Derby a Great Place to Take Cheap Shots

This is a bumper year for Kentucky Derby anniversaries. Besides Twenