In the world of sports, athletes often dedicate their entire lives to reaching the pinnacle of their profession, but for many, life at the top can be short-lived. Sometimes all a player gets to experience at the highest level is one minute on the court, one trip to the plate, one shot on goal or one checkered flag, but more often than not, that fleeting moment in the spotlight is a story all its own. This is One & Done, a FOX Sports series profiling athletes, their paths to success and the stories behind some of sports' most ephemeral brushes with glory.
This weekend, American Pharoah will become the latest horse to try to end Thoroughbred racing's 37-year Triple Crown drought, and as post time Saturday at Belmont Park draws closer, fans will undoubtedly hear more and more about the rest of the Belmont Stakes field and the dearth of horses in it who have competed in each of the three Triple Crown events.
The argument made by some -- including California Chrome owner Steve Coburn after his horse's fourth-place finish at Belmont last year -- is that it's cowardly to skip the Preakness or to bring a rested horse into the final leg of the Triple Crown looking to spoil a shot at history.
For Chip Woolley, who trained historic longshot Mine That Bird to a Kentucky Derby win in 2009, only to see him finish second and third in the Preakness and Belmont, respectively, the Triple Crown is fine how it is.
"Absolutely not," Woolley told FOX Sports when asked if the Triple Crown format should be tweaked to put all horses on an even playing field. "It would be a detriment to the sport. Hell, you'd have a Triple Crown winner every year or two, and what would be precious, what would be special about that?
"Any horse that ever did it after you changed it would never be able to compare himself to the early Triple Crown winners," Woolley continued. "You'd never be that special, because those horses took on all comers, every time. They've done it that way for 141 years, so why would you want to change it now?
"It's the same with talk about spreading the races a little farther apart," he added. "It would never be the same. Once you've been there and done it like I did, you start to understand the history, and if you ever changed any of that, it would take away from that history and it would never be as special as it is the way it's set up right now.
"So changing it wouldn't be good for the sport. In fact, I think it would be the worst thing you could possibly do."
The New Mexico-based trainer Woolley speaks from experience. After all, he lived it. In '09, after traveling from Sunland Park to Louisville with Woolley, Mine That Bird went off at 50-1 odds in the Kentucky Derby, only to stun the racing world when he beat Pioneerof the Nile -- American Pharoah's sire -- by 6¾ lengths in a 19-horse field at Churchill Downs.
The Derby win was as much of a surprise to Woolley as it was to everyone else. In fact, the original plan was to hold Mine That Bird out of the Derby altogether because his owners didn't feel he had a chance.
"A few days after (a fourth-place run in) the Sunland Derby (in late March), when everybody's heads were clear, I sat down with (Mine That Bird co-owner) Mark (Allen) and I told him, 'Look, this horse is much better than that and we need to move forward,'" Woolley recalled. "It was about that time that they called and told me they thought he'd get in the Derby.
Trainer Chip Woolley
"When they first said that, I'm like, 'Well, we just got beat at Sunland Park, so what would make you think this horse could run deep in the Derby?' You put up $50,000 to run in the Derby and you only get your money back if you run fifth or better. If you run sixth, you get zero dollars, so you don't run in that for fun -- not people like us."
Ultimately, however, Allen made the decision to run Mine That Bird, who had won four of six races as a two-year-old, at Churchill -- against the wishes of minority owner Leonard Blach, who instead wanted to run him in the Lone Star Derby near Dallas -- in part because Woolley convinced Allen he had nothing to lose by trying.
"(Blach) was wanting Mark to take the horse away from me and give him to somebody else," Woolley said. "So when Mark and I sat down and discussed it, I told him, 'Look, if this horse doesn't win the Lone Star Derby, I'm more than likely going to lose the horse anyway, so if I'm taking my shot, I want to take my best shot.' So I said, 'I want to take him to the Kentucky Derby,' and he said, 'OK, if that's what you want to do, then we're going.'"
Once Woolley arrived at Churchill Downs and had a chance to scout the competition in person, his feelings about Mine That Bird's chances in the race began to shift.
"The one thing I was pretty sure of was that I knew my horse could run a mile and a quarter, and I was pretty sure nobody else in that group of horses could," Woolley said. "None of them had been that far yet. They'd been up to a mile and an eighth, but that last eighth of a mile in the Kentucky Derby separates the best ones from the rest and it makes a big difference. There were only a couple of horses I was afraid I couldn't beat, but I believed, in my mind, that we could at least run fourth for sure."
Still, the thought of actually crossing the wire first on the first Saturday in May was about the furthest thing from Woolley's mind.
