Blast From The Past: Breeders' Cup

Twelve months ago at Keeneland US Triple Crown winner American Pharoah put up probably the best performance seen at a Breeders’ Cup meeting when winning the Classic in track-record time by six and a half lengths. His all-the-way win earned him a career-best Timeform rating of 138, but we’re going back to 2004 when Ghostzapper was also an outstanding winner (rated 137) of the same race.

The venue that year – and for the only time in Breeders’ Cup history – was Lone Star Park in Texas, and the meeting will perhaps be best remembered by British readers for Oaks winner Ouija Board’s victory under Kieren Fallon in the Filly & Mare Turf, a race she was to win for a second time at Churchill Downs two years later. While Ouija Board was a hot favourite for her race, there was also a surprise win on dirt for the only other British-trained runner at the meeting Wilko who won the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile under Frankie Dettori.

But it was the Classic which was the race of the meeting. That year’s Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes winner Smarty Jones had already been retired by then, but otherwise the Classic brought together most of America’s top dirt horses still in training. They included the previous year’s winner Pleasantly Perfect who started joint-favourite in his bid to win it again having won the Dubai World Cup and the Pacific Classic in the meantime.

Besides the Belmont Stakes winner Birdstone (the only horse to beat Smarty Jones when foiling his Triple Crown bid) and the gelding Funny Cide who had won the previous season’s Kentucky Derby and Preakness, the field also included a rare female challenger in former Horse of the Year Azeri, a prolific Grade 1 winner against her own sex who had won the Breeders’ Cup Distaff two years earlier.

The other joint-favourite, though, was Ghostzapper, winner of seven of his nine races, including all three of his starts in 2004. Although a son of the 1998 Breeders’ Cup Classic winner Awesome Again, the big question about this former Grade 1-winning sprinter was would he stay on his first attempt at a mile and a quarter?

A runaway win in a Grade 3 contest over nine furlongs in the summer gave some encouragement, and he had followed that with a battling Grade 1 success over the same trip in the Woodward Stakes at Belmont (the neck runner-up Saint Liam won the following year’s Breeders’ Cup Classic) on his next start.

Settled comfortably in the lead by Javier Castellano with another of the Grade 1 winners in the field Roses In May in close attendance, Ghostzapper quickened on the home turn and drew clear in the final furlong, passing the post still full of running. Roses In May (who went on to win the 2005 Dubai World Cup) was three lengths back in second, putting up a top-class performance of his own to pull four lengths clear of Pleasantly Perfect in third.

As well as breaking the Lone Star Park track record, Ghostzapper’s time of 1.59.02 remains the fastest ever for a Breeders’ Cup Classic. Ghostzapper was the pick of his trainer Bobby Frankel’s six Breeders’ Cup winners, while his Vosburgh Stakes victory the year before had contributed to his trainer’s total of 25 Grade 1 wins in 2003, a record that Aidan O’Brien could conceivably move closer to reaching at this year’s Breeders’ Cup.