Giacomo turns to gold, just like that: the first Saturday in May in Kentucky, the impossible is possible

One of those beautiful dawn's-coming moments long ago on the backside at Churchill Downs, great old thoroughbred trainer Charlie Whittingham explained why he kept at it. "No horseman," he said, "ever committed suicide with a good 2-year-old in the barn." Come the next spring, that baby might make the Kentucky Derby. And if lightning strikes, he might even win the thing. "It's the chance of a lifetime in a lifetime of chance," songwriter Dan Fogelberg calls it.

So when Mike Smith first sat atop then-2-year-old Giacomo, he told trainer John Shirreffs, "This is our Derby horse."

Dreamers, all dreamers, and it is the game's beauty, this dreaming.

"This horse will redeem his daddy's name," the jockey said to the trainer, and the jockey had reason for this hope. He had ridden the daddy, too, Holy Bull in the 1994 Kentucky Derby--ridden him to disappointment, the favorite beaten by 11 horses.

And Smith went looking for undershirts. He made them up, with his name under a picture of Holy Bull. Every time he rode Giacomo, he wore a Holy Bull undershirt, now threadbare.

It's racing's heart and its mystery, this A embrace of meaningless symbols that mean everything, this sentiment that makes no sense and as much sense as anything else.

They had no chance in this Derby. The horse had done nothing. Giacomo had won one race, that one seven months ago against other babies who never had won. Then he was beaten five straight times, running decently yet unremarkably, finishing fourth in his last try a month before the Derby. At post time for the 20-horse field, the 156,435 mint-julep'd customers at Churchill Downs had made Giacomo their 15th betting choice. If he won, he would pay $102.60 for a $2 bet.

Giacomo's owner, Jerry Moss, bought a $200 win ticket on the horse and gave it to Smith, who slid the ticket into his riding sock, there to carry it the mile and a quarter that divides horses into the obscure and the immortal. A $200 win ticket on a nothing horse is all the evidence a rational person needs to understand the irrationality that makes racing irresistible. A fact: There are days in racing when the almighty alchemist's lightning changes dross to gold before our very eyes.

How else to explain Giacomo and Smith? Seven years ago, Smith lay broken in pieces, thrown over a hedge at Saratoga and crushed by his own horse falling out of the sky, a sequence of events that Smith summarizes: "It hurt. Really bad."

Five months later, his broken back not yet healed, Smith rode again because he had a Derby horse in the barn. He finished third that time, but it became apparent he had come back to work too soon. For two or three years, he wondered whether he'd ever again be the Mike Smith who in the early 1990s was as good as a rider gets.

The doubts, long since resolved in a Hall of Fame career with nearly $150 million in earnings, now can be forgotten.

"Since I could walk," he said, answering the question of when he first rode. He is 39 years old. It is a daredevil's act, these little big men perched daintily atop half-ton animals flying shoulder to shoulder, contesting for a piece of ground, a sliver of space. And in winning his first Kentucky Derby, Smith did work to make any daredevil proud.

He took Giacomo on a trip fraught with danger and replete with peril, which is to say scary as hell. After being trapped outside on the first turn as smoke curled from speedballs' hooves, Smith dove to the rail. No easy thing, that. "He was athletic there," Smith said, meaning Giacomo danced his way over hooves ahead.

On the back stretch, Smith took Giacomo outside before reaching the second turn, where he again moved inside. Then, in the stretch, no other way to win, a wall of horses blocking his way, he asked Giacomo to move out again, to run to daylight. Once outside, they had a clear lane to the finish line--except there were five horses to catch and no one ever had passed so many horses so late and won a Derby.

Smith, the whip in his left hand, reminded Giacomo of every horseman's dream. Seventeen times he reminded the horse, 17 lashes of the lightning that moved Giacomo from sixth place to first. It was a ride for the ages; it was dross made gold, obscurity made immortality.

COPYRIGHT 2005 Sporting News Publishing Co.
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