Man With A Key to a Championship

by Whitney Tower

Fall, 1972

No one living has rivaled Elliott Burch's record of training three Horses of the Year; now he has a fourth--Key to the Mint

It rained relentlessly last Saturday, but there was no rain check in the race for Horse of the Year honors. The $100,000 Woodward Stakes was the ultimate contest, matching Kentucky Derby and Belmont winner Riva Ridge and the mid-summer champion Key to the Mint. Since late February the two 3-year-olds had jogged and cantered and galloped and breezed and run as fast as they could over many hundreds of miles. They had won between them more than half a million dollars and most of racing's celebrated trophies. But now they met in a sudden-death mile and a half to determine who deserved the national title.

If the deciding distance seemed scant after the long season, there were horsemen who felt the Woodward would be a far better race if it were just a mile and a quarter. That had been the traditional distance of the stake until this season, when Alfred G. Vanderbilt, the boss of New York racing, ruled differently. "Maybe A.G.V. just wants to start the race in front of the grandstand," grumbled one critic.

"Maybe the guy's right," said Vanderbilt, a man known for his efforts to win fans for the sport. "But also, maybe there are enough mile-and-a-quarter races already. What's wrong with having a true autumn championship? The Belmont Stakes and the Coaching Club American Oaks are raced over a mile and a half in late spring.They are this country's classics. Why not do it all over again in September and really find out who's the best horse around?"

By dusk on Saturday that was obvious: Key to the Mint. But the Woodward revealed a number of other things as well. Among them 1) that winning trainer Elliott Burch, who is not yet 50 and therefore young in his profession, is something of a genius (Key to the Mint seems certain to become his fourth Horse of the Year in 14 seasons), 2) that Burch trains the best 3-year-old filly in the U.S. as well as the best colt, for in finishing second before being disqualified Summer Guest probably snatched that title from her rival, Susan's Girl and 3) that Riva Ridge, beaten in his last three starts, is not the horse he was heralded to be in June.

In their last meeting in the Belmont Stakes, Rive Ridge overwhelmed Key to the Mint by 13 lengths. This time he lost to the Burch colt by a little over six lengths. The reversal of form--19 lengths in 17 weeks' time--was astonishing.

There were indications through July and August that Key to the Mint might be racing into championship form. He won three prestigious stakes--the Brooklyn, Whitney and Travers--while Riva Ridge barely eked out a victory over so-so horses in the Hollywood Derby, then finished fourth in the drug-clouded Monmouth Invitational (SI, Sept. 4) and was a well-beaten second to Canonero in the Stymie.

Yet, all the while, Lucien Laurin, who trains Riva Ridge and finds it hard to believe that he's ever about to saddle a loser, retained confidence in the colt. "I'm not afraid of any horse," Laurin said on Woodward Day. "I'm going in with the best, and all I want is luck." As he spoke, rain poured down, and the track turned from fast to mud to slop. "This surface won't bother Rive at all," Laurin declared. "He's a long-striding horse who needs sure footing, and that's what slop at Belmont provides. The going here won't be at all like the slippery, greasy muck in the Preakness at Pimlico.Belmont's track has a superior bottom and a higher sand content. None of us should have an excuse."

Like Laurin, Elliott Burch did not believe the mud would be a factor. But as always, Burch was apprehensive about his preparation of Key to the Mint. He believed as long ago as last January that the colt had the potential to be the best racehorse in America. His daily concern for the horse's training regimen was revealed in a diary (SI, April 17) he kept as he readied Key to the Mint for the Kentucky Derby. Then, in a conditioning race at Hialeah, the horse struck his right hind leg coming out of the starting gate and suffered a massive bruise. At the time it appeared the son of Graustark might be finished as a racehorse.

But Burch had nursed the lame colt back to his winning ways by Derby week, and while Key to the Mint did not start against Riva Ridge at Churchill Downs, he was ready to take on Laurin's horse in the Preakness. The boggy track beat both colts that day. Then came the Belmont Stakes."I probably messed up Key to the Mint in that race," Burch said last week. "I put a lot of speed into him prior to the event and then told Braulio Baeza, our jockey, to rate him. It was impossible. The colt proved so rank and so difficult to handle that afterward I decided to disregard that race--without, mind you, taking any credit away from Riva Ridge, who certainly was tops that day. But then my colt came back to take those three big stakes, and won like a good horse should. I still don't know if he is a mile-and-a-half horse, but the Woodward--for better or worse--will tell us."
On the eve of the stake, Burch figured that if Key to the Mint flagged, there was always a chance Summer Guest, who had been successful in the Coaching Club American Oaks and Alabama, might win the race anyhow for him and Owner Paul Mellon. She had shown she could stay the distance and she only improved on a muddy track.

There were seven other entries in the Woodward, but from the start it turned out to be a match between Key to the Mint and Riva Ridge. For a full mile and a quarter in the depressing slop Key to the Mint, on the inside, and Riva Ridge, on the outside, dueled, first one head in front, then the other. The pace was moderate: six furlongs in 1:11 2/5, the mile in 1:36 1/5, then it quickened, with the mile and a quarter in 2:01 2/5. A long shot, Favorecidian, made an early run at the pair--in vail. Then King's Bishop challenged; he fell back. And finally, on came Summer Guest.

Now the brave pair of front-runners were testing each other to the limit. Suddenly, as had happened in the Belmont Stakes, one of the leaders gave way, but this time it was Riva Ridge. Key to the Mint went ahead for good just inside the three-eighths pole. The only threat as he raced to the wire in the creditable time of 2:28 2/5 came from his stablemate, who passed both Riva Ridge and Autobiography to close to within a length and a quarter. But the chestnut filly had cut across Autobiography going into the first turn, and although the latter had a mile and a quarter to recover before finishing third, the stewards disqualified Summer Guest and moved Autobiography into second.

Riva Ridge had finished fourth. His excuses were nil, even according to Trainer Laurin: "Maybe he has lost a little flesh, maybe he's going back a bit and maybe he's tired from losing to Canonero in world-record time. All I know is that Riva Ridge did his best today, and it just wasn't good enough."

Horse of the Year votes won't be tabulated for another couple of months, but it is likely that Key to the Mint and Riva will face each other again this season. The Key may start in the two-mile Jockey Club Gold Cup and his rival could wind up the year in the Washington, D.C. International.

After the Woodward was all over, Laurin and Burch pumped hands and the latter allowed, "Maybe I'm just lucky." But a man who develops such champions as Sword Dancer, Bowl of Flowers, Quadrangle, Arts and Letters, Fort Marcy, Run the Gantlet--and now Key to the Mint and Summer Guest--has something more going for him. He may have available the best stock in the world, but it takes more than that and more than luck.