Horse Racing: Derby in the Air

Forget the mint juleps ($1.50 and keep the glass), the programs, hats and banners. The business to own at Churchill Downs when they run the Kentucky Derby on May 6 is the Ouija board concession. Without one, nobody is going to be able to pick a winner.

Something like 19,000 thoroughbreds are born every year in the U.S., and the odds against any of them even getting to the post in the Derby are at least 1,000 to 1. The way this year's three-year-olds have been knocking each other off, the odds against any of them winning—or even surviving—should be even more attractive.

The original favorite was Mrs. H. C. Phipps's colt Successor, a full brother to the 1965 Derby choice Bold Lad (who finished ninth in an eleven-horse field), a winner of four races and $441,404 as a two-year-old in 1966. Successor has raced twice this year and lost both times. His successor as the early-book Derby favorite (at 2 to 1) was Edith Bancroft's Damascus, whose name may be steelier than his spirit. At New York's Aqueduct race track two weeks ago, he was beaten by a horse named Dr. Fager—after a surgeon in Boston, and for good reasons. Dr. Fager's right knee is so bad that his trainer does not even plan to enter him at Churchill Downs.

Confusion was compounded last week when Liz Tippett's Racing Room breezed to a five-length victory in the Forerunner Purse at Keeneland in Kentucky—a prep race designed to weed out obvious Derby also-rans and narrow down the field. Of the seven horses in the Forerunner, one was so little thought of that his owner had not bothered to nominate him for the Derby. His name: Racing Room.

Big tune-up race of the week was the $112,400 Wood Memorial at Aqueduct. This time, there was no Dr. Fager to contend with; Damascus drew off by 6 lengths at the wire, and Jockey Willie Shoemaker was cautiously optimistic: "Right now, this looks to me like the Derby horse."