Elkton, Md. – A year ago, after the big, dark bay horse arrived at a European-styled training center here, the trainer Michael Matz and his assistant, Peter Brette, shared a transcendental thought about a colt by the ho-hum name of Barbaro. But they dared not say it aloud.
Barbaro was a superhorse, Brette believed, after he first took him onto the racetrack for a morning gallop. Barbaro could sweep the Triple Crown, Matz kept thinking. It was the beginning of what would become a most unorthodox plan to chase after one of sport’s most elusive prizes.
“We were training for the Triple Crown,” Matz said, daring to tempt racing’s fates, which caution trainers not to get ahead of themselves. “It has been so long since anyone has won it, why not try something different?”
Last Saturday in the Kentucky Derby, Barbaro validated Brette’s opinion with a stunningly effortless victory in America’s most famous race. On Saturday, in Baltimore, Matz believes his undefeated colt will take the second step toward fulfilling his prophesy by jetting away from a compact field of maybe six horses in the 131st running of the Preakness Stakes.
Matz reckons he can succeed where six horses in the past nine years, from Silver Charm to Smarty Jones, failed after coming so close to horse racing immortality. He has thrown out a regimen that has been regarded by trainers as commandments etched in stone, opting instead for a new schedule, forged in his own personal setback and inspired by a brilliant colt.
While most trainers organize training to maximize fitness and build battle readiness, Matz has given Barbaro an unusual amount of rest between races in his budding career.
Trainers prefer to have their horses experienced in getting dirt kicked in their face, maneuvering through crowded fields and reacting to adversity before they run in the Triple Crown races, beyond being in shape.
Barbaro, though, ran only five times before winning the Derby, and started his career only when Matz felt he was ready, last October, relatively late for a horse with Triple Crown ambitions.
Matz, 55, came upon his fresh-horse theory at the lowest point of what turned out to be an illustrious career in show jumping.
In 1976, he was on the cusp of making the U.S. Olympic team and was forced to push his horse in the trials. Matz became an Olympian, but at the Montreal Games, he and his tired horse staggered through the competition, suffering 28 faults and knocking down seven poles.
“When I watched the replay, I felt agony,” he said. “No one, none of my teammates, wanted to get close to me. I decided then, I was never going to put a tired horse in a competition or race.”
In recent years, Matz has watched as six horses, weary from their Triple Crown campaign, have fallen short in racing’s most difficult quest.
As a group, those six horses had competed in an average of 8 1/2 races before the Derby, and roughly four of them were as 3-year-olds, usually in the 12 weeks before the first Saturday in May. Bob Baffert trained three of those horses, and two of them – Silver Charm and Real Quiet – fell three-quarters of a length and a nose short, respectively, of completing the sweep in the grueling mile-and-a-half Belmont Stakes. Eeking out those last few gallops from a tired horse in the Triple Crown’s third leg is what has so vexed trainers in recent years.
“It’s a tricky balance to keep, and a lot of it depends on your horse and how he is progressing,” said Baffert, who raced Silver Charm six times before the Derby and ran Real Quiet 12 times. “You want him to be ready for anything in the Derby. I think most of us focus on winning the Derby.
“Then you try to hold them together for the Preakness and Belmont. It looks like Michael had a horse that he could think Triple Crown with, and he believed enough in his colt’s talent to try a different route.”
Baffert said he plans to bypass the Preakness this year with Bob and John and Point Determined.
“Bob and John was the only one (under consideration),” Baffert said. “If Barbaro were to defect on Monday then I’d run Bob and John, but they (Bob and John and Point Determined) are going back Monday to California (from Louisville, Ky.) to prepare for the Belmont.”
Barbaro pulled into Churchill Downs having raced only once in the 13 weeks before the Derby. Between all his starts the colt was rested anywhere from five to eight weeks. His racing career looks odder still because his first three victories were on grass – not on dirt, the surface of the Triple Crown – at distances of a mile, a mile and a sixteenth, and a mile and an eighth.
Usually, Triple Crown hopefuls begin their careers on the dirt in races under a mile involving one turn of the track before stretching out to two-turn route races in their 3-year-old year.
Barbaro did not compete on the dirt until Feb. 4, in the Holy Bull Stakes at Gulfstream Park.