Going into the final weekend of the meet, what with the Woodward Stakes and all, it’s high time to look back 10 years ago to when Rachel Alexandra beat the boys and became horse of the year.
That was going to be the entirety of this week’s column. Looking back at the moments big and small into the most electric scene ever at Saratoga Race Course.
It was going to the sole focus, but how can it? How can it when Rachel’s jockey, the Hall of Famer Calvin Borel, was arrested for drunk driving this past Sunday? In what I was hoping would be a celebratory column that allowed us to look back on a meet that saw so many great things, the coup de grace coming when Rachel Alexandra gallantly thwarted Macho Again under the wire and knighted “Alexandra the Great” by then-race caller Tom Durkin.
Ten years ago Borel had won the second of what would be three Kentucky Derbys. He then took off that mount because Jess Jackson, wine magnate, purchased Rachel Alexandra from Dolphus Morrison.
Morrison infamously said following Rachel’s smashing 20 ¼-win in the Kentucky Oaks that, in essence, fillies should run against their own. Jackson then purchased her and ran her in the Preakness Stakes. She broke from Post 13. She had Borel in the irons. She won.
Borel would even go on to win the 2010 Kentucky Derby aboard Super Saver. It granted Todd Pletcher his first career Derby win, a very elusive one at that. Borel won his third.
Borel, for all his ability and longevity, is a one-note rider. Hence the nickname Bo-rail. He rides the rail. For better or worse, there isn’t a whole lot of nuance. He had a chance to pilot Rachel Alexandra to a win in the Personal Ensign back in 2010. She had struggled all year. She never regained that turn of foot we saw her deploy in the Oaks, the Mother Goose, the Preakness, the Haskell and certainly the Woodward. She had reached the bottom.
And so in the Personal Ensign, Life at Ten went gunning for the lead and yet Borel insisted on taking Rachel Alexandra in a suicidal speed dual at the classic 10-furlong distance — always thought to be her Achilles’ heel — where she staggered home and lost to the opportunistic Persistently.
John Velazquez, aboard Life at Ten, couldn’t believe Borel went with him. But Borel had one thing in mind and didn’t call an audible.
In any case, Borel’s star began to fade and by 2016, Borel stepped away from racing, apparently at the behest of his wonderful and charming partner Lisa Funk. She worked with hunter jumpers and Borel couldn’t take that pace. He’s a one-note horseman, so to speak, and rides thoroughbreds.
“I didn’t quit because I wanted to,” he said. “I quit because of the circumstances. I didn’t quit because I was scared. Because I knew I didn’t quit for Calvin. I quit for somebody else, and I didn’t like it…. It slowed down so much.”
In the match race of passions, the track won out.
During the reporting of Six Weeks in Saratoga, Funk spoke of how the pair were like soul mates. They were so in sync when it came to horses and racing but, it appears, racing was too much in Borel’s blood — again, one note — that the pair split in 2016.
And so it is now, as we look back on that magical summer we asked: Would she run in the Travers against Summer Bird, the Belmont Stakes winner and Mine That Bird, the Kentucky Derby winner? (MTB would skip town, literally, in the middle of the night.) Would she run in the Pennsylvania Derby?
No, in order to cement Horse of the Year she would have to defeat older males.
In the post parade for the Woodward, she reared up on her hind legs. She stood as tall as a basketball hoop. Borel jumped off her. The crowd gasped. Nerves were popping.
We were all nervous. The Eight Belle’s post-Derby tragedy in 2008 was still very much on people’s minds.
Rachel was given a clean bill of health. She went to the lead and set scorching fractions. She circled the track repelling all attacks. One final push came from Macho Again. She held him off too. Over 30,000 fans were screaming, hugging, high fiving.
Ten years ago. It’s how we remember her, at her highest.
And now it appears Borel is at the nadir of his career, perhaps his life.
Nobody got hurt as a result of Borel’s drunk driving, except for Borel’s reputation. Maybe, if he remembers, he can look in the rearview when he was atop the best horse in the country (shush Zenyatta fans!) and his success was sustained and well earned.
Wish him well.
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. (@BrendanOMeara)
