Never in a million years did I think an amazing month of racing would start and end the same way for me. While we all waited last Saturday to see if Bayern would be disqualified in the Breeders' Cup Classic for interference at the start, my mind kept replaying a conversation I had weeks before about stewards. More on that in a moment, though.
Following the stewards' decision to leave the results of the Classic as-is, I have heard various arguments about the controversy. Some think the stewards got it right, many think they got it wrong, and now everyone is talking about what can be done to keep it from happening again.
The most popular suggestion I keep hearing is that if a horse drifts out of his or her lane at any point of a race and interferes with another horse, the horse automatically will be taken down. That brings me back to the beginning of my story.
A month before Bayern's swerve out of the gate dominated headlines at home, I received a lesson in how the French stewards operate. Basically, in France, the rule is that it is a jockey's job to make sure his mount runs straight, and if they don't, they get disqualified. They are arguably the strictest in world when it comes to a horse drifting off a straight line.
This came to pass not once but twice during the weekend of the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe this year. The main race, thankfully, was controversy free but that wasn't true for all of the races.
Earlier that day, Gleneagles put in an impressive performance to take the Group 1 Prix Jean-Luc Lagardere for 2-year-old colts. Many, if not everyone, felt the best horse won the race. That, however, did not keep him from being disqualified.
At the end of the race, Gleneagles drifted a bit. It appears he didn't even actually touch another horse, but second-place finisher Full Mast was intimidated enough that he swerved into another runner, Territories. There was an immediate stewards' inquiry.
While watching the replay, I said to a friend, "There is no way that horse is coming down." His reply was, "Of course he is, dear. This is France."
I was dumbfounded, but he wasn't wrong. Coolmore's Gleneagles was disqualified to third for drifting at the wire.
Lest you are thinking it was a case of bias, that the French just wanted a reason to take down an Irish horse, you don't have to look any further back than the day before to see that isn't true.
Hard-knocking French gelding Cirrus des Aigles is a beloved runner in his home country and beyond. The only reason the champion does not run in the Arc is because due to his gelded state, he isn't allowed. The French don't mess around with their racing rules.
Instead he runs the day before in the Group 2 Prix Dollar. Coming into this year's race, he had already won it three times, and a replay will show that he did in fact win the race again. However, he was disqualified for interference in the stretch.
Anywhere else in the world, it would have been a judgment call on if his drifting should have demoted him to second for bumping Fractional. Because the race is held in France, though, he was not only disqualified from first, he was demoted to fifth based on the reasoning he also interfered with fifth-place finisher Planetaire. Second-place finisher Fractional was named the winner.
"It's always a bit disappointing to win a race in the stewards' room, especially against a champion like Cirrus des Aigles, but Fractional came into this race in the form of his life and we were very hopeful that he would run well," said Lisa-Jane Graffard for Godolphin.
The connections involved in both disqualifications were also philosophical about it.
"He is a true champion and has proven that once again," Cirrus des Aigles' trainer Corine Barande-Barbe said. "What happened afterwards is debatable, but that's the way it is."
Michael Tabor, part-owner of Gleneagles, echoed those sentiments, saying, "There are different rules in France, and when you are in France you need to abide by their rules. That's how it is. It would be better if they were more uniform, but rules are rules.
"I remember that we kept the Arc with Dylan Thomas, and in all honesty, I'd rather have kept that one than kept this."
In 2007, Dylan Thomas won the Arc, but it took French stewards 45 minutes to decide that the race results should stand. The colt had bumped Zambezi Sun in mid-stretch and then bumped stablemate and entrymate Soldier of Fortune. Neither horse finished in the top four, and in the end, Dylan Thomas was allowed to keep his victory.
One has to wonder if even the super strict French were hesitant to pull down the horse who ran the best race in the biggest European race of them all.
Throughout the week I have been thinking about the French system, though. It removes a lot of the emotion and humanness that exist in the racing rules of many other jurisdictions, including those found in America. There is a lot to be said for that.
However, cases like Gleneagles make me hesitant to think it is definitely the way to go. He put in the best performance and deserved to win that race. Are rules that don't take into account actual performance worth not having to worry about bias?
That is what I keep coming back to with Bayern. If he was disqualified, who should have been put up? Toast of New York? He caused interference in the first few strides, too. California Chrome? He avoided the brouhaha coming out of the gate and had every chance to win on his own merit but didn't. Shared Belief? You can't put him above California Chrome because you think he may possibly have run a better race if he hadn't been bumped at the start.
If you believe that Bayern kept the race because of some kind of Baffert bias, you might also consider that the horse most likely to be put up as a result was Toast of New York, the foreign horse. There might have been a touch of bias in that, too.
No matter what, someone was going to be unhappy with how the Classic played out. It was an ugly start, there is no debating that. The unfortunate thing is there is no clear cut answer about who "should have" won the race, so no matter what the stewards did or did not do, the race was never going to be truly satisfying.
However, if you think having rules similar to those found in France will eliminate controversy, think again. I am already imagining the start of the Kentucky Derby, with its 20-horse fields and notorious rough beginnings.
Horses are not machines. Races are not always going to be cleanly run. No matter what the rules are, sometimes things are going to get messy, and there isn't going to be a good answer.
Should things change? Maybe. Just don't confuse lack of bias with lack of controversy.