Zenyatta defeat - It was my fault says Mike Smith
Mike Smith has been in the game long enough to think he had seen it all. Then two minutes redrew the boundaries.
The winners, the losers, the crunching falls that have come as part of the journey that took a teenager from New Mexico with dreams of being jockey to the Hall of Fame. This year’s Breeders’ Cup Classic was meant to be the defining moment and, in a way, it was. It was the moment, the race, for which Smith will be remembered for as much as any of the near 5,000 winners that have meant he is considered one of the best riders in America.
As Zenyatta pounded down the final hundred yards of the Churchill Downs dirt on Saturday night, Smith’s body and mind was working furiously to try and help the great mare to claw back both Blame and her place in destiny. As she hit the wire those few, vital, inches adrift of Blame, Smith’s body could come to rest but his mind was hit by a tidal wave of emotions. And none of them felt good.
Defeat he could handle but this was something far worse. It was failure.
Even as the first camera shots caught the jockey’s face it was all too clear to see the torment that was creasing his face. For the past three seasons that he has played a part in the Zenyatta story – the 16 wins that included those two headline-grabbing victories in the Breeders’ Cup – Smith had been along for the ride of his life and now it had hit the buffers in the most spectacular manner.
When Zenyatta had started so slowly from the gates there was a sense of disbelief in the packed Churchill grandstand. If he had pulled her up there and then few would have questioned it. But then the big mare showed that she has an even bigger heart in one those performances that can be safely filed under “heroic defeat”.
The gods, with a malicious sense of humour, twisted the knife into Smith’s psyche with a nemesis who came by the name of Blame. Victory has a hundred fathers but defeat is often an orphan however Smith knew he could do nothing less than step forward and claim it for his own.
Few would have blamed Smith if he had elected for an ignominious exit via the backdoor. But, instead, he faced the media and his emotions. He admitted that he would have wanted to do more to get Zenyatta into the race in the first half-mile and to be further up the field to deliver his challenge. “It hurts more than I can explain just because it was my fault,” Smith said, before succumbing to the tears of emotion that had been tugging at him for several minutes. “She should have won.”
Which is a fairly accurate summary, and that is not meant to detract from the run of Blame. He won – fair and square.
But that fact is still hard to square with the fabulous stretch run of Zenyatta which, for a few mesmerising seconds, threatened to grab victory from the jaws of a defeat that may also sink her claims to the Horse of the Year title for a second time.
Having regained his composure, Smith spoke of the key moments in the race that made the difference from the 20-20 vision that he and trainer John Shirreffs had shared and the reality of being 19-1. “I couldn’t get her going in the first part. The dirt was hitting her and she was a bit overwhelmed by it in the beginning,” Smith said. “She finally levelled off and started taking me.”
However he was nowhere near being level with, perhaps, the best field that Zenyatta had taken on and she had at least 15 lengths to make up after six furlongs. A quarter-mile out and, just as Smith wanted to develop momentum, he found Quality Road falling into him. “I had to tap on the brakes when Quality Road came back on me so quick. That cost me at least a good jump. I just know she was the best horse. I hate to go out this way, that’s all.”
Even the collective will of 73,000 baying for a miracle worked in reverse with Smith believing that the explosion of sound briefly startled Zenyatta. “I was really getting after her all I could, but it is what it is.” At this point it could be argued that Smith may have been an architect of his own misfortune as Zenyatta did appear to become unbalanced for a few strides as Smith went into overdrive. Perhaps a calmer ride might have yielded a better finish?
“If I just could have got a little better first position first time around,” he said, adding: “I was on the best horse, trust me.”
This was not a declaration of the tub-thumping sort that is trying to find excuses when a horse’s performance fails to match their reputation. Smith simply wanted to exonerate whom he saw as the innocent party.
“I think she ranks up there with the greatest of all time,” he said. “If I had won this you could arguably have said she was. To come up a [head] short is just too hard, it’s hard.”
But this is a hard game. Just ask Mike Smith.
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