More than two minutes of fame for Canonero

TIPPING POINT:The story of how the Caracas Cannonball claimed the Kentucky Derby is by far the greatest racing fairytale of them all

THE KENTUCKY Derby is labelled the greatest two minutes in sport, a piece of American hyperbole that only barely exaggerates the excitement that takes place on the first Saturday in May in unlovely Louisville. This weekend, under the twin spires of Churchill Downs, racing’s posh elite in the stands will combine with the raucous bare-breasted, beer-swilling proles of the infield to roar the 136th “Durby” hero home.

Pedants will quibble that it usually takes a few seconds more than two minutes for the winner to gallop the mile-and-a-quarter dirt circuit. The 1907 victor, Pink Star, took a positively stately two minutes, 12 seconds and change. Just two horses have broken the two-minute barrier, and the first of them was the legendary Secretariat. But since Big Red wasn’t so much foaled as quarried, no one was surprised he went all Roger Bannister in 1973.

Last year Secretariat’s story received the ultimate American tribute of a movie, one in which John Malkovich played his trainer, Lucien Lauren, with all the scenery-chewing flamboyance of true-blue hickory ham.

But in many ways, Hollywood missed out on the Derby’s greatest story, maybe the greatest fairytale result racing has ever thrown up anywhere, and it happened just a couple of years before Secretariat, 40 years ago yesterday.

It began in Kentucky in 1968 when the product of a quick, shuddering meeting between a $2,700 mare and an unfashionable, English-bred stallion called Pretendre was born. The new foal had a crooked off-foreleg and was so ungainly one local hardboot horseman described him as walking “like a crab”.

Within a year, that dismissal sounded affectionate compared to what the then yearling went through. No one wanted to buy him, bar a bloodstock agent with a reputation as an equine junk dealer. He paid 1,200 bucks and only had to bid once. The bay colt with the wonky front leg was sold to race in Venezuela, not so much a racing outpost as a bivouac in no man’s land.

The colt’s new owner was Pedro Baptista, whose plumbing and pipe manufacturing company was even more broken up than his latest purchase. In fact, to keep a step ahead of his creditors he registered the horse under the name of his son-in-law. He put him into training with a young man named Juan Arias, a product of the Caracas slums whose upbringing was so tough he would sneak into the local track and muck out horses for free to briefly escape the poverty around him.

It was Arias who named the new colt Canonero, after a type of singing group. The two-year-old won his first race at the La Rinconada track, after which Baptista sent him to California in the hope of selling him off. There were no buyers, but the under-pressure businessman proclaimed there would be plenty of buyers the following year after his horse had won the Kentucky Derby. Even Arias put such dreams down to stress.

Canonero won six of his first nine starts back in Venezuela, and then, three weeks before America’s greatest race, Baptista announced the horse would run in the Kentucky Derby.

The fact he even had an entry was miraculous. Baptista had been in Florida a couple of months previously, heard that the vice-president of the Pimlico track, Chick Lang, was in town taking Triple Crown nominations, and asked Lang by phone to nominate Canonero for the Derby, the Preakness and the Belmont.

Lang had never heard of the horse and neither had any of his pals. He wrote the name on the back of a cocktail napkin, but couldn’t find a record of this strange Venezuelan or Canonero and concluded someone was yanking his chain. Later, he remembered balling up the napkin to throw in a bin, but some self-preserving instinct made him hang on to it just in case.

Canonero boarded a plane for Miami but mechanical failure meant it had to turn back. A second attempt saw one of the engines catch fire. The only other option was a cargo plane filled with chickens and ducks. When the exhausted Canonero finally arrived in Miami, officials kept him on the plane for 12 hours because he had no blood work papers. That meant four days in quarantine at the airport while bloods were sent to a lab. By the time he was released the colt had lost 70lb and was a physical wreck.

The indignities didn’t end there. Baptista didn’t have enough money to fly his horse to Louisville, so a 900-mile, 24- hour van drive concluded with Arias and Canonero arriving at Churchill Downs where no one knew who they were and being refused entry. The Derby was a week away.

Canonero spent that week as a curio. Or a freak show, depending on whom you talked to. You could count every one of his ribs. When Arias was told a sack of bran cost $45, he asked for half a sack. The chain-smoking black man who wore a tie to the barn and spoke to reporters through a translator revealed he also spoke to his horse and, if he told him he didn’t feel like training, then he stayed in his stable.

These Spanish-speaking visitors were dismissed as clowns by the US racing establishment. The racing papers contained no form for the horse, one simply saying “Missing Data Unavailable”. Canonero and his Venezuelan jockey, Gustavo Avila – nicknamed “El Monstruo” – were made 500 to 1 outsiders.

But they won; somehow, and to the sound of an entire industry’s jaw dropping. Canonero passed most of his 19 opponents to win by almost four lengths with Avila not even having to use his whip. He passed the line to comparative silence, for the simple reason that no one knew he was. Chick Lang didn’t twig it until Canonero was trotting back.

“Jesus Christ, it’s the mystery horse,” he said, thinking back to the napkin he’d almost tossed in the bin.

Avila returned to Caracas to a parade through the streets and a telegram from the president saying: “This great victory will stimulate Venezuela’s progress.”

Canonero and Arias hadn’t time to celebrate. Instead, they had to head to Baltimore for their next race, the Preakness. They won that too, but could finish only fourth in a Triple Crown attempt in the Belmont.

Canonero raced on as a four-year-old before retiring to a spectacularly unsuccessful stallion career which ended with him back in Venezuela. Just a decade after his finest moment, he was found dead in his stall.

By then the horse nicknamed "the Caracas Cannonball" was largely forgotten, making a famous Sports Illustratedheadline seem even more appropriate: "Missing Data Unavailable".

It was his trainer who caught the magic of his story though.

“They laughed at us in Louisville,” Arias said. “But we laughed at the whole racing world.”