ELEVEN YEARS AGO was the birth as we know it of the Curlin Stakes.
At that time it wasn’t called the Curlin Stakes. That wouldn’t come until 2009. In 2007, it was just an anonymous allowance optional claiming race on a Friday, July 30 to be precise, Race No. 6, nine furlongs on the dirt, a nine-horse field. This race was nothing, one of the countless and innumerable footnotes over the course of 36 days.
Grasshopper, a son of Dixie Union, won the race with Calvin Borel in the irons, this when Borel was the darling of horse racing having won the Kentucky Derby aboard Street Sense that year.
Grasshopper won that allowance optional claimer in a respectable 1:49 and change, and it was Grasshopper who changed how we think about prepping for the Travers. Why?
It was Grasshopper who eventually gave Street Sense the stretch battle of a lifetime during the Travers ultimately ceding to the Derby winner mere yards from the wire. And the prep wasn’t a stake. It lacked prestige. It won’t pad a horse’s resume. It was a simple race tucked away on the card before the “serious” weekend racing took place.
“That was a signature race for him,” Grasshopper’s trainer Neil J. Howard told me over the phone. “Anytime you win anything—anything—at Saratoga, you’ve got to be pleased. He did it with a strong race.”
Ever since that July 30 day in 2007, the Friday before the Grade 2 Jim Dandy at Saratoga and the Grade 1 Haskell Invitational at Monmouth, there was now a newer, fresher, maybe junior varsity-way to prep for the Travers if the horse wasn’t quite ready for graded company.
Maybe the colt isn’t ready to face the battle-tested Triple Crown horses in the Jim Dandy, but a trainer still wants to get a race for his colt on the track. Suddenly the Friday race—restricted to non-winners of one graded stake in 2018—is a legitimate and fruitful test to see if the Grade 1 Travers four weeks later merits attention.
Grasshoppper came into the allowance with two starts as a two-year-old and two starts as a three-year-old. He hadn’t even stepped up into light stakes company yet. He had some zip, but he needed a race over the track. He won, and Howard and owner Will Farish objectively thought the Travers was a race worthy of Grasshopper’s talents.
“The Travers is not a race where you take the position, ‘Let’s just take a shot and see what happens,’” Howard said.
As luck would have it, that 2007 Travers was a small field, which gave a horse with the tactical speed of Grasshopper an advantage.
Grasshopper took the lead early in the race, and turning for home it was evident that we were in for a classic stretch duel, a two-horse race between David and Goliath.
“The feeling was that of course it’s not over till it’s over,” Howard said. “When they came off the turn and they passed the 3/16th pole it was a two-horse race. You could tell that it was not going to be impossible.
“At that point you know you were going to be first or second and run well in the Travers. We were rooting our horse on, hoping to get there. It was exciting in those kinds of races. You knew you were going to run well at that point. The Travers came up a short.”
Satisfied his plan worked so well, Howard figured he could try again a year later.
“Mambo…that’s another conversation,” Howard said.
If you thought the Street Sense v. Grasshopper stretch duel was as close as it could get, a year later Mambo in Seattle and Colonel John locked up at the wire in one of the closest Travers in history. You needed a microscope to name the winner.
Colonel John had the lead down the center of the track with Mambo in Seattle, that year’s winner of the Neil Howard Stakes, soon-to-be-Curlin Stakes, swung out wide. Robby Albarado, aboard Mambo, pumped his fist as if he had won.
“You know what’s funny,” Howard said. “I kind of knew. Even though you can’t tell watching it, I knew he got beat that lip. I told everybody just calm down. I had a feeling. What can you say? He ran a great race in the Travers.”
After Howard used this pre-Jim Dandy Day race two years in a row to come within a half-length (2007) and a lip (2008) of the Mid-Summer Derby, it suddenly became a thing.
By 2009, the race was named for two-time Horse of the Year Curlin. Now it is taken as seriously as the Jim Dandy and Haskell. The betting favorite doesn’t come out of this race, but because of the work Howard did with Grasshopper and Mambo, this race and this day can’t be ignored.
V.E. Day, then trained by Jimmy Jerkins in 2014, is the only Curlin Stakes winner to parlay that into the Travers winner’s circle. It’s a gargantuan leap in class from the Curlin to the Travers, but there is precedent with what V.E. Day did and what Howard had done before that.
“It’s tough to have horses right. I don’t care if it’s a goddam maiden race,” Howard said. “It’s hard to have horses just right on the day. That’s why I’m the type of person…these guys win the all the big races all the time, I tip my hat to him. It’s hard enough to win a maiden race.
“You watch the likes of [Bob] Baffert, [Steve] Asmussen, [Chad] Brown, all those big outfits, to win those races at that high rate of accomplishment. It’s hard enough to win a maiden race, much less keep them right and eating. The time, the effort and pressure…training thoroughbreds, it’s the greatest job in the world. There’s a lot that goes into it.”
A decade after Howard changed how some trainers approach the Travers, there’s zero sourness with Grasshopper or Mambo. This sentiment will most certainly differ from trainer to trainer, but getting them to the wire and giving them the best chance to run their race, that is the true victory, win or lose.
“That’s why when the horse runs good, much less wins, you can relax a bit and be happy,” Howard said.
Brendan O’Meara is a freelance writer and author of Six Weeks in Saratoga. He also hosts The Creative Nonfiction Podcast.
