Jacinto Vasquez and Buddy Delp sat together in the warmth of the morning light. It was Belmont day, and they watched the early races together, side by side, and chatted like the old friends that they were.
Amiable Jacinto had ridden for Buddy many times, going all the way back to the 1960s. They had the intimacy of two veterans who had heard and seen it all in the racing business, and they had no qualms about speaking to each other frankly. But what Buddy said to Jacinto that morning astonished the Panamanian. “Today,” Buddy said, “I’m going to break Secretariat’s record.”
It was an absurd statement. Secretariat had won the Belmont by a staggering thirty-one lengths to set the track record. It was a performance that was unequaled in history.
Buddy’s prediction was ridiculous but nevertheless fascinating. He was actually revealing his strategy, right there. In effect he was telling Jacinto precisely what his horse would do. He intended to have the Bid charge right out of the gate to the lead and then sprint the lengthy mile-and-a-half track in order to show that his horse was even faster than Secretariat.
Jacinto, who thought only of winning, couldn’t wrap his mind around why Buddy would risk losing only to chase the ghost of a horse from the past. But Buddy had different considerations than mere victory, and ego and money were chief among them.
Winning the Triple Crown, and beating Secretariat’s record, would enrich Buddy. The trainer was tied into Spectacular Bid’s next business venture as a high-class horse gigolo. It was a forgone conclusion that Spectacular Bid would win the Triple Crown and make a great deal of money in syndication. But besting Secretariat was another matter. It would cement the Bid’s reputation as the greatest racehorse of all time and take the price tag on his syndication to stratospheric levels.
Jacinto didn’t care about any of that. He was all about sound racing strategies, and he knew a bad idea when he heard one. “Mr. Delp, listen,” he said. “The day Secretariat raced and broke the [Belmont Stakes] record, the track was two, three seconds faster than it is today.” Jacinto looked Buddy right in the eye and laid it on the line for him.
“You trying to do the same thing Secretariat did?” he said. “You never going to win the race.”
“I’m going to win,” Buddy repeated, “and I’m going to beat Secretariat.”
“Bullshit!” Jacinto shot back. “They gonna catch your ass the last part of the race.”
Jacinto knew what he was talking about. He was one of the few riders who had ever beat Secretariat, and he had done it on an undistinguished animal named Onion. Buddy, of course, did not heed the words.
And so that was how the day began, with a braggart boasting that he would torch the century’s fastest racehorse with an animal that had just been Scotch-taped together by Dr. Harthill.
Meanwhile, Ronnie Franklin, the young man who was under tremendous pressure to actually ride that horse to victory, had a difficult day ahead of him. Besides the Belmont Stakes, Buddy had him scheduled to ride in the sixth race. Like the Belmont, the sixth was a one-and-a-half-mile race, so Buddy believed that riding in it would familiarize Ronnie with the track and especially its brutally long distance.
But Ronnie wouldn’t be riding alone in the sixth race; his old tormentors from the Florida Derby, Angel Cordero and Georgie Velasquez, were scheduled to ride too. And it had been only three days since Angel had thumped Ronnie with his horse out on the same track. It was the Puerto Rican’s retaliation for their war of words that had spun out of control. Cordero was still seething, and no one could say for sure what he might do.
Ronnie’s mount, Seethreepeo, had been purchased at the same Kentucky yearling sale that had produced Spectacular Bid. He was named for the effete, gold-plated robot in Star Wars, but he was in a talent galaxy far, far away from the Bid. Nevertheless, he was a fine horse that had finished in the money in his last twelve straight races.
The sixth race was anything but easy for Franklin. He was bumped by both Cordero and Velasquez, and he was in no mood to take it. When the running was over, he confronted Cordero back in the relative privacy of the jockeys’ room, and they almost came to blows again—this time, only a few moments before the Belmont Stakes.
The two riders got face to face in an aggressive posture. They shouted loud obscenities at each other as the other riders and the valets watched them express their blistering rage and mutual contempt. The unwitting audience looked on as the two riders thundered at each other, raining spittle, and becoming more aggressive. Finally, they were separated.
