<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"   Yesterday, the trainer Bob Baffert made official what most had already suspected: Neither Super Ninety-Nine nor Den&amp;#039;s Legacy would be entered next Wednesday when the field is drawn for the Kentucky Derby. To most handicappers, it appears a sane decision. Den&amp;#039;s Legacy, like many Baffert-trained horses, showed prodigious talent as a two-year-old but struggled to find his stride at three. For the speedy Super Ninety-Nine, the longer distances of the Rebel Stakes and the Santa Anita Derby exposed an inability to carry any speed beyond a mile. Except for their association with the Hall of Fame trainer, neither horse had enough to threaten the country&amp;#039;s best three-year-olds at the Derby&amp;#039;s grueling mile-and-a-quarter distance. Baffert claims generous motives for the early announcement: he wanted to allow those owners and trainers with long-shot horses on the points-earned bubble time to decide whether to take a shot at entering the 20 horse field on May 4. A sporting gesture, but that leaves us with Derby with no Baffert entry, which is a bit like a Fourth of July without a cookout. The sole Baffert horse with enough points to qualify is Govenor Charlie, who&amp;#039;s had as many difficulties with a sore right hoof as his connections apparently had in spelling the word &amp;quot;governor.&amp;quot; With only a single workout since winning the Sunland Derby in March, he appears unlikely to go to the gate in Louisville. Baffert&amp;#039;s Code West is on the bubble: he&amp;#039;s an honest plodder who would look much more appealing in the marathon Belmont Stakes than in the Kentucky Derby\u2014apparently exactly the course that Baffert plans for the colt. Baffert hasn&amp;#039;t missed many Derbies since he dominated the Triple Crown series in the mid-1990s with his fabulous horses Silver Charm and Real Quiet. Since 1995, when his tough little gelding Cavonnier[1] got nipped at the wire by D. Wayne Lukas&amp;#039;s Grindstone, Baffert has shown up year after year with a small cavalry charge of horses and frequently with the favorite (as he did last year with Bodemeister). There&amp;#039;s been only two Derbies in the last eighteen years without a horse from Baffert stables. The past year hasn&amp;#039;t been kind to the sixty-year-old silver-haired trainer. In Dubai while Game On Dude prepared for the $10 million World Cup, he suffered a heart attack that nearly killed him. He still made the trip to Louisville with the Derby favorite, and he played his usual role of horse racing&amp;#039;s unofficial backstretch jester upon arrival, but his brush with mortality was a shock to fans who had grown used to Baffert&amp;#039;s always-youthful frat-boy mien. He found himself in the news again, and uncomfortably so, in mid-April, when it was reported that seven of his juvenile horses had died over the previous sixteen months, three of them from cardiac arrest\u2014a troublingly large number even for a trainer responsible for a giant stable. I doubt any Baffert horse will be in the Derby starting gate a week from Saturday, and I wouldn&amp;#039;t put a nickel on one if it were. (I do love the idea of betting a rested Code West in the Belmont.) Still, I hope the lack of runners doesn&amp;#039;t keep Bullet Bob from Louisville. NBC would be wise to hire him as an on-air analyst for the broadcast. His personality has always made the Derby an even better event, and in a sport where trainers have successfully trained themselves to deliver only packaged sound bites and clich\u00E9s in place of real insight, Baffert&amp;#039;s been a rare case of candidness topped with a kind of devil-may-care gift for humor. [1] Who writes footnotes in a blog? I do, when it comes to Cavonnier, one of my favorite horses of the last couple of decades. The dark-brown California-bred gelding in the bumblebee black-and-yellow-striped silks of Bob and Barbara Walter put Baffert on the map with a gutsy Derby performance, then came back to run miserably two weeks later in the Preakness, a race in which he got pelted on the backstretch by a beach ball hurled from the infield. Three weeks later, Cavonnier suffered what looked like\u2014and for almost any other horse would have been\u2014a career-ending injury at the Belmont Stakes as he bowed a tendon in the stretch. But Cavonnier and his owners made one of the least probable comebacks, and after a long regimen of experimental equine medicine and old-school hillside gallops the horse came back to the track and the winner&amp;#039;s circle two years later. The good people on the northern California racing circuit were always justifiably proud of the little gelding&amp;#039;s efforts\u2014after all, no other horse that broke his maiden at the Sonoma County Fair Meet ever ran in the money in the Kentucky Derby\u2014and not only did they rename the track&amp;#039;s premier race for juveniles after Cavonnier, for many years the near-champ put in a cameo, leading the two-year-old Cal-breds to the gate. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/a1051/the-railbird-trainer-bob-baffert-kentucky-derby/>