Nothing special about the Louisiana Derby winner ‘Hero of Order’
It is still hard to digest the fast that with so much top notch runners in the Grade 2, $1 million Louisiana Derby, it was the 109 to 1 shot, Hero of Order, who held off the favourite Mark Valeski in the deep stretch and won the race by a mere head to become the only horse in the history of the race to win it with these long shot odds.
If we go back in 2010, Hero of Order was a yearling and in the 2010 Keeneland September yearling sale he brought a price of $3,000 which attracted little interest, but even then whoever bought him at that point would had been aware of the fact that the horse will have an unnoticed career.
The Kentucky bred son of Sharp Humor, out of mare Ocean Sprite by Ocean Crest, was sold by Bandoroff, who in the name of Denali for the yearling’s breeder to Gennadi Dorochenko in the name of Raut.
“He was kind of a tall, plain, brown wrapper,” said Denali Stud’s Craig Bandoroff of Hero of Order. “He wasn’t something we said, ‘Oh my Gosh, he’s awesome,’ and he wasn’t something that we looked at and said, ‘Oh my Gosh, he’s horrible.’ He was a solid colt. He got my grade of B. He wasn’t an A and he wasn’t a C. He was pretty straightforward.”
“The Gibbonses have a small farm and sometimes they have a little trouble handling the colts, so they send them to us to be prepped (for a sale); that was his story,” Bandoroff said. “He came to us around June 1 (in 2010).”
Hero of Order did not have to face much bidding problem because of his low price tag, and the colt started his career as a juvenile on 20 August, 2011, and after 8 attempts at the maiden’s, Hero of Order finally broke it in his seasonal debut of the new 2012 campaign at Fair Grounds Race Course.
The colt stayed there and finished fifth in the Grade 3 Lecomte Stakes, and fourth in the Grade 2 Risen Star Stakes. Now the next stop for Hero of Order is the Triple Crown, but after his magnificent victory over Mark Valeski, there has been talk of supplementing him.
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