As they all appeared for the post parade, Spectacular Bid was a prohibitive favorite, but it would be no cakewalk. Instead of the paltry five-horse posse that Franklin and the Bid had faced at Pimlico for the Preakness, the Belmont featured ten hearty horses and riders. Flying Paster was gone, a victim of failed expectations. But a new challenger was there to take his place, a talented and well-rested horse named Coastal.
Coastal’s owners and trainers had been indecisive. They took their time before deciding whether they would even enter him in the Belmont. Buddy Delp watched their deliberations with a great deal of interest. Although Buddy was a true believer in his own baloney about the Bid’s being the greatest horse in the world, he also knew what Coastal could do. “Obviously this horse can run,” Buddy said. “I wish he’d stay in the barn.”
The highly regarded Coastal wasn’t going to sneak up on anyone, yet his owners had much to consider before forking over the $20,000 entrance fee. First of all, like everyone else, he’d already lost to Spectacular Bid. At the World’s Playground Stakes he’d finished seventeen and a half lengths behind the Bid.
But that was back when both horses were still only two-year-olds, and a lot had changed since then. For one thing, Coastal’s 1979 schedule was leisurely. He’d had but three races for the entire year so far, and all were victories. One of them was the prestigious Peter Pan Stakes, also at Belmont Park, where Coastal had smoked a well-regarded field by thirteen lengths.
Even with his relatively breezy schedule Coastal had his bruises. His massive, almond-shaped right eye was ulcerated and had required surgery. After the operation he wore a special cup to shield the eye from further damage. It had only recently been discarded.
The Bid was surely as exhausted as Coastal was rested. Buddy had worked his star horse hard in 1979—some felt too hard. He was on a streak of twelve straight stakes victories. In the last year he had run sixteen races on twelve different tracks—a brutal pace.
The previous three weeks, in particular, had been torrid. Bid traveled to three different states—Kentucky, Maryland, and New York—to face the most formidable competition in the nation. In addition to the strain of the Triple Crown races, Buddy’s training regimen included “blowouts,” running his horse full speed during exercise to simulate racing conditions, something he did only days before both the Preakness and the Belmont Stakes.
In both blowouts the Bid had registered blistering speeds. These exercise sessions proved the health and vitality of the horse, but they took a lot out of the animal and should have required a period of recovery. For brutal Buddy, however, running hard was simply what a racehorse did. He saw no need for accommodation.
Despite Coastal’s advantages, his team members were not at all confident that he could beat the Bid. They didn’t make the final decision to enter their horse and pay the remainder of the supplemental fee until race day. Perhaps they should have felt a little better about their chances. After all, Coastal had a few things in common with Spectacular Bid. He, too, was Kentucky-bred with noble bloodlines. And like the Bid, he had an excellent trainer with Maryland roots.
Coastal’s tutor was David Whiteley, the son of Frank Whiteley Jr., the difficult trainer who had once given Jacinto Vasquez so much grief about his Latin heritage. David wasn’t considered to be as talented a trainer as his father, but he was a much calmer, more decent and polished man.
In high school, David had been a distinguished, even brilliant, student. He stood out at the prestigious McDonough School in North Baltimore, giving his father hopes that his son would pursue a more lucrative and less manic career than his own. He wanted David to study veterinary medicine. But David was adamant that he wanted to follow in the footsteps of his hero-father and train horses.
Frank continued to push his son toward college, but David held his ground and insisted that his father teach him the skills of a trainer. It was a father-son standoff that ended only when Frank pretended to give in. He agreed to take David on as an apprentice trainer but held a secret and ugly plan to get his kid back to school. “Dumb little son of a bitch,” Frank told an old friend. “I’ll work his ass to death.”
Knowing how anxious his son was to please him, Frank kept him hopping all day long in the broiling summer sun. The work pace was so brutal that David finally collapsed one day near the exercise track in a pool of his own perspiration. The young man was rushed to the hospital, where he was diagnosed with exhaustion and dehydration. His dangerous situation had been created by his own father’s secret agenda and misapplied love.
However harmful Frank’s plan was, it worked. When David finally got well, he did indeed agree to go to college. He enrolled at the University of Maryland and studied alongside his boyhood friend, Jimmy Stewart.
Stewart’s father, like Frank Whiteley, was a horse trainer, and Stewart was on track to be a veterinarian. The two boys had a lot in common—so much so that Jimmy couldn’t help but compare himself to David and found himself wanting. “I had good grades,” Stewart remembered, “but David had a 4.0. I took regular math, but David took math for engineers. I took French, but David took Russian. And he gets the 4.0.”
In short, David easily had the intellectual ability for veterinary school or any other significant profession. But he went back to his dad and told him he wanted to quit school and resume his lessons in horse training.
Frank would still not relent. He sent David back to school, this time to George Washington University, which he perceived to be more challenging than Maryland. David got all A’s there too, but he was done. At the end of the semester he asserted control over his own life, left school for good, and began his training career in earnest.
Because Frank Whiteley had such a singular and difficult personality and a legendary career, David was naturally compared to him. One jockey who rode for both father and son observed their striking differences. “I knew Frank; he was really, really a tough guy,” Ruben Hernandez said. “He was the type of guy you sometimes hesitate to talk to because of the way he come about. He didn’t lose his temper, but he always cuss a lot and he always talks tough. Sometimes, I like to approach him and ask him a question, but I hesitate to do it because I don’t know what his reaction is going to be.”
Ruben did not find David to be nearly as intimidating. “David Whiteley was a different guy, one of those very quiet guys,” Ruben said. “He don’t fool around. . . . It was black and white for him. He tell you the way he thinks, tell you what he wants, tell you the way things [are] supposed to be done. He know his business.”
Hernandez appreciated David’s straightforward approach, and David felt a rapport with Ruben. Perhaps that connection was why David chose Hernandez for Coastal, his prize colt, though he might have selected any one of the other, more celebrated, New York jockeys that he knew. David stuck with Hernandez, and the decision was a wise one since much of the horse’s later success was attributed to the rider.
Ruben Hernandez was a gentle, genial, and likable man who had started on the path of a professional athlete in Panama City when he was only thirteen years old. One of his uncles, also a rider, saw his potential and enrolled him in a school for jockeys.
But before Ruben learned to ride, he was taught to be humble. He started out by working in the stables as a groom and a hot walker. “I did everything you’re supposed to do in the backstretch,” he said.
From there he followed a methodical path to becoming a full-fledged jockey. At age sixteen, he moved up to galloping and breezing horses. By eighteen, he was 5 feet tall and one hundred pounds, the ideal size for a rider. And he already had experience. With his perfect build and impeccable training, Hernandez appeared at the gate of Hippodromo Presidente Remón, Panama’s only race track, and obtained his professional license.
Hernandez led Panama’s jockey standings for two and a half years. After four years, he already had more than four hundred professional victories. His early success amplified his talent and put him on the radar of others in the business. He was quickly approached by an American agent who urged him to ride in the States.
Hernandez saw the opportunity and agreed. He started out in Puerto Rico, but nothing there went his way. The week he arrived in San Juan, there was a jockeys’ strike at El Comandante Race Track. The regular jockeys had stopped working because they were disgusted with men like Ruben who were coming in from the outside and taking the better mounts. So after two weeks without races, or paychecks, Ruben went right back to Panama. It would take him another year before he worked up the courage to leave home again.
In 1973 Ruben Hernandez arrived at Hialeah. He found Florida, with its large Latin populations, welcoming and comfortable. But as a young rider, he ran right into the same difficulties with the veterans that later plagued Ronnie Franklin. “The jockeys there began shutting me off all the time and keeping me from winning,” Hernandez said.
Again, much like Ronnie, the veteran riders made it impossible for Ruben to ride on the inside. “I try to get through the holes,” he said, “but they close up on me.” His solution for opening up those closed holes lay in his fists. He was suspended again and again for fighting.
Not all the jockeys he met in the United States were hostile to him. That winter Hernandez was introduced to Angel Cordero and Georgie Velasquez. He would forge close, life-long friendships with both of them. That was especially true of Cordero. He had a vastly different opinion of the intense and high-strung Angel than others did. “[Angel] was a happy go lucky guy,” Ruben said. “A very nice guy, very nice to me. He was funny, liked to joke around, all the good stuff.”
