Rip Van Winkle is favorite in British betting shops for Breeders' Cup

[clevfan]

Rip Van Winkle is favorite in British betting shops for Breeders' Cup

Vic Ziegel
NY DAILY NEWS
Friday, November 6th 2009



ARCADIA, Calif. - Just in time, at long last, not a minute too soon, and finally, it's Day One of the Breeders' Cup races, $25.5 million in purse money riding on four thin ankles and judicious whipping. That doesn't mean the cuckoo time is actually over.

Did you know Gary Player has a 20,000-acre ranch in South Africa, where retired horses make little ones? Where they've identified 130 species of birds. (Which probably explains the scarcity of statues.) Why is Gary Player, the jockey-sized golfer who won nine major championships, interrupting my handicapping of Friday's Juvenile Turf Fillies, a million-dollar pot to be split up among various juvenile turf fillies? My pick, which appears in Friday's section, is not to be taken seriously.

But we're talking about Gary Player, who was awarded the first Breeders' Cup Sports and Racing Excellence Award (BCSREA) Thursday. The rest of us got breakfast. Player was asked to speak about SRE and he dropped these beauties on the audience: "The outside of a horse is good for the inside of a man." Followed by, "Overhead is vanity, profit is sanity." (A line to remember for my next expense account.)

The good news: He didn't offer an opinion on Zenyatta's chances against 13 male horses in Saturday's $5 million Classic.

It made a lot more sense to throw the question at Jerry Bailey, the jockey who won four Classics in five years and added one for the thumb 10 years later.

He likes Zenyatta. "Her" is what he called the undefeated mare. "Her and Rip Van Winkle, it's their race to lose," he said. "They're the most talented horses."

Rip Van Winkle is a 3-year-old visitor. He won his last two races, Grade I's, in England. He's never won at Friday's distance, a mile-and-a-quarter, never run over a synthetic surface, and never plays crap games with barons and earls. The punters love him over there. Zenyatta will go off at close to even-money Saturday but Rip Van Winkle remains the favorite in British betting shops.

Turns out he's got hoof problems that show up regularly. His trainer, Aidan O'Brien, said, "It would take nine months" to make it all better. "Usually, when a horse suffers those things, the season does catch up to them. (But) we haven't come here with a horse of this caliber before. He's had a lot of issues and he's swum against the tide all season."

"I'll make Rip my sleeper horse," I told a British writer.

"Sleeper?" he said, looking confused.

"You know, Rip Van Winkle, slept for 20 years."

"Twenty years?"

"Never mind."

Zenyatta has come from far back in all her races. In six of her last seven starts - five Grade I races - there was always somebody in front of her in deep-stretch. (Stat that may not mean a thing: 13 different horses have finished second in every one of her 13 races.)

She's a big horse, unusually big. A long strider. So even though it looks like she has too much ground to make up, her stride is something close to the giant on the beanstalk.

For all that, Bailey wonders if she'll be forced too far to the outside when she launches her late move. It's a route that's never failed her but she's never been asked to pass more than seven horses. Ladies, each and every one.

The Classic's field of 13, big boys, is the largest, and meanest, crowd she's been in with. And at a demanding mile-and-a-quarter, with various horses tiring, spread out across the track, she may have to weave her way home. And by the way, she's not fast enough to catch the Road-Runner.

"Nobody's asking her to win coming from the parking lot," Bailey says, "but she needs to save a little ground." One more concern: "She can't afford to be last," he warns.

The distance isn't a problem, trainer John Shirreffs assures us. Her sire, Street Cry, won Australia's two-mile Melbourne Cup. A son of Street Cry, Shocking, won the same two-mile grind this week.

Trainer Tim Ice, who's in the Classic with Summer Bird, the Belmont winner, isn't at all caught up in the Zenyatta-Rip Van Winkle hoo-hah. "I think it's great for racing that Zenyatta's in there," he said, "but I'm not scared of her."

Neither, I'm certain of this, is Gary Player.