It's not often that horse racing fans in Winnipeg have a vested stake in the Kentucky Derby, but that's the case with two different horses in today's big race. And for very different reasons.
It's not your dad's Downs
With pre-race favourite Big Brown, race fans in this town have very good reasons to cheer against his trainer, Richard Dutrow Jr. -- the man who hoodwinked our Manitoba-breds in the Queen's Plate three years ago and later got suspended for his conduct.
Horses thunder into the clubhouse turn last night as live racing began at Assiniboia Downs.
With 15-1 longshot Tale Of Ekati, it's a very different story. Canadian zillionaire Charles Fipke bred Tale of Ekati, just as he bred five two-year-olds sitting in trainer Carl Anderson's barn on the Assiniboia Downs backstretch. It might be the first time ever that the same breeder had horses at Churchill Downs and horses at Assiniboia Downs on Kentucky Derby Saturday -- and it's reason enough to cheer for a longshot.
More on that in a minute, but first back to Dutrow. For those who have forgotten, Dutrow was the trainer of Wild Desert, the horse that came out of nowhere, literally, to win the 2005 Queen's Plate.
The second-place horse that day? Manitoba-bred King of Jazz. The third place horse that day? Manitoba-bred Gold Strike.
And here's the thing -- what emerged months after the big race was that Wild Desert shouldn't have been allowed to race in the Queen's Plate in the first place.
That's because the horse's connections had falsely listed Wild Desert as having had only two workouts in the previous two months, when in fact the horse had been working out secretly. And one of the two workouts that was listed? That one never even happened at all.
Had all this information come to light prior to Canada's biggest race, Wild Desert almost certainly would have never been allowed to enter the starting gate and King of Jazz would most likely today stand as the only Manitoba-bred ever to win the continent's oldest horse race.
But the subterfuge surrounding Wild Desert only came out afterward. And, in part, only because the horse's owners boasted to the media in the post-race news conference about how much they'd won betting on their horse -- one owner made over $100,000 -- at what we now know were artificially inflated odds.
While Dutrow wasn't the trainer of record the day Wild Desert won the Queen's Plate -- he was serving a suspension at the time and transferred training duties to Bobby Frankel -- he was ultimately suspended for 14 days and fined $5,000 for giving false statements as part of an investigation into the matter by the New Jersey Racing Commission.
Dutrow is no stranger to suspensions, having been sidelined several times in recent years by racing commissions for illegal drug use on his horses -- and himself.
Put it all together and it'd be tough for anyone -- much less a racing fan from Winnipeg -- to cheer for Dutrow today.
But Tale of Ekati? That's a, well, different tale.
The horse's breeder is Fipke, the man who discovered diamonds in Canada's north.
And while it's normally hard to relate to a billionaire, Fipke gets big points in my book for continuing to stable horses at the Downs even as he's graduated to the big leagues of the sport.
The last couple years, he stabled the impeccably bred Indy Lead in the barn belonging to Anderson, an easy-going horseman with nothing but Canadian prairie in his blood.
This year, five of his horses, who are now owned by Fipke's buddy -- B.C.'s Ross Bennett -- occupy stables in Anderson's barn.
Anderson has dined with Fipke over the years and the two are close enough that Fipke invited Anderson down to Louisville this weekend to watch the big race. Anderson declined because he's got horses of his own running at a very different Downs this weekend.
"Fipke's got a lot of money but he's no different than anyone else," says Anderson. "You can talk horses with him all day."
It's hard to cheer for a billionaire, but today might be one of the few times.
paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.ca
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