Hernandez idolized Cordero and marveled at his skill but also appreciated his cerebral approach to riding. “Angel knew everything in riding horses from A to Z,” Hernandez said. “He take the maximum ride of the horse. It doesn’t matter if he ride a favorite or a 10–1 shot, you would see him riding with the same enthusiasm.”
Ruben was a fine rider, too, and a winner in both Florida and New York. But he never grabbed the national spotlight like Cordero or Jacinto had. That was true even when Ruben was the leading stakes rider in New York. Instead, he was content to enjoy the reputation of a nice guy and the respect of those who knew him best. When he was instructed to list his hobbies for a questionnaire given to him by the track publicity department, he put but one item on his list: “My family.”
And indeed, Ruben had one thing going for him at the Belmont that even Spectacular Bid’s rider did not have, and that was a home-field advantage. No one knew Belmont better than he did. When the cold winds blew in off the Hudson River, guys like Cordero and Velasquez flew out to Florida. But Ruben was no snowbird. He spent his winters in the same place he spent his summers, and that was New York.
While Ronnie had his fitful night of sleep at the Plaza, Ruben was in his own bed next to his beautiful wife, Maria Isabella. In the morning, when he rose from that bed, Hernandez was well rested, comfortable, and happy. He didn’t have any sorts of dreams or visions the night before. And for that matter, he was under no false illusions.
Hernandez arrived at Belmont Park much like everyone else, with the firm belief that Spectacular Bid would win the race and capture the Triple Crown. And he was fine with it. “Everybody thought that [Spectacular Bid] was tough to beat or unbeatable that day,” Ruben said. “My feeling was that we were going to see another Triple Crown; I just wanted to be there to be a part of history.”
Hernandez said he “didn’t have any premonitions,” but Maria Isabella was so confident of his victory that she lectured her husband, instructed him, to go slowly to the winner’s circle. She planned to watch the race from the fourth floor, she told him, to get the best view of the action, so she reminded him that she would have a lengthy walk to meet him after it was over. “I want to be in that winner’s circle photograph with you,” she said.
Now all Ruben had to do to fulfill his wife’s expectations was go out and pull off the biggest upset in modern racing history.
Ronnie’s pressures and problems were a far cry from Ruben’s domestic bliss. He went to the gates like one might go to the gallows. Cordero was out to get him; that was clear from their crash-car horses earlier in the week and even their jousting and aggressive arguing earlier that day. Angel had already demonstrated that he feared neither bodily risk nor authority. If he wanted to use his animal as a weapon and take a crack at Ronnie, he would do it right there in the Belmont Stakes. He had no qualms about destroying the Bid, putting Ronnie in danger, or, if necessary, risking his own neck. It was that simple.
Ronnie got a leg up into the irons knowing that the world was watching his every move. Expectations from the press and the fans were sky high. “I knew that the pressure was with him,” Ruben said.
And then there was Buddy.
This was Delp’s moment, his chance to sanctify his life and career. He’d literally emerged from the flames to arrive here. He had persevered through setbacks and tragedies that would have sidelined many lesser men. And now here he was, in this position and on this day, about to realize one of the hardest achievements in professional sports. If he succeeded, it would be a once-in-a-lifetime payday and respect. It always came back to respect.
But it all depended on Ronnie’s ride, his ability to avoid trouble and coax victory from his hurting horse. Buddy often publicly disparaged Franklin’s intelligence, and his view was that Franklin couldn’t do much to win the race, but he could do an awful lot to lose it.
When Ronnie took the mount, Buddy Delp’s dreams and aspirations went right along with the exhausted, frightened, and deeply troubled teenager draped, appropriately, in the black-and-blue silks.
All of the jockeys took their last instructions from their trainers just prior to the post parade, but Ronnie was different; he had the advice of many experts. Even Lucien Laurin, Secretariat’s sainted trainer, knew just what the kid on the Bid should do. “I’d tell Franklin to put [Spectacular Bid] right on the lead and not fool around,” Laurin said.
