canada and Ireland). He just finished a trek as one of the horses flying above the world at any given moment, landing here last weekend as, like his Dubai-Derby predecessors, a mystery.

In these cases, even those who know just don't know.

"You don't know, really," said trainer Bob Baffert, who has won four Kentucky Derbies and three Dubai World Cups, including the one this past March 25 with Arrogate. "You really don't know how they're going to respond until you put them in the gate and they come out of the gate. There's always that - to me, I always feel that little bit of, like, 'I'm not sure.' It's like, maybe, 'I think he's doing well. He should run well. But, we're not sure.' "

He searched for the word before homing in: "Doubt," he said. "There's always that little doubt. So anytime you ship somewhere, you might think you're doing fine, but there's always that little doubt in the back of your mind that, 'I hope the trip didn't take more out of him.' And you don't know until it happens."

After the half-eternal flight in the other direction, Arrogate did seem a trifle off but did adapt to the heat and the dirt that wreaks the doubt. "Most turf horses, when they ship, they seem to run really consistently, because grass is grass," Baffert said. "But when you go dirt-to-dirt, it's different kinds of dirt. Every dirt track is different, so that's where the doubt comes in. Because grass, it's a different story. But basically, the way we ship horses now, they get them there quicker, they know what to do. The whole key is, as long as they're drinking water. Fluids are the main key there."

For a further factor, consider the thick, howling Derby itself. "Dirt races, you're getting that dirt all the way around there, and a lot of horses, after a while, they just get" flustered, Baffert said. "I've seen it here in the Derby. I've seen really good horses get beat by 20 lengths. The only time you'll see it is in the Kentucky Derby. You'll see the chart, and the horse, they just quit. Because there's so many horses in there, and they're getting jostled around, and they're getting the dirt, and they're getting bumped around, and they just get all keyed up. There's so many factors involved, because the big crowd, they get stirred up going there."

He said, "You have to have a great horse to get it done."

Omar Khayyám, who lived until 1938, might not have been great, necessarily, training through the winter in New Orleans and Hot Springs at a time when war chased horses across the ocean but when horses didn't fly. But after jockey Charles Borel told of "much interference" and the colt being "forced heavily against the fence" in the backstretch, he called Omar Khayyám "undoubtedly pounds the best horse in the Derby." Should any horse ever win the Derby via Dubai, people might use the same language, if probably minus "pounds" as an adverb.