Khozan runs very fast, has won his two career starts in dominating fashion, is a $1 million yearling and a half-brother to the great mare Royal Delta. The hype machine has gone into overdrive as he heads toward the Florida Derby, and he might be the rare type of talent that will justify every breathless word said and written about him.
Yet, there will be some, maybe even many, who will give him no shot in the Kentucky Derby. That won't change if he wins the Florida Derby by the length of the stretch. The naysayers will point to 132 years of history that says no horse that did not start as a 2-year-old can win the Kentucky Derby. Khozan made his career debut Jan. 24 in a maiden race at Gulfstream before winning a Feb. 22 allowance.
You have to go all the way back to Apollo in 1882 to find the last Kentucky Derby winner that did not start as a 2-year-old. Since 1944, 62 horses have started in the Derby that did not race during their juvenile seasons.
The reason given most often for the futile record these horses have compiled is that they lack experience and are at a competitive disadvantage against more seasoned horses in what is the most grueling horse race run in this county. There's no doubt some truth to that.
At this point in his career Khozan is on an almost identical path that another highly hyped horse named Verrazano was on. Also trained by Todd Pletcher, he broke his maiden at Gulfstream on January 1, 2013, won an allowance, the Tampa Bay Derby and the Wood Memorial and appeared to be as talented as any 3-year-old in the country. He finished 14th in the Derby.
But it would be foolish to throw out Khozan when it comes to this year's Derby. The same goes for any horse in this Derby or future Derbies that did not start at the age of two.
To begin with, the numbers aren't quite as bad as they look at first glance. To have only 62 horses over 71 years fall under the "2-year-old" rule means that this applies to less than one starter a year or easily less than 10 percent of all the runners. It's not like four or five of these horses are going down every year, and many among the 62 were no-hope longshots. And three have finished second, Coaltown in 1948, Strodes Creek in 1994 and Bodemeister in 2012.
But what should really give Khozan fans hope is that the modern Kentucky Derby bears little resemblance to what the race was even just 15 or 20 years ago. Khozan won't be going up against grizzled veterans of the turf wars, horses that have started 15 times or so, including seven or eight starts as two-year-olds. He will be facing horses more like him than not. Most will have had only six or seven lifetime starts, their races carefully spaced out and their trainers careful never to have pushed them too hard. As a lightly raced horse with no experience as a 2-year-old, he's simply not going to be at that big of a disadvantage.
The way horses are now prepared for the Derby is the main reason why so many other "Derby rules" have been broken in recent years.
No horse had won the Derby off a layoff of five weeks or more for 50 years until Barbaro took care of that rule in 2006. If he makes it there, Khozan will come into the Kentucky Derby with just three lifetime starts. There was a time when no one thought that could be done. But when Big Brown won the Derby in his fourth lifetime start he broke a rule that had held for 93 years. It used to be that you had to have three preps for the race to have a legitimate shot in the Kentucky Derby. Now, trainers think nothing of coming in with two preps. Don't be surprised if someone soon tries to get their horse ready off just one prep. The Dosage Index? What's that?
None of this means that Khozan will win the Kentucky Derby. He's going to have to be good enough, lucky enough and tough enough. But he could be all three. That he didn't race at two? It's not a major concern.