Justify Was Good. Should We Be Okay With That?

This is the hard part about being called a freak, the best horse in decades, a cinch to win the Triple Crown. Do anything less than win by 10, run an off-the-charts speed figure and scare everyone but the foolhardy and dreamers away from the GI Belmont S. and you look like a disappointment.

Was Justify (Scat Daddy) a disappointment in Saturday's GI Preakness S.? No. To say or write that would not be fair. He won the race. He did his job. He'll be running for a Triple Crown in 20 days for the team of Baffert, Mike Smith, the China Horse Club, WinStar Farm, SF Bloodstock and the other entities that own a piece of the horse.

But Justify didn't look invincible, and that's what was puzzling. We came for the second of three stages in what was supposed to be a Triple Crown coronation and instead we got a knock- down horse race where even winning trainer Bob Baffert admitted “he really had to work for it.”

So who is this horse, the freak that looked so dominant and overcame the odds in the GI Kentucky Derby–or the horse who “really had to work for it” to win the Preakness? We don't know, but after the Preakness, a Belmont win by Justify no longer looks like a foregone conclusion.

After the race when appearing before the NBC cameras, Baffert was honest in his assessment, but didn't seem the least bit bothered that this was, in his words, a “nail-biter.” That's probably because he's been through this enough times that he knows you can never take a win in a Triple Crown race for granted. He also seemed to believe that Justify's race was better than it looked because he was hooked early by a good horse in Good Magic (Curlin).

There is some truth to that. Aboard Good Magic, Jose Ortiz was not going to let Mike Smith and Justify get an easy lead. He sent his horse out of the gate and also seemed to want to float Justify out toward the middle of the track. The two were eyeball-to-eyeball from the start and were still going at it in the middle of the stretch.

“They put it to us,” Baffert said. “It was like they were having their own private match race and someone had to give. I'm glad it wasn't us. I'm so happy that he got it done. He's a great horse to handle all that pressure and keep on running.”

Agreed, Justify didn't have the easiest of trips, but it wasn't that tough. Justify would have been in a real bind if the pace were fast. It was not. The opening quarter was run :23.11 and the half went in :47.19.

Compare that to the Derby. With speedball Promises Fulfilled (Shackleford) leading the way and Justify on the attack just outside of him, they went in splits of :22.24 and :45.77. After enduring a pace fight that would have broken the spirit of just about any other horse on the planet, Justify pulled away and won comfortably over Good Magic.

Yes, this was a different day and a different racing surface, but the Preakness pace was much more comfortable than the Derby pace and this time Justify “really had to work for it” to beat Bravazo (Awesome Again) and Tenfold (Curlin). Bravazo was coming off a sixth-place finish in the Derby and Tenfold was last seen finishing fifth in the GI Arkansas Derby. Neither is a bad horse, but nothing about their credentials told you they'd be able to put a scare into Justify in the Preakness. Justify beat Bravazo by a mere half-length. Bravazo finished a neck in front of Tenfold.

“It took more out of me,” Baffert said when asked if he thought the Preakness had taken much out of Justify.

Now that we know that the Belmont will not be the first walkover in the history of the Triple Crown series, Justify's owners are facing an incredibly difficult dilemma. The China Horse Club and WinStar Farm and their various partners own several good 3-year-olds, and that's actually a bit of a problem. They took on their own horse yesterday with Quip (Distorted Humor). That was a gamble that could have seriously backfired. What if Quip beat Justify by a nose and thus ended his Triple Crown bid? Fortunately, or, perhaps, unfortunately, Quip didn't bring his A game to Pimlico yesterday. He finished last of eight.

But WinStar and China Horse Club have another one waiting in the wings who is much better. His name is Audible (Into Mischief). He won the GI Florida Derby and ran a big race when third in the Derby. He's trained by Todd Pletcher, whose Derby starters virtually always skip the Preakness and then enter the Belmont starting gate fresh and dangerous. Right now, he looks like obvious second choice in the Belmont and, on paper, it looks like he has every chance to beat Justify and keep him from winning the Triple Crown.

Do you run him in the Belmont and risk beating Justify or do you sit it out and deny Audible a chance to win a Triple Crown race and greatly improve his own value as a stallion? I wouldn't run Audible, but let's leave that decision up to the people who call the shots for WinStar and the China Horse Club and, admittedly, know a lot more about this stuff than I do.

That decision will come in time. In the meantime, the Justify team deserves a chance to sit back, relax and enjoy another win in the Triple Crown series by a really good racehorse. But how good a racehorse? That's a question that was not answered yesterday.