LITTLE ROCK —Speculators willing to buck history found great value in the Kentucky Derby future wager.
Three times a year leading up to the Derby, Churchill Downs offers an opportunity to bet on the most well-known race in the country. Unavailable in the first two pools, Bodemeister wound up at 22-1 in the third pool, which closed two weeks before he ran 10 other 3-year-olds off their feet in the Arkansas Derby.
On May 5, the colt is likely to be the Kentucky Derby favorite around 4-1 or 5-1. The speed figure Bodemeister recorded at Oaklawn Park towers over those assigned the winners of other major Derby preps and he would be a shorter price except for the stigma of not racing at 2. The last time a Derby winner won with a blank slate at 2 was 1882, although every time that fact is cited I wonder how many runners tried in the interim.
During the past decade or so, almost all the other hard and fast rules for handicapping the Kentucky Derby have fallen by the wayside. Last year, for example, Animal Kingdom won the Derby in the fifth race of his career and the race at Churchill was his first in six weeks. Prior to 2011, only four horses since 1955 had won the Derby with fewer than six starts. Now, three of the last six winners have had five starts or less. Even more to the point, before Animal Kingdom, Needles was the last to win the Derby after six weeks on the sideline and that was 1956.
First offered in 1999, the biggest payoff in the Derby future wager occurred in 2003 when Funny Cide became the first gelding to win the race since Clyde Van Dusen in 1929.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
Those who bucked that trend and invested $2 on Funny Cide in the future wager were rewarded with a $188 payoff.
If Bodemeister fails because of the 2-year-old thing, it will be more about experience than conditioning. Bob Baffert, who has trained three Derby winners, will have him prepared to run 1 1-4 miles. Bodemeister has never been worse than second in any of his four races and many of the Derby contenders have a similar running style. They can’t all be third, two lengths behind a speed-crazy leader, going into the first turn.
What if Bodemeister breaks a step slow and is eighth or 10th in the early going and dirt clods are hitting him in the face? What if he is trapped on the rail? Does he spit the bit, having never been in such a situation, or does he respond like a veteran? Even when he faced 10 others in the Arkansas Derby, he quickly made the lead. At Louisville, he will have 19 opponents, most of them of better quality than those at Oaklawn.
Also troubling is the fact that Baffert cannot replicate the noise generated when 150,000 people or so sing “My Old Kentucky Home” while the horses are warming up. When Bodemeister lost to eventual Santa Anita Derby favorite Creative Cause on March 10, the word was that the colt was on edge. For the Arkansas Derby, Baffert removed the blinkers that limit a horse’s vision and that equipment change helped him relax.
“The main thing is to keep him quiet in the warm up …,” Baffert said after the race.
To do that, he could follow the lead of Jack Van Berg who adorned Gate Dancer with purple ear muffs for his winning effort in the 1984 Preakness.
Despite the various hurdles and the luck needed to win the Derby, I wouldn’t trade my $2 wager on Bodemeister in the Derby future pool.
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Harry King is sports columnist for Stephens Media’s Arkansas News Bureau. His e-mail address is hking@arkansasnews.com.