Trainer takes 2 Triple Crown race winners into summer season | Dick Jerardi
Todd Pletcher trained Tapwrit wins the Belmont after Always Dreaming won the Kentucky Derby.
ELMONT, N.Y. - Some years, you get Smarty Jones and Afleet Alex running as hard at the end of the Triple Crown as at the beginning. One year, you get American Pharoah winning the Triple Crown. Many years, like this year, you get three different winners of the Kentucky Derby, Preakness and Belmont Stakes.
In August 2015 at the Fasig-Tipton sales pavilion, just across Union Avenue from Saratoga Race Course, a few horse owners got together to bid $1.2 million on a yearling colt from superstar sire Tapit. Saturday at Belmont Park, that colt, Tapwrit, from the barn of superstar trainer Todd Pletcher, won the Belmont Stakes, earning $800,000 for the owners, bringing his career earnings to $1,143,902 and "getting them out" in style. With the summer season at Saratoga looming and Tapwrit certain to be in demand as a stallion prospect, the partners are now rolling downhill in a year without any 3-year-old superstars, but with plenty of major races on the horizon.
Pletcher became the first trainer since his mentor, D. Wayne Lukas (1996), to win the Derby and Belmont with different horses in the same year. Always Dreaming won the Derby for a separate set of owners convincingly, but was a tired eighth in the Preakness, keeping the trainer from a chance at the Triple Crown but avoiding a potential touchy conflict in the Belmont.
"We really were hoping that Always Dreaming could take a shot coming in for a Triple Crown try, but that's every trainer's ultimate dream," Pletcher said. "But the back of my mind I was thinking, man, if he wins, I'm worried about what we're going to do with Tapwrit."
Tapwrit finished sixth in the Derby and passed on the Preakness, with the Belmont always the plan. The conflict was avoided and the trainer had his fifth Triple Crown race win, nine behind Lukas's record 14.
"Each of these races individually stand on their own as major, major races and huge wins," Pletcher said. "The Derby win was awesome, and the ebbs and flows of this game are well-documented, and the last five weeks has been the ultimate roller coaster for us.
"It's the nature of this business. You very seldom just get to enjoy a win and not have a target right around the corner, especially with the Derby winner . . . The two-week turnaround between the Derby and the Preakness is a really short time for horses, but it's a pretty long 14 days for a horse trainer."
Pletcher's training style, which emphasizes significant time between races, fits the Belmont much better than the Preakness. And the trainer knows it.
"It's a race that's been so good to us, and we've been very fortunate now to have won three and taken a couple of tough beats, too," Pletcher said, "but it seems for whatever reason to kind of suit our style well . . . it's maybe the way we train, the foundation that most of these horses have over a long period of time."
Pletcher's task now will be to keep Always Dreaming and Tapwrit apart as the second season begins this summer, with the Haskell at Monmouth Park, the Jim Dandy at Saratoga, the Travers at Saratoga and the Pennsylvania Derby at Parx.
It would be no surprise to see the Derby or Belmont winner at Parx in September. We could also see Preakness winner Cloud Computing in the Pa. Derby. Pletcher and Chad Brown, Cloud Computing's trainer, regularly run horses at Parx. Brown won the 2016 Pa. Derby with Connect; Pletcher won it with Harlan's Holiday in 2002.
The amazing Mr. Smith
Mike Smith finished eighth on 13-1 shot Meantime in the Belmont Stakes, but that could not spoil a near-perfect day. The jockey, 51, goes to work when he feels like it these days. But when he does work, he is putting up historical numbers.
Smith won five stakes on the Belmont card (four on Bob Baffert-trained horses), including the Met Mile on Pennsylvania-bred Mor Spirit, the Ogden Phipps Stakes on the great filly Songbird and the Acorn on Kentucky Oaks winner Abel Tasman. On the day, Smith won nearly $2 million in purses for the horses' owners. On the year, his mounts have already accumulated $19.2 million in earnings, much of it due to Arrogate's wins in the $12 million Pegasus and $10 million Dubai World Cup. What is crazy is that Smith has done all this on just 127 mounts, an impossible $151,864 per start.
With the Haskell at nearby Monmouth Park and the Pa. Derby looming over the next few months, the next big race on the local calendar is the July 15 Delaware Handicap at Delaware Park. If we are lucky and Songbird is entered, Mike Smith will be there to ride her and it will be a race not to be missed.
@DickJerardi