Twirling Candy wins Del Mar Derby in the midst of controversy
The fourth win in four starts for ‘Twirling Candy’ came on Sunday at the grade II, $300,000 Del Mar Derby. The race wasn’t without its troubles for Twirling Candy but in the end it all worked out for the horse. With Jockey Joel Rosario on board, the favourite won the 1 1/8 mile race 3 ½ lengths ahead of second place finisher ‘Jairzihno.’
There was trouble for the winner at the 3/4th mile marker. Twirling Candy had pushed ahead into the lead from the start and proceeded on to set his own pace. Jockey Victor Espinoza began to catch up with the leader but then all of sudden Twirling Candy went a bit out of control for second. Despite Rosario’s efforts to keep the horse in line Twirling Candy veered to the outside while Espinoza aboard ‘Summer Movie’ had caught up with and was almost set to overtake him from the outside.
The Jockey who ended up finishing in last place well behind the field said that he made sure the two horses didn’t clip heels. In that much he was successful, if the two horses had collided, as they without a doubt would have if Espinoza had not reacted in time, it could have been devastating for the field of four behind them. Although he avoided the collision he said that after the incident Summer Movie began running strangely. “I did everything I could to stay up on him,” Espinoza said but by then it was too late.
The general consensus was that Espinoza would have finished better than he did had Twirling Candy not interfered with his race. The crowd thought so too and showed that they believed that Espinoza had been wronged when they booed Twirling Candy as he was brought into the winning circle. It wasn’t just the crowd that held such an opinion. When it was announced that the officials would take no action to right the situation, Jockey Patrick Valenzuela blurted out expletives that can’t be quoted here. “They haven’t even talked to the jockeys and they’ve made the ruling. That horse took Victor’s horse out of the race.”
The Stewards maintain that they indeed wanted to talk to the Jockey but the Jockey didn’t respond in time. “Given the fact that he was not exactly eager to talk to us, we went ahead and made a decision,” Steward Scott Chaney said after the decision was made. Espinoza was speaking with his trainer when he was summoned by the Stewards. “We didn’t know how long he was going to stand there and talk to the trainer. We’re not going to wait a crazy amount of time if it doesn’t seem that important to them.”
Scott added that the decision would have been the same regardless. He said that the events of the race were pretty obvious and after making their decision they did talk to both Jockey’s involved but emphasized that their comments wouldn’t have altered the decision. The Stewards strongly defended their decision to not disqualify Twirling Candy. Chaney said that disqualification was a serious matter in any race and even more so for a grade II event. He said that to disqualify a horse on any sort of guessing game would have been highly unusual.
He said that in this case they weren’t quite as sure as they needed to be that the incident had cost Summer Movie enough time to warrant a disqualification. “That’s very speculative,” Chaney said. Espinoza at least thought that Twirling Candy had a serious effect on his race. “He took me way out,” the jockey said adding that he almost went down. He said that to avoid collision he had to ‘stop riding.’ Rosario on the other hand, not unexpectedly, played down the incident saying that in his opinion the incident didn’t cause all that much trouble. It can’t exactly be measured how much the incident affected the outcome but the fact that a horse that was challenging the pacemaker ended up finishing last suggest that it had at least some effect. In any event, the Stewards decision stands. Twirling Candy has won his fourth straight race.
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