This Side Up: Derby and Met Mile: Two Sides of the Same Coin

We are increasingly familiar with the kind of traction even the most brazen untruth can achieve in the era of social media. I guess people either no longer believe in hell, or they've decided they're headed there anyway.

But let's not kid ourselves that we were ever especially diligent in authenticating what we read in the Good Old Days of hot-metal print. How apt, for instance, that a highly pertinent observation long credited to Mark Twain–that “a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes”–should instead turn out to have a convoluted ancestry extending three centuries. Sure enough, perhaps the most famous quotation of the Turf is still almost universally misattributed.

The G1 Investec Derby may be a month later than usual, and with hardly anyone present, but you can guarantee one thing won't have changed. Round the world, people will again be recycling the “famous” dictum of Federico Tesio: “The Thoroughbred racehorse exists because its selection has depended not on experts, technicians or zoologists, but one piece of wood: the winning post of the Epsom Derby.”

While that was evidently Tesio's belief, the words actually belong to his business partner and biographer, Marchese Mario Incisa della Rocchetta. It's a typical instance of how Don Mario, with his charm and elegant prose, managed to render accessible the inscrutable genius of his late friend. Few who today profess reverence for Tesio have much sense of the idiosyncrasies that governed his unarguable legacy to the breed. Certainly some of his less scientific instincts could never have warranted general application.

But his faith in the Derby, as the definitive test of the assets we should replicate in the breed, is unimpeachable. And if we owe the axiom itself to Don Mario–whether paraphrasing some remembered exchange, or just giving felicitous expression to observed behaviour–then it is one that has united breeders across the centuries.

In fact, the Derby and the breed evolved almost in tandem. The first Derby over a mile and a half was run in 1784; the first attempt at some formal registration of what evolved into the Thoroughbred was the Introduction to a General Stud Book, just seven years later. And we have long grasped why this should be: how the track configuration and the race distance together demand an optimal equilibrium–both between speed and stamina, and also in the more literal sense of athletic balance.

The 2001 winner is certainly doing his bit for the Derby as the ultimate genetic signpost. True, Galileo (Ire) must this time settle for just the five runners in his quest for that fifth winner, to secure outright a record he shares with five others.     Nonetheless his own sire Sadler's Wells still casts a long shadow. Montjeu (Ire)'s son Camelot (GB) is the sire of English King (Fr), whose discovery for €210,000 at Arqana is only the latest proof of Jeremy Brummitt's flair for tasks that baffle so many other prospectors. High Chaparral (Ire)'s son Free Eagle (Ire) has outsider Khalifa Sat (Ire) while Kameko, as a Classic winner already, shows how scandalous has been the general European neglect (David Redvers an honorable exception) of Kitten's Joy.

That's a point I have labored sufficiently for now, though it's also good to see George Strawbridge's home-bred Point of Entry colt Worthily fast-tracked from a debut success only three weeks ago. Albeit both are by pretty unequivocal turf stallions, success for either of these U.S.-breds would have me banging with renewed insistence on the same drum as in this space last week.

I had lots of interesting feedback on the observations I made then, including some inspired guesses regarding the anonymous European agent with such infuriating misapprehensions about the American Thoroughbred. If he (or his patrons!) have also managed his identification, then let me add a fresh provocation–which is that a future Derby winner might more feasibly be sired by the winner of the GI Runhappy Metropolitan H. than by the winner of the GI Manhattan S., over turf and a longer route on the same card.

That's because pretty much the same attributes have helped to make the reputation of both the Met Mile and the Derby as “stallion-making” races. Both put a premium on carrying speed–which, as I said last week, is the defining hallmark that should again interest European breeders in dirt stallions generally. This Sadler's Wells hegemony at Epsom, after all, started with the son of a Kentucky Derby winner.

And few horses carry speed like a Met Mile winner. Because there's no doubt that a mile round a single turn showcases very different merits. Two turns relieve a horse from flat-out commitment (besides also introducing an extra crapshoot quality in the draw). The Met Mile is an extended sprint, with zero opportunity for a breather. It brings together dashers and Classic types in a challenge that discloses precisely the versatility, toughness, lungs and class we should be breeding to.

It will be fascinating, in this whole context, to see how Noble Mission (GB)'s son Code of Honor gets on today. He is, on paper, turf-bred-but Noble Mission, just like his brother Frankel, always ran in a fashion ideally tailored to dirt. Having shown Classic caliber round two turns, Code Of Honor now bids to make a renewed nuisance of himself to Vekoma (Candy Ride {Arg}): they were foaled in the same Lane's End barn, within 24 hours, and Code of Honor has finished ahead in both of Vekoma's career defeats.

Eventually a race's reputation for making stallions will become self-sustaining. Everyone sees the resonant names strewn across the Met Mile roll of honor–from Native Dancer to Buckpasser to Fappiano to Ghostzapper to Quality Road–and wants to earn a share of that legacy at stud. That's why, for instance, recent Belmont winners Palace Malice and Tonalist each returned to New York the following summer for the Met Mile (finishing first and second, respectively).

Of course, there will be the occasional dud. But you have to ask what else might have been lost to the American breed in the export of Eskendereya, responsible for two of the last three winners (graduating from his first three crops). Because a race that permits no hiding place will tend to disclose something authentic.

It's rare even for an elite race to be quite so unrelenting, so unsparing. Yet Saturday we have one staged either side of the ocean. They could not look more different, but neither will compromise in making their conflicting demands. There can be no half-measures; just a perfect blend. And that, you might say, is the long and the short of it.