Cauthen: A Born Winner

There had been 102 runnings of the Preakness Stakes before last Saturday, and many a great duel between horses and their riders. But the 103rd Preakness was as thrilling and cannily run a race as any in the history of this Triple Crown classic. Harbor View Farm's Affirmed, a splendid chestnut colt that can win from the front or the field, was masterfully paced by Steve Cauthen, who showed once again that, at 18, he already has the incandescence of greatness.

After a clean break, Cauthen dropped Affirmed into second place, waiting for Believe It, third in the Kentucky Derby, to lead the way. When Believe It hung back, Cauthen moved to the front. With stopwatch precision, he then cut the pace, lulling the field into marching to his drumbeat. Affirmed ran the first half-mile in a plater-slow 47 3/5 sec., Cauthen actually managing to rate, or husband, his horse while loping on the lead. Thus, when Jorge Velasquez pushed Calumet Farm's Alydar into his stretch surge, Affirmed was rested and ready to run. Said Cauthen simply: "He came up and set his horse down in the lane and I set mine down. Mine won." Affirmed flashed across the finish in 1 min. 54 2/5sec.—just 2/5 sec. short of the track record despite the slow early running—and won, going away, by a neck. Steve Cauthen and Affirmed outwitted and outran their challengers for the $136,200 winner's share of the Preakness purse. It was a lesson in the jockey's art.

From the day he first dons silks, walks to the paddock and gets a leg up on a Thoroughbred race horse, the public knows him as a jockey. But around the track, he is called a boy. It is an odd inversion of status for these masterful men, a class cognomen left over from the days when jockeys were servants of the sporting aristocracy. Age does not matter. The rankest apprentice is a boy; Willie Shoemaker—at age 46, the winner of more horse races than any man in the sport's history—is a boy.

There is another track term for a jockey: race rider. The title is used sparingly so that, in a generation of boys, only a handful, the very best, will earn the honor. Arcaro, Atkinson, Longden were race riders. And Shoemaker, Hartack, Cordero, Pincay, Baeza, Turcotte, Velasquez. Now there is Steve Cauthen, only 18 and a race rider. A prodigy at 16, a fearless boy returning from an ugly spill at 17, and less than a month past his 18th birthday, winner of the Kentucky Derby and Preakness, the first two classics of the Triple Crown.

Saturday's Preakness victory on Affirmed is further proof, as much as any single race can be, of Cauthen's claim to be on the select list. At 1 3/16miles, the Preakness provides an honest test of the three-year-old Thoroughbred and an intense examination of the rider. The shorter course (1/16 of a mile less than the Derby and 5/16 of a mile less than the Belmont Stakes) demands the hot speed that is the first hallmark of the breed. A topflight field hurtling around Pimlico's tight turns leaves no margin for error by a jockey: fail to find position by a few feet, miscalculate the pace by a tick of the clock, and the winner streaks to the wire before ground can be made up.