ARCADIA, Calif. -- Two horses already have secured championships, and, strangely enough, the Breeders' Cup has relegated them to supporting roles in the sport's championship event. Close Hatches and Untapable should be racing on Saturday, along with the sport's other stars, instead of on Friday, during a work, a rush or a cocktail hour, depending on your time zone. The snub, I suspect, is more harebrained than sexist. And it represents just one of the problems with a modern Breeders' Cup that has expanded like a glutton to its own detriment.
The 2007 Breeders' Cup began the fraught trend, expanding first from one to two days and from eight to 11 races. The next year, the Breeders' Cup added three more races and then in 2011 yet another. This year, the two-day extravaganza has, somewhat mercifully, reduced its number of races to 13; but, still, that's too many. After all, how can there be more "championship" races than there are championships if the races are to maintain any championship credibility?
The predictable result has been the dilution of everything -- the quality, excitement, intrigue and importance. Even handle has been diluted. In 2006, when the Breeders' Cup presented eight championship races on a single day, total handle was $140,332,198. Adjusted for inflation, that would be $165,691,543 in today's dollars, or $20,711,442 a race.
For last year's two-day, 14-race Breeders' Cup, total handle was $160,704,877. Adjusted by an inflation rate of 2.2 percent, that would be $164,102,986 in today's dollars, or $11,721,641 a race.
This isn't an argument against presenting more races that bring together horses of quality. But does the Breeders' Cup really need two turf races for 2-year-olds when there isn't a corresponding Eclipse Award for either? Couldn't such races, with lucrative purses, be run as an opening act?
Anyway, the current format relegates the meeting of two tremendous racehorses in the Distaff, Close Hatches and Untapable, to a prelude. They deserve better. Together, they've won nine of 11 races and earned more than $3 million this season. For months, they were both candidates to be Horse of the Year. Close Hatches, with her four major stakes victories, including the Apple Blossom, Ogden Phipps and Personal Ensign Stakes, has virtually clinched the Eclipse Award as the outstanding older female.
She comes off a poor effort, however, for which her Hall of Fame trainer, Bill Mott, has found no explanation. On Oct. 5, Close Hatches finished fourth in the Spinster Stakes at Keeneland. Prior to that outing, she was unbeaten; even more, she was dominant. She trained well before the Spinster and has trained well since, Mott said. She was, of course, examined from stem to stern after the loss, but nothing explained it.
"The only thing I can think of is that maybe she didn't like the surface," Mott said, while admitting he hated to say it because, after all, to suggest a horse's poor performance resulted from a disdain for the surface is resorting to the oldest and lamest excuse in a thick but threadbare book of trainer excuses. Mott, though, is probably right.
Close Hatches had been training at New York's Belmont Park, where she has had 21 workouts in her career and where she has won two major stakes. She probably should have run in Belmont's Beldame Stakes as her final Breeder's Cup prep, but instead she traveled to Lexington, Kentucky, for the Spinster, which is sponsored by Close Hatches' owner, Juddmonte Farms. The move didn't make any more sense than expanding the Breeders' Cup to two days, and it met with similar results. But she'll return to form for the Distaff.
And nothing that happens Friday could possibly displace Untapable as the champion 3-year-old filly. She has won five major stakes, including the Kentucky Oaks, Mother Goose and Cotillion Stakes. Her only loss this year came in the Haskell Invitational at Monmouth Park, where she missed the break and got shuffled back in traffic while facing males on a surface that profoundly favored early speed. She finished fifth to the loose-on-the-lead Bayern.
After that, she seemed somewhat dehydrated, said her trainer, Steve Asmussen. "So we backed off," he explained, "and she spent some time just walking around Saratoga in the mornings." Rather than going to the racetrack for a gallop or a workout, Untapable would stroll like a visitor through the barn area, but under tack, and enjoy one of the sport's most picturesque settings. Getting back to work, she prepared for the Breeders' Cup by winning the Cotillion Stakes.
Here at Santa Anita, Untapable generally has gone to the racetrack before sunrise for her training. But even in the darkness, she has sparkled, and that might be a foreshadowing, for throughout her career, sharp workouts have heralded her best efforts. Thirteen days before she won the Cotillion, for example, she worked a bullet five furlongs at Saratoga. And on Oct. 19 here, she worked five-furlongs here in 58.60; it was the bullet, or fastest workout of the morning at the distance.
"It's a good time to be quick," Asmussen said about that move. "She has done very well here. I expect her to run a big race."
The meeting of Close Hatches and Untapable in the $2 million Distaff is an event, a confrontation that could be recalled by many for years -- but it'll be seen Friday by an audience that will probably be smaller by half than the one that watches Reneesgotzip in Saturday's Turf Sprint. That's just wrong, and if only considered in the context of a need for the sport to put its best foot conspicuously forward, it's at the very least injudicious.