American Pharoah’s Mile and a Half to History

He had been cooped up all day long. They stuck the best horse on the planet inside a barn at the end of the road, nestled up along Hempstead Turnpike, and didn’t allow anyone in. American Pharoah was there all day long. No visitors, just officials – and there were even very few of them. The sliding doors to the forest-green barn with the white roof stayed closed from the moment Belmont Park opened. People walked by and asked if the horse had come out.

No, they were told, he had not.

At 5:42 p.m., American Pharoah finally emerged from the barn and into the late afternoon, staring straight at the Wendy’s and the Subway and the Tobacco Junction across the street. It was showtime. The biggest, baddest horse on the grounds was ready to be seen. The handlers took him out back and gave him a bath, the sun glistening off of his rich, chocolate-colored coat, the steam rising off his back and dancing in the light.

Bob Baffert, the trainer of this majestic beast, stood a few feet away watching with one eye while tying the shoes of his 10-year-old son, Bode.

“What happened to the rain?” Baffert had said minutes earlier on his walk to the barn. “I wanted the rain to tighten up that track. I want the same track Secretariat ran on – how do I get that?”

He was kidding. Well, maybe not. Baffert knew that his horse could excel on the same type of hard and fast track that had produced the most famous Triple Crown winner in racing history. But this place has been cruel to those attempting horse racing’s most arduous feat. Win three races in 36 days, over three states on three different tracks. Only 11 horses had ever accomplished the feat. None since 1978.

There had been challengers, of course – Baffert having been on the doorstep three times before, in 1997 with Silver Charm, 1998 with Real Quiet and 2002 with War Emblem. But Belmont Park is an unforgiving track. A one-and-a-half-mile long monster, which has chewed up and spit out Triple Crown contenders over the last 37 years.

Until American Pharoah kicked the track known as “Big Sandy” in the teeth, winning the 147th Belmont Stakes by the fourth-largest margin ever from a Triple Crown winner, at 5 1/2 lengths.

“I just feel like I have a very special horse,” Baffert would say later, amid the celebration. “And he’s the one that won. It wasn’t me. It was the horse.”

That seems like as good of a place to start, doesn’t it? After all, the horse is the one that truly does all the work. American Pharoah had become the latest horse to arrive in New York at the Belmont Stakes, needing to win the final leg to complete the Triple Crown. We had all been here before – it was almost a year to the day that California Chrome became the last almost-got-it horse – and frankly, it was getting kind of tiring. To not have a Triple Crown winner for almost four decades? At some point, you’re just going to give up chasing the carrot. But here we all were again on Long Island on what turned into a splendid spring Saturday, waiting to see if a horse owned by a millionaire former Egyptian beer baron could end the streak.

If you’ve never been to the Belmont Stakes, it falls somewhere near the depravity of the Preakness Stakes yet far below the elegance of the Kentucky Derby. But in the makeup of the Triple Crown, it’s a necessary evil – no one’s favorite, but you have to do it.

“I like the Derby the best,” said Valerie Bridges, an Ocala, Florida resident who made the trip up with her girlfriends for the week. “But at the end of the day, the Belmont is what you need to finish off the Triple Crown.”

And so once again, everyone schlepped to the massive racetrack hoping to see history. Saturday at the Belmont is the place where Friday night meets Saturday morning, where women show up in maxi-dresses and miniskirts and where the bros in polos alternate between Bud Light and Bud heavy.

OK, enough of that. Back to the horse.

Pharoah, ridden by jockey Victor Espinoza, had beaten a crowded field of 18 at the Kentucky Derby and smashed the Preakness field by seven lengths after a deluge hit the place. Suddenly, everyone started to wonder: Is this the year that it finally happens?

His bombastic owner, Ahmed Zayat, told folks to “Bring it on!” after the Preakness. The charismatic son, Justin Zayat, said all of the right things throughout the run to Belmont. And the Hall of Fame trainer, Baffert, had done his best to keep things in perspective. At the draw for the race on Wednesday afternoon though, the magnitude of the chase for history suddenly began to set in.

In Rockefeller Center, the Zayats and Baffert went coy.

“I don’t think about it, because I know how tough it is,” Baffert said.

And after poking the racing gods with his post-Preakness comments, Ahmed Zayat stood in front of the statue of Prometheus and brought anything but fire to the crowd in front of him.

“I think we’re going in the best we could,” he said.

The message was a simple one: History would be up to American Pharoah.

The walk from Barn No. 4 to the paddock seemed to take forever. A mess of people and television cameras had crowded the area where American Pharoah had to turn from the relative peace of the stable area and head into a cauldron of noise and anticipation on the other side of the road.

“I think I’m starting to get nervous,” Bode Baffert told his dad as the big horse got ready to make the trek.

“No, no,” the father replied, patting him on the back.

Going from the barns to the paddock is when the reach for history goes from something people talk about to something real. And if the task at hand wasn’t daunting enough, American Pharoah had to walk up Count Fleet Drive to get to Secretariat Avenue. He had to pause momentarily for the NBC cameras right in front of the barn where Secretariat – the baddest horse who ever lived – was stabled in 1973, when he crushed the field by such a margin his jockey had to look back to see everyone else.

On his way to the paddock, Baffert and the Pharoah training team were greeted with all sorts of cheers.

Good luck, Bob!

This is the year!

You’ve got the hang of it now, Bob!

(Baffert, to his credit, played it cool, keeping only a slight smile on his face. His only show of emotion? Yelling “Guacamole!” so his children wouldn’t step in the huge piles of horse poop.)