Editor's Note: Derek Simon's winning selections can be purchased on VegasInsider.com daily. Click to win!
Big Brown will not win the 2008 Kentucky Derby.
Yes, I know his trainer, Richard Dutrow, said that he “wouldn't trade horses with anyone” and proclaimed his steed to be the best three-year-old in the world. And, yes, I saw the Florida Derby — a race that Big Brown captured by five widening lengths after breaking from an impossible outside post position and negotiating the first half-mile in a blistering 45 4/5 seconds.
But the derby in Florida is a far cry from the one that will be run on the first Saturday in May in Kentucky. In the Bluegrass State, Big Brown surely won’t be facing a field featuring a second betting choice whose only win came against maidens — as was the case in the Florida Derby, where Elysium Fields (who finished 11th) went to post at 5-2.
Regardless of what Dutrow thinks, his chances of winning the Kentucky Derby — even if Big Brown is, in fact, the best sophomore in training — are about as good as a Pamela Anderson wedding anniversary.
In the Run for the Roses, experience counts.
After all, it was just last year that Curlin, the reigning Horse of the Year who captured the World Cup in Dubai on the same day that Big Brown was victorious in Florida, faced an identical challenge — winning the Derby off of just three lifetime starts. It is a feat that hasn’t been accomplished since Regret became the first filly to win America’s most prestigious horse race on May 8, 1915 — two days after Babe Ruth hit his first Major League home run, when the price of gasoline was just 13 cents a gallon.
Now, if the world’s greatest racehorse couldn’t win in Kentucky as a three-year-old, what makes Dutrow (and others) think Big Brown can?
Not only has the son of Boundary shown an (over)abundance of early speed — hardly a selling point at 1 ¼ miles (especially when Nick Zito, trainer of onetime Derby favorite War Pass, promises his colt will “be on the lead” in Kentucky) — but Dutrow’s charge hasn’t exactly packed a wallop down the lane either. Big Brown required almost 13 seconds to traverse the last 1/8-mile of the Florida Derby. That’s more than a second longer than it took Curlin last April, when he blazed the closing furlong of the Arkansas Derby — his final Kentucky Derby prep — in 11 4/5, despite running over a deeper, more tiring surface at Oaklawn Park.
Add to that a sire and dam not known for their durability and foot trouble requiring custom shoes more expensive than those once worn by Imelda Marcos, and it’s plain to see that Lady Luck is not smiling on Big Brown.
Following Kentucky Derby 134, my guess is Richard Dutrow won’t be either.
