Title: The Fast Ride: Spectacular Bid and the Undoing of a Sure Thing
Author: Jack Gilden
ISBN: 9781496230508
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Publication year: 2022
You try to do the best with what you’ve got and ignore everything else. That’s why horses get blinders in horse racing: You look at the horse next to you, and you lose a step.
. – Jimmy Lovine
By Fakhry Asa’ad
In 1979, Spectacular Bid, a grey racehorse that was described as “astonishingly fast” was on track to win the Triple Crown, the prestigious trio of American races for three-year-old horses.
The horse had already claimed victories in the first two legs — Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes. However, in the final and longest of the three races, the Belmont Stakes, the colt only managed to come in third, failing the so-called “Test of the Champion”. Ever since, racing fans have wondered: What went wrong?
“The Fast Ride”, written by renowned Baltimore journalist Jack Gilden, underlined the untold story behind Spectacular Bid’s saga, describing a thin line between hard work and excess, including substance abuse, animal manipulation and doping, and race fixing. Hardly anyone in the horse’s circle made it out unscathed or undamaged.
When the horse went into the gate during the Belmont, he was the heavy favourite at odds of 3 to 10 — probably paying out a mere US$0.60 on a US$2 bet. He seemed headed for greatness, but as railbirds are quick to remind you: The horse has to run all the way around the track before he gets the trophy. A lot of things can happen on that trip, and there is no quicker way to find out that there is no such thing as a sure thing than to back one.
The Bid did not win, and the racing world blamed his jockey Ronnie Franklin for giving him a bad ride. Franklin did hit Spectacular Bid with the whip on his left flank coming on to the final stretch, which opened up a space on the inside rail, through which rival jockey Ruben Hernandez guided the challenger Coastal to victory.
What no one said at the time, however, was that the trainer, Buddy Delp, overcome with the idea that he had one of the greatest horses of all time (which he did) had told Franklin to go to the front early and try to win the race wire to wire.
Gilden explained that Delp didn’t just want to win; he wanted to break Secretariat’s Belmont Stakes record: 2:24. But chasing Secretariat (arguably the greatest racehorse ever in the history of horseracing) at the gruelling mile-and-the-half Belmont is, quite frankly, insane. Delp’s plan was like setting out to win the Golf Masters by making the longest hole-in-one ever sunk.
Later, Delp would say that Spectacular Bid had stepped on a safety pin, but no one believed him. Franklin, who had very public drug problems and was inexperienced, took the heat. His reputation never recovered.
To me, the key factor that sets this book is made clear in the afterword, where Gilden recounts his meetings with Delp: “He didn’t look good in his own stories, and neither did his father, but he believed in the redemption of confession, and he told me about everything that he personally had witnessed, which was just about everything.”
The untold story is revealed to us as to what happened that fateful weekend to alter horse racing history. As a racing fan, I was always intrigued about Triple Crown champions and the horses that “almost” made it — those who won the first two but failed the final hurdle.
The details behind the scenes in this book were very detailed and engrossing. The author gives the reader a full picture of how the racing world really works and what happens when all the tv cameras leave after the races are over and it’s just stable after stable full of basically money on the hoof.
