Kentucky Derby winner Sovereignty not a sure thing to run the Preakness

LOUISVILLE - The remorseless drizzle continued its relentless weekend just after dawn Sunday at Churchill Downs, and then it sounded like the melancholy might drift toward Baltimore. On the question about whether freshly crowned Kentucky Derby champion Sovereignty would pursue the Triple Crown at the Preakness on May 17, the human voices closest to the colt carried hints of hesitancy.

“We’re in discussions about it,” Hall of Fame trainer Bill Mott said. “Michael and I have already had a brief discussion and we’re just tossing around the options.”

“Michael” is Michael Banahan, who has represented the global equine empire of Godolphin here as its director of bloodstock in the United States. “It’s a long season,” Banahan soon said, “and he’s had three hard races since the beginning of March” - counting the Fountain of Youth on March 1 and the Florida Derby on March 29 - “and that takes a lot out of these horses.”

He said, “Yay or nay, we’ll do what [Sovereignty] tells us to do.”

Asked if he would have trouble with the act of saying no to the Preakness, the deeply experienced and long-judicious Mott, 71, said he would not, if the decision came to that. Asked whether the biggest obstacle would be the two weeks between the races, a time frame increasingly seen as hasty, Mott said: “Yeah. Over the years I think spacing them out a little bit gives the opportunity to make them [the horses] last a little longer. We’re looking at a career, and you want a career to last more than five weeks.”

Said Banahan, “He has a big year hopefully to continue down the road here, and there’s an awful lot of nice races.”

Still, the Triple Crown, Mott said, is “not something we’re not going to think about.

“He’s a big, strong horse, and if you’re ever going to look at one and say that’s [Triple Crown] your goal … this is the horse.”

“If he’s in great shape,” Banahan added, “we’ll have a look at everything.”

The rain kept falling outside the barn where the native South Dakotan Mott has stationed himself for his Kentucky stays since 1980. He still felt the wow of his second Derby win, the other having come in 2019 when Country House moved up from second to first 22 minutes after the finish when Maximum Security met disqualification for interference, and the first seeing his horse first to the wire. Mott said he’d awakened Sunday to his wife asking if he believed it yet. (Sort of, it seems.)

Mostly, the session concerned the immediate future of the big horse who just got bigger. Sovereignty seemed fine by Sunday morning, posing skillfully for photos, and Mott said he felt “flabbergasted” at how well Sovereignty ate Saturday evening. The trainer also noticed “a little scrape on the outside of his pastern,” maybe the result of an early fracas out of the gate that left jockey Junior Alvarado in a brief fret about whether Sovereignty might lose a shoe. “On a normal day on a horse that’s not him,” Mott said, “you wouldn’t be concerned about it.”

This customary interview session for the winning connections the morning after the Derby doubled as another marker of an era when the notion of winning the Derby and then skipping the Preakness has become more fashionable. Racehorses run less frequently in general than did their ancestors. Considerations about future stallion days factor in, a thought Mott did mention Sunday. Then this year, there’s another element: The Belmont Stakes will happen upstate at Saratoga while Belmont Park undergoes renovation, meaning it will require only a mile and a quarter rather than the usual and arduous mile and a half.

“Makes it very interesting to me,” Mott said, without saying how that might impact the Preakness.

If Sovereignty were to miss the Preakness, he would become the fourth Derby winner in the past seven Triple Crown seasons to do so (with a technicality in one of those cases). Mott’s own Country House missed out when a respiratory infection turned up the Tuesday morning after the Derby, but he already seemed a bit circumspect that year.

The spring of 2021 brought the complicated case of Medina Spirit and Mandaloun, who ran 1-2 in the Derby on May 1. Mandaloun trainer Brad Cox announced on May 6 he would bypass the Preakness to give the colt more time off. Medina Spirit trainer Bob Baffert announced May 9 that his colt had tested positive for a drug allowed only up to a certain time before a race, which would lead to eventual disqualification. Medina Spirit ran the Preakness on May 15 as a temporary Derby winner, finishing third.

The mind-boggling 2022 Derby champion, 80-1 shot Rich Strike, also missed the Preakness as trainer Eric Reed thought it imprudent for his particular horse. He did run the Belmont, unlike the other recent cases, and finished sixth.

During the 1950s, five Kentucky Derby winners bowed out of the Preakness, often because their trainers did not nominate them to begin with, according to research in Playfecta.com. Then the annual Triple Crown season breathed all the way to 1982 before another such case, which came with Gato del Sol and his post-Derby fatigue. The year 1985 brought the eccentric story of Spend A Buck, who went chasing a $2 million bonus offered for a race sequence centered in New Jersey. Eleven more years went by before the career of Grindstone, the 1996 winner by a notch of a nose, ended five days after that finish because of a bone chip in his right knee.

All 22 Derby winners between 1997 and 2018 entered the Preakness, and 11 of them won it to jazz up the run-up to the Belmont.

“Maybe the middle of the week, we’ll make a decision on it,” Banahan said.

“I don’t believe we’ve got to move anywhere for a week,” Mott said, “even if we were going to Pimlico.” He said of Churchill, “I think this is the best place to evaluate and assess him,” concluding that it’s comfortable “because it’s home.” He said, “I think the great thing about the Triple Crown is not many horses are able to do it.”

And he said, “Once we make the decision, we’ll make the decision and not look back.”