"I suppose if they had told me I could have had second in the Derby that day and I didn't have to go out there and run, I would have taken it and just gone home," Woolley said. "I didn't really think I could win the race, but of course we go on to win it, and that kind of changed everything."
With Calvin Borel hand-picked as his rider largely because of Borel's Derby-winning mount aboard Street Sense in 2007, Mine That Bird ran a perfect race, and Borel followed Woolley's game plan perfectly. Woolley instructed Borel to hug the rail and hang back until the three-eighths pole and then make his move, and as soon as he did, Woolley knew he had the race won.
"When I said I wanted to be back, I wanted to be 15 to 20 (lengths) out, I ended up being 30 out and when they went by me in the grandstand the first time, I thought we were a little too far out of it," Woolley said. "Then when he turned around the backside, I thought, 'Well we're going to get up in the middle of them, and we're going to still be OK.'
"When we went into the three-eighths pole, which is the second turn, I'm like, 'We're going to run really deep here. We're going to get a big piece of this.' And then when they turned for home, he had to go out and around one horse, and when he went around that horse and dropped back to the fence, I knew right then that we were going to win the Derby."
Not everyone saw it coming, however, as Tom Durkin, who called the race for NBC, seemed to lose Mine That Bird as the horses headed into the home stretch.
"I was only watching my horse, and nobody else in the world is watching him but me," Woolley said. "So I'm watching and he's running so much faster than everybody else that it was obvious, when he turned for home, that he was going to win. Even (Pioneerof the Nile trainer Bob) Baffert -- he and I have become friends over the years and he ran second in the race -- he said that about 300 yards from the wire he saw this horse coming, and he realized, 'It's over, we're beat.'
"To be honest, I never saw the rest of the race after that," Woolley continued. "I had started celebrating. We knew we had won, and I remember a clear moment where I stopped celebrating and looked one more time at him and he was just going past us where we were in the grandstand, and I remember looking and I could see that pink saddle towel and never saw anything else."
Unfortunately, Mine That Bird's Triple Crown attempt began and ended at the Derby, which would turn out to be his final win.
Rachel Alexandra, a winner by 20¾ lenghts in the Kentucky Oaks the day before the Derby, would go on to win the Preakness over Mine That Bird by a length with Borel on board, and at the Belmont, Mine That Bird finished third behind Summer Bird, who finished sixth in the Derby and skipped the Preakness, and Dunkirk, the 11th-place finisher at Churchill Downs who also passed on Pimlico.
After Belmont, Mine That Bird ran third in the Grade 2 West Virginia Derby and after surgery to fix an entrapped epiglottis, he struggled in the Goodwood Stakes and Breeder's Cup Classic at Santa Anita, finishing sixth and ninth, respectively. Before Mine That Bird's 4-year-old year, D. Wayne Lukas replaced Woolley as trainer, but Mine That Bird was never able to regain the form that won him the sport's most prestigious race.
"The decision to change trainers -- it's me talking, so I'm saying it from my heart -- that was a bad decision to move that horse," Woolley said. "I'm not saying I was the best trainer in the world by any means, and I'm not comparing myself to anyone out there, but obviously something that I did in my training program, that horse liked. Because he ran awfully well for me, and changing trainers, I feel, was probably a detriment to my horse. So who knows? Maybe the horse had already gone over the hill at that point, but I would have liked to have had a shot to bring him back."
Woolley says he doesn't regret for a second his moment in the spotlight with Mine That Bird.
"Mine That Bird is the only horse to run 1-2-3 in the Triple Crown in 10 or 11 years, now," Woolley said. "I think Smarty Jones was the last horse to run 1-2-3. California Chrome, for all the hoopla around him, runs a horrible race in the Belmont, and you can go back from there. Some of them don't even make it through the three races, but my horse showed up for every single one and proved that he was the best 3-year-old at that time.
"Let's face it, the only one that matters is the Derby, because you can't win the Triple Crown without winning the Derby," Woolley continued. "You've got to start with the one block first, and it's the most important one. Now they'll never forget me and Mine That Bird. A hundred years from now, when we're all dead, they're still going to be talking about it, just like we still talk about Sir Barton and horses back 100 years ago.
"I know you're looking at this as a one-hit thing, but he was no one-hit wonder," Woolley added. "This was a great, great horse, and he's being remembered now and given the credit for being the great horse that he was."
PREVIOUS ONE & DONES:
May 5: Mario Andretti
May 12: Dean Morton
May 19: Ross Browner
May 26: Dave Salvian
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