Buddy agreed, and his advice to Ronnie was elegant in its simplicity. “Take ’em away,” Buddy said, utilizing an old race track expression for running away from the pack.
Winning the Belmont meant every bit as much to Whiteley as the Triple Crown did to Buddy. He had fought his hard-bitten father for his right to be a trainer. Now he was on the biggest stage, on a tense day, with a fresh horse and a fine rider.
Whiteley was cool under fire, and his advice to Hernandez was tinged with humor. “I just want you to break good, and get a good position, and then you take it from there,” Whiteley said. “I won’t say anymore, because you pinheads don’t listen anyway.”
But pre-race, no one spoke louder than Spectacular Bid. He paraded to the post in a fashion uncustomary to him. He trotted on his toes, walked in diagonal lines, and showed copious amounts of foam at his haunches. His neck twitched so incessantly that he looked like a Tourrette’s patient. And he bit and chewed at the horse ponying him to the gate.
Bid was clearly in pain from his encounter with the business end of that safety pin. Whatever Dr. Harthill had done to help him, it clearly wasn’t working.
“The Streets of New York” played in the background as all the other horses went calmly to the post. Except for the Bid’s behavior there was little drama. The riders of note, and their horses, all loaded easily. Angel Cordero was on General Assembly, who went to gate number two. Ronnie and the Bid were loaded into gate five. The least likely horse to have a bearing on the result, Gallant Best, an 80–1 shot, went to the seventh position. Ruben Hernandez and Coastal were in number nine. And Mystic Era went to gate ten, Georgie Velasquez up.
In the split second after all the horses were loaded and before the gates opened and the powerful animals unleashed, all that could be heard in the hushed track were the Latin riders shouting to each other in Spanish at breakneck speed. And then there was the startling and satisfying sound of the steel gates opening all at once and locking into place.
Ronnie and Bid, following Buddy’s orders, exploded out of the gate. Right from the get-go they were in the pack of leaders. It was a sign that Franklin’s ride would be unusual, far different from his work at either the Kentucky Derby or the Preakness. In those races he had been content to hang back a good distance and patiently wait for his moment. But here, in the longest race, where patience was rewarded unlike at any other track, Ronnie and the Bid were hot on the heels of the long shot.
Gallant Best was in the lead at the first turn and setting a blazing pace. And that was precisely what Buddy had hoped to see. Ronnie, just as he was instructed to do, stalked the leader. He hung close to Gallant Best as they galloped around the backstretch, and then he exhorted the Bid to make a decisive move. “Let’s go, Big Daddy!” he said.
As the horse catapulted himself forward, the rider’s black-and-blue silks blurred and streaked across the New York air, and the Bid’s mane caught the breeze and stood up on the back of his neck, and it looked like jagged flames.
At first, overtaking Gallant Best was an intense pleasure, an exhilaration unlike any other. But it wasn’t long before a certain hollowness set in. Ronnie had spent a lot of horse, very early in the race, chasing a competitor who had no chance to win.
The fans groaned as they could only imagine the fuel spilling from the Bid’s tank. Meanwhile, Cordero was many lengths off the action but still a factor. He paid close attention to Ronnie, and when the Bid made his move, so did he. Angel whipped General Assembly and the colt perked up, came alive, and was, for a moment at least, a worthy son to Secretariat. General Assembly’s reddish chestnut hue became more orange-vibrant as it glinted in the sun, and he strained to give Cordero everything that he had, which was ample.
About three-quarters of the way down the backstretch Cordero masterfully guided General Assembly to the rail, and he actually closed the gap on Spectacular Bid. Angel menaced Ronnie by coming closer and kept the pressure on him. The Bid was forced to run at his highest speed for a protracted period. And he was still a long way from the wire.
And then the Bid labored. It was as if he were carrying all of the dysfunctions of his team like lead weights. The bloat of the addictions and the moral failings were all aboard the fabulous colt just as surely as the jockey was, and it was finally too much for even the Bid to bear.
