At long last it’s time for the Grade 1 Run Happy Travers Stakes. Can you believe it? One hundred and fifty of these things.
It takes a while to get here, but when it arrives it always feels worth it, worth the wait.
We make a big of a deal it. Looking back over the last several winners of the race, it’s definitely a race that’s on its own island. Most of the horses that win this race didn’t have much of an impact before or after. I say most because there are some special horses on this list.
Arrogate started the greatest four-race win streak in the history of the sport by erupting onto the scene, winning the Travers, the Breeders’ Cup Classic, the Pegasus Cup and then his spectacular Dubai World Cup win. Suffice to say we will never see anything like that again.
And there was Street Sense, who had won the Kentucky Derby in 2007, yet came within a whisker of losing to Grasshopper in the Travers. But to find a truly great horse, a Hall of Famer, you’d have to go all the way back to Point Given in 2001. I’d throw Bernardini in there too in terms of sheer class.
So let’s take a look at some of the, let’s say, less impressive winners of this race, or the ones that didn’t quite make a lasting impression: Catholic Boy, West Coast (despite being Champion Three-Year-Old), Keen Ice, V.E. Day, Will Take Charge, Alpha, Golden Ticket, Stay Thirsty, Afleet Express, Summer Bird (despite being Champion Three-Year-Old), Colonel John, Flower Alley, Birdstone and the list goes on and on. As we go farther back into history, I suspect the pattern would continue with the rare exception of an Easy Goer or Thunder Gulch.
What you don’t see are a lot of Triple Crown race winners. In the last, say, 16 years, only Summer Bird (2009), Street Sense (2007) and Bernardini (2006) and Birdstone (2004) won a Triple Crown race and neither ran in all three legs.
And so with the latest crop of 3-year-olds, it appears history will repeat itself. Sure, Tax, winner of the Jim Dandy, and a horse that ran in the Kentucky Derby will be here. But the real eyes will be on the most talented sophomore, though the one who has yet to break through and assert himself as the best of this crop: Tacitus.
A Tacitus for the rest of us!
He’s a strapping colt that might have just found his secret weapon: blinkers.
Ever have trouble focusing? Ever start writing a column and it goes in one direction, then a different one and then you forget what you started?
So where was I? Oh, yes, Chad Brown, can you believe he has “only” won 25 races as of this writing? Wait, what? …Tacitus? Gotcha, gotcha. I see.
Hall of Fame trainer Bill Mott strapped on the eye cups and something happened, something good for Mott and scary as all get out for the field.
“I think the blinkers seem as though they helped him focus a little bit. Even in the workout, it looked like his head carriage was a little more straight and level,” Mott said in a NYRA release. “Does he absolutely have to have them? Maybe not. But if they help him an inch it’ll be worth it. The good thing is that they didn’t make him anxious or rank. They just helped him focus through the stretch.”
Given that Maximum Security will take his inquiry-inducing talent to the Pennsylvania Derby, Game Winner came down with a virus and War of Will on shelf needing more rest, that gives Tacitus no excuse entering the Travers.
His greatest opponent will be Tax, the Jim Dandy winner, who benefited from the better trip in their head-to-head matchup. Tax filed a monstrous 47.33 four-furlong breeze in his final turn of the screw ahead of Travers 150.
“We tucked him in behind a horse and we got some other company in the middle of it and he went to the rail and just went right on about his business. I was really happy,” said trainer Danny Gargan. “Irad [Ortiz] said he’s getting stronger and bigger and faster. We’re really happy with how he’s doing. He seems to be blossoming at just the right time. He was bucking and squealing coming off the track. It was a big-time work. He worked in 47 [.33], and out three-quarters in 1:12.4.”
Tax showed grit down the lane when confronted by Tacitus. Will Tacitus move forward after a bad break in the Jim Dandy? Will Tax step up another rung after the win and that faster-than-a-speeding-bullet work?
The rematch looks great, so it’s best to enjoy it while you can, because, like most renewals of this race, it’ll be long forgotten before the race is official.
Brendan O’Meara is a freelance writer and author of Six Weeks in Saratoga: How Three-Year-Old Filly Rachel Alexandra Beat the Boys and Became Horse of the Year. He lives in Eugene, OR.
