Archives

Tuesday, May 24, 2005

SHAMMADAMMA. A year ago, the Philadelphia region was caught up in the story of Smarty Jones, the little horse who overcame an accident that left him blind in one eye to win the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness. What are the odds that the very next year would bring us another melodramatic winner from Philly? About 2-to-5, apparently.

This time, the hero is a gorgeous stallion named Afleet Alex, purchased by a syndicate of five owners for $75,000 and named for a valiant little girl who fought cancer with a lemonade stand. Like a typical Philadelphian, Afleet Alex has had his own experiences with bad luck. The Kentucky Derby this year was part horse race and part rush hour on the Schuylkill Expressway, as (seemingly) thousands of horses jostled fender to fender at blistering speeds for the right to merge into too few lanes of traffic. Afleet Alex battled through the melee and took the lead but failed to look out for that bane of highway commuters, the right-lane bandit who sneaks by from your blind spot.

The track stewards at Pimlico obviously liked the freeway free-for-all ambiance of the Kentucky event, and so they decided it would be fun to run the Preakness like a demolition derby. Since Pimlico is a shorter and narrower track than Churchill Downs, only a few hundred horses were led into the starting gate last Saturday, but all of them were intent on blocking the path of Afleet Alex, who was the betting favorite despite the participation of the two horses who had beaten him to the exit ramp in Kentucky. What happened next was -- no kidding -- the stuff of legend.

The first two-thirds of the race looked a lot like a rerun from two weeks earlier. Too many horses thundered into the first turn, and the traffic down the back straight was bumper to bumper. Afleet Alex started his move on the final turn, dashing outside to escape the crush near the rail. A horse named Scrappy T (!), without so much as a glance at the rearview mirror, veered across Alex's path from the right lane, cutting him off. Knocked off balance, Alex stumbled, almost to his knees, while his jockey pitched sideways in the saddle, and everyone watching waited for horse and rider to go down.


 [And now for a digression from the main story line, which somehow skips from disaster to victory on a seamless tide of adrenaline. Or is it seamless? After the race, the critical seconds were shown again and again -- and you can see the video here -- but each time the footage ran I sensed a kind of hiccup in the continuity. Afleet Alex was falling, the jockey hiked out and in danger, and then there seemed to be an infinitesimal freezing of time in its tracks, which burst suddenly back into motion with Afleet Alex at full gallop, pulling mightily away from Scrappy T. I couldn't detect the instant at which the fall ended and the horse and rider righted themselves, as if that instant had been clipped from my perceptions or accomplished in the space between moments. There, on film, I seemed to behold a factual record of discontinuity, an event that occurred outside the realm of possibility and was therefore concealed in the microscopic folds of time. Was this an illusion, wishful thinking, the mere jarring suddenness of the transformation from graceless calamity to reasserted control? Or was this the kind of event whose inevitability overrode the limitations of physics and human perception? I do not know. I choose to call it a hiccup. You call it what you like.]

Then, impossiblyimprobably, Afleet Alex stopped himself from plunging knees down into the track surface, rescued perhaps by the jockey's terrified and determined pull on the bit, and he hurled himself into a furious gallop that leaped past Scrappy T and propelled him over the finish line all alone and still pulling away from the field.

Home Page

InstaPunk.com

TBB & 9-11

TBB Shop