HORSE OF THE ISSUE:
BARBARO by
E R I C F LOY D
Jockey Edgar Prado guides Barbaro to victory in the 132nd Kentucky Derby. (Photos courtesy of Churchill Downs)
A wise man once told me, “Many a great narrative is camouflaged on that occasion when it first rubs shoulders with the limelight”. Well, believe me when I tell you that this axiom certainly proved true inside the confines of Delaware Park Racetrack on October 4th, 2005. See, because even though the day’s 7th race (a one mile “Maiden Special Weight” turf affair) was captured in dazzling fashion by a 7-1 first time starter, no one in attendance could have possibly realized that the curtain had just gone up on one of thoroughbred horse racing’s most poignant tragedies. Though he fell from his mother’s womb in West Grove, Pennsylvania at Roy and Gretchen Jackson’s Lael Stables, Barbaro is still considered Kentucky bred since he was conceived (courtesy of a stallion named Dynaformer) at 20
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Three Chimneys Farm in Midway, Kentucky. Making his stakes debut on the grass about eighty-eight miles southwest of where he was foaled, Barbaro went on to set a stakes record (1:40.17) in Laural Park Racetrack’s highly regarded 1 1/16 mile Laurel Futurity. Now while he’d been masterfully maneuvered by jockey Jose Caraballo in his first (and only) two starts as a juvenile, Roy and Gretchen Jackson’s upstart was still far removed from that prominent Peruvian horseman who would pilot him into history. Inducted into Thoroughbred Horse Racing’s Hall of Fame as a jockey in 2008, the sublime Edgar Prado first mounted the equine of his dreams on New Year’s Day in 2006. Pointed towards the turf yet again in his three-year old debut by trainer Michael Matz, (this time in Calder
Race Course’s Grade III 1 1/8 mile Tropical Park Derby), Barbaro soon made a believer out of his new rider by virtue of an easy 3 3/4 length score. Subsequently asked by the media if he would risk testing a horse that has “turf champion” written all over him on the dirt along the Triple Crown trail, one Michael Matz paused ahead of circumspectly responding, “I would say you’d have to try the dirt now to see where he fits.” Eventually making his dirt debut thirty-four days later in Gulfstream Park’s much celebrated Grade III 1 1/8 mile Holy Bull Stakes, Barbaro actually wound up squaring off against not one, but two unfamiliar elements, one being the dirt course, but also a sloppy track. Initially tracking in behind a leader named Doctor Decherd for much of the race,
