LOUISVILLE – The trainer wore a black cowboy hat, which was perfectly appropriate since his horse is considered the outlaw of the Kentucky Derby field.
“I got a closet full of ’em,” said Dallas Keen with a laugh, one of the few he’s been able to manage since his horse, Valhol, was accused of having won the Arkansas Derby with some help from Duracell.
There’s an old saying around the racetrack that when a horse is gelded – as Valhol was last October – they throw the, um, “discarded parts” ahead of him.
“That way he’ll chase them the rest of his life,” Keen said.
Instead, Valhol, Keen and vanquished jockey Billy Patin may spend the rest of their careers running from the charge of being cheaters.
Never mind that nothing’s been proven, nor that even if it is somehow established that Patin carried an electronic device during the race that he actually used it on Valhol, or that even if he did, whether it had any more effect on the horse’s performance than the equally-persuasive but perfectly-legal whip.
Unless – or, as Keen believes, until – Valhol crosses the finish line ahead of 19 other horses in the ninth race on Saturday, he will forever be known as the horse that was “plugged in” to the 125th running of the Kentucky Derby.
“It’s not fair,” Keen said. “Not fair to the horse, or to the owner or to the rider. They weren’t giving us very much respect before the race, and now this.”
Valhol, one of the most lightly-raced horses in a Derby field as green as the Churchill Downs turf course, didn’t warrant much respect before he broke his maiden in Arkansas, where he romped by 4 lengths.
That was just his third start of a career that began in February with a second-place finish in a six-furlong race at the Fairgrounds, followed by a fourth in the Louisiana Derby – the Louisiana Derby his second time out! – after Kimberlite Pipe, the eventual winner, cut in front of Valhol, causing Patin to pull him up in the stretch and lose any chance of winning.
But at Oaklawn Park, Valhol took command of the race after six furlongs and drew off from the field. If ever a horse looked as if he had won easily, without help, it was Valhol that day.
But then came the incriminating videotape, in which a black cylindrical object roughly the size of a pocket cigarette lighter could be clearly seen falling – or being flipped away – from Patin’s right hand.
When the track was rolled afterward, a makeshift device of two small batteries wrapped in a coil of wire, commonly known as a “machine,” was found by the groundskeepers.
Weaving together a web of circumstantial evidence – after all, the device was found in roughly the same area where the object was dropped by Patin, who after all rode mainly on the Louisiana circuit, where buzzing horses is said to be standard operating procedure, and after all, what right did this horse have to win the Arkansas Derby anyway? – the Oaklawn Park stewards froze the winner’s $300,000 share of the purse pending an investigation.
It all presumed not only guilt, but complicity on the part of Valhol’s ownership, and effectively precluded the horse and its trainer from the only chance either would ever get to run for the roses.
It also smacked of selective prosecution, since, as Wayne Lukas pointed out yesterday, “If you think that was the only battery found on that racetrack that day, you’re being naive. In some of those tracks down there, the boys carry one in each hand.”
One could make the point that the difference between jolting a horse and whipping him is similar to the difference between going to the electric chair or being caned to death.
Both do the same job, only differently.
Thankfully, a Little Rock judge righted Oaklawn’s wrong on Tuesday, but the episode still stung Valhol’s team worse than any battery ever could have stung its horse.
“It was very disappointing,” Keen said. “We were especially angry with how Oaklawn handled the whole situation.”
Patin, an unknown rider with a history of personal problems, had volunteered to work horses for Keen when Mark Guidry, Keen’s regular rider and Patin’s brother-in-law, was injured and unable to keep some commitments.
Keen said Patin willingly rode Valhol in the morning free of charge, and in 2-year-old training races, after one of which he came back raving, “This is the best horse I ever rode.”
Since Patin had not won a race worth more than $35,000 in more than 10 years, it may have seemed like faint praise, but according to Keen, Patin and Valhol had a rider-runner bond that he hasn’t seen too often.
“He loves Valhol,” Keen said. “When Billy gets on him, the horse just goes perfect.”
Instead, Valhol will be in the capable but unfamiliar hands of Willie Martinez, who rode him for the first time on Tuesday. “He got along with him pretty well,” Keen said. “But not like Billy.”
Keen, a 41-year-old former rodeo bull-rider who proudly wears a huge gold belt buckle identifying him as the leading trainer at Lone Star Park for 1997, affected the black cowboy hat look long before he became a villain.
Yesterday’s choice was a $400 Resistrol 20X, which is a designation of the quality of beaver skin in the hat. He also has hats designated 100X, worth over $1,000, he said. Every one of them, of course, is black.
“When I put on a light-colored hat, everybody says, no, that’s not you,” Dallas Keen said with a shrug. “I guess black is me.”
And probably always will be, unless he and Valhol manage to win the Kentucky Derby, batteries not included.