But the heaviest burden of all was the delicate psychology of the 105-pound rider. His chemical dependencies, anxieties, and stresses were weighing him down, and his body appeared limp and exhausted. Right there on that horse with Franklin was all the money he’d lost to cocaine and poker pots. Riding Franklin’s back as surely as he was riding the Bid were the little baggies of pills and powder, the whores, the letters and calls form threatening lawyers, and the little boy who looked so much like him but whom he didn’t even know. There was also the rage and racist taunts, Angel’s death threats and pranks, the fights, Buddy’s insults and expectations, and the press that printed only the half of it.
It was all too much for even the greatest horse to ever look through a bridle. And it all seemed to coalesce right there in the throbbing toothache that was the Bid’s left forehoof.
Ronnie could see Cordero gaining on him like a conquistador, and he pushed the Bid harder. But as the boy and his steel gray made their way around the far turn, the finish seemed hundreds of miles away.
Ronnie believed that the Bid refused to change his leads, a consequence of the mishap in the stall, and he felt the horse labor and huff beneath him. Cordero’s horse was every bit as much spent as Ronnie’s, and General Assembly slowed and fell off the pace.
In the backstretch Coastal looked like a goner, dead on arrival. He was a distant fourth, and even Whiteley believed that it was over. He was simply too far behind to catch a great horse like the Bid even on his worst day.
Ruben alone kept the faith. He knew Belmont as well or better than any rider, and he knew that it was finally time to make his charge. Cordero’s now plodding animal blocked Coastal’s path forward, but the fierce competitor inside of Angel must have been fast asleep because he moved to the right as gently as if he were riding a lamb in a baby’s dream.
Cordero gave up his own position to make a wide and comfortable inside lane for Coastal. As Ruben passed him, Cordero smiled and became a cheerleader. “Alcánzalo!” Angel shouted to his friend. “Go get him.”
Ronnie hugged the rail with no intention of yielding an inch, but in his panic and zeal to revive the Bid he furiously whipped with his left hand, moving his horse ever so slightly to the right. And that created the small sliver of light Ruben had hoped to see. It was a tiny, dangerous crevice, but Ruben urged Coastal to charge through it confidently.
It was his to take.
Clothed in the flaxen silks of Coastal’s owners, Ruben disappeared into the black hole and then reemerged, streaking out of the darkness like yellow starlight, beams and particles bent by gravity and propelling through space.
Ruben charged right past the suddenly inconsequential Bid, gaining confidence with every stride. He actually opened a lead on the great horse, and the humiliation of that reality dazed both Franklin and his colt. From Middleburg to that moment they had never experienced anything like it, and before they could contemplate the enormity of it, it happened again. Golden Act slipped past them too, but on the right. Wily Sandy Hawley crossed the finish line a mere neck ahead of Ronnie and the great Spectacular Bid.
The sight of it, the unexpected deflation and crushing disappointment, reduced Teresa Meyerhoff to tears. She buried her face in her hands and softly said, “No, no, no.”
The sadness of the Meyerhoffs, the Delps, and Ronnie was a stark relief to the elation of the Whiteleys. Ruben maintained his composure. True to the promise he’d made Maria Isabella in the morning, he went to the winner’s circle as slowly as he possibly could. When the outrider picked him up, he blew a puff of air and said, “Let my horse relax.” All the while he was thinking about his wife, the woman who had so much confidence in him.
Like Coastal, Maria Isabella was swift enough to make it to the winner’s circle right on time. She stood beside her husband as the shutter clicked on a moment that lasted for both only a fraction of a second and for all time.
While Ruben was praised on national television for his daring and skillful ride, Franklin dismounted and suffered the horror and humiliation of a far different experience as he strode off in the direction of the jockeys’ room. The fans and bettors beheld his small, defeated form and loudly taunted him. Their profane jeers and debris combined and rained down upon his helmeted head like a wintry mix.
Franklin used gallows humor to deflect the sting of his low moment. “Don’t nobody stand too close to me,” he said. “I might get plucked off.”
Someone wanted to take him out all right, but not with bullets. In the jockeys’ room a jubilant Angel was celebratory, even exultant. It was a peculiar posture for the most intensely competitive man in racing, considering he had just finished seventh in a field of ten on a horse that had the best blood lines in the race.
Angel enjoyed Franklin’s and Spectacular Bid’s disgrace as if it were his own glorious victory. His antics hogged the spotlight from both the day’s winner and the devastated favorite who had lost.
Cordero seized the opportunity to train Ronnie in his sights and shoot devastating barbs right at him. Angel grabbed the microphone to the PA system and bellowed into it in thick Spanish locutions. In the guise of addressing his friend Hernandez, he took Ronnie apart like a roaster. “Ruben, Ruben, you make all the spics happy!” Angel shouted with glee. “All of the spics love you, Ruben. The spics in New York, the spics in Puerto Rico, the spics in Florida, the spics in Minnesota, the spics in California. All of them love you, Ruben!”
And then Angel turned his venom on Spectacular Bid himself. “I tole you,” he shouted, “no horse is unbeatable. Every turkey has his Thanksgiving.”
Back at the stalls Delp, the braggart, was subdued. Deprived of the victor’s champagne, he gulped a working man’s beer and spoke to the greatest of American sportswriters in a self-pitying tone. “[Ronnie] ran a perfect race,” Buddy told Red Smith. “I got beat, that’s all. Tomorrow’s another day.”
No one on the Bid’s team mentioned anything about the safety pin. Not a single word. In his post-race interviews, Ronnie alluded to the fact that the horse had been unsound but never said a word about his bad hoof. “He choked, he couldn’t get his breath,” the young jockey told reporters, implying that there was blood in the Bid’s lungs. “I noticed it as we were coming into the stretch. He wasn’t right. I had a lot of horse at the beginning, but when I asked him to respond, he didn’t.”
It was a lie that he would later disavow.
To the outside world Ronnie was the one who had choked, chasing a huge long shot and tiring out his horse.
The real controversy didn’t start until Buddy and the Bid were back in Baltimore. That’s when the trainer finally told everyone about the safety pin. But in New York, Dr. Manuel Gilman, the veterinarian for the New York Racing Association, disputed everything. “The horse was checked at 8:30 a.m. Saturday,” Gilman said. “He was sound then. He was sound going into the race, he was sound coming out of the race. He was sound when he left here this morning.”
In fact, very few people in racing bought into Buddy’s story. In Middleburg, where they knew the horse, the trainer, and the jockey all too well, everyone believed it was a lie. The backstretch workers in Baltimore thought it was a lie too. But nobody was more skeptical than the Latino riders; to a man they thought it was mierda, horseshit, a way of deflecting shame and robbing Ruben of the glory.
“If [Spectacular Bid] step on a nail and he sorry about it, he won’t lead all the way to the sixteenth pole,” Angel Cordero reasoned. “The sixteenth pole is the only time the horse remember that he step on a nail.”
“He didn’t step on no pin,” Jacinto said. “Is a bunch of bullshit.”
“Spectacular Bid’s safety pin,” Ruben Hernandez said more succinctly than anyone, “was Coastal.”
The Meyerhoffs were devastated by the loss and blamed Cordero’s intimidation tactics for their young jockey’s poor ride and ultimately their horse’s defeat. “[Ronnie] was scared Cordero was going to go after him,” Tom Meyerhoff said. “And he responded by getting away from the field.”
Ruben Hernandez saw it that way too. “Franklin got Cordero on his mind all the time,” Ruben said, “and I know it.”
But it was Jacinto Vasquez who knew the real reason behind the bizarre ride. He knew why the boy had chased the long shot and unwisely burned up his horse out there. “He just do what his trainer tell him to do,” Jacinto said.
But fear did play a role in Ronnie’s devastating loss; it just wasn’t what everyone thought. Cordero could not intimidate Franklin. It simply wasn’t in Ronnie’s nature to fear any man in a fight. Ronnie could deal with hate, but love was another story.
Buddy Delp had come to mean everything to him. Pleasing Buddy was all cocaine and good times. Letting Buddy down meant enduring an incredible wrath and a free ticket back to Dundalk to be a nobody and a nothing.
“I wasn’t afraid of Cordero,” Ronnie Franklin said in a highly secret moment. “I was afraid of Buddy Delp.”