BALTIMORE — Let’s call it a correction in the horse racing market.
Two weeks after a late entry named Rich Strike unleashed a rail skimming, swerving stretch run that anyone who’s had a few can appreciate to win the Kentucky Derby at impossible 80-1 odds, order was restored.
Early Voting, a colt owned by the billionaire hedge fund investor Seth Klarman, repelled the challenge of the heavily favored Epicenter to capture the 147th running of the Preakness Stakes.
Early Voting won with a time of 1:54.54 and 1 ¼ lengths ahead of Epicenter.
Granted, the colt’s victory was not as compelling as the Derby winner’s.
Rich Strike was the only horse in training for his owner, Rick Dawson. His trainer, Eric Reed, ships his horses from his modest farm in Lexington, Ky. to backwater tracks in Ohio, Indiana and West Virginia where the ding, ding, ding of slot machines provides the soundtrack for low budget horse dramas.
His jockey? Sonny Leon. Don’t worry if the name is not familiar — seasoned horseplayers were barely familiar with the 32-year-old Venezuelan.
Still, it was not like Early Voting’s victory was totally void of warm and fuzzy. Klarman was celebrating his 65th birthday and grew up three blocks from Pimlico Race Course, a blistered monument to the sepia age of horse racing.
After all, the hard-knocking Seabiscuit gave hope to Depression-era Americans when he upset 1937 Triple Crown champion War Admiral, owned by one of the titans of the turf, Sam Riddle, in a match race.
Seabiscuit was a victory for the proletariat. Early Voting’s win here was a tribute to a sound business plan executed by a team of thoroughbred racing’s blue bloods.
The colt’s trainer, Chad Brown, has hundreds of horses provided by enough well-heeled owners to make him a four-time Eclipse Award champion trainer. Early Voter’s jockey, Jose Ortiz, along with his brother Irad, are perennially among the top 10 riders in the nation.
And Klarman, who got rich and famous as a value investor, applied those principles to win the middle jewel of the Triple Crown. He had the foresight and iron will to resist the lure of the Derby.
With only three starts, two of them victories, Klarman told Brown that Early Voting was not ready to face 20 horses and the mayhem of America’s most famous race.
“They had an option to run in the Derby and passed,” said Ortiz, wiping away tears in the moment after the race. “It’s very hard to get a winner to pass on the Derby and they made a right choice by the horse.”
When Dawson and Reed decided their colt needed more than two weeks rest and chose to skip the Preakness to run in the Belmont Stakes on June 11, Klarman, Brown and Ortiz took advantage of the fundamentals presented them.
The trainer and owner followed a similar path to win the 2017 Preakness with Cloud Computing, a similarly lightly raced colt that offered more promise than performance at that point in his career but delivered.
Team Early Voting, however, changed tactics to ensure the victory. The colt had never really sat behind horses, preferring to steal to the front like a cat burglar and dare the authorities to run him down.
Not on Saturday. Early Voting and Ortiz stalked the early pacesetter Armagnac as unhurried as a museum goer on a Sunday afternoon before overtaking him and holding the lead to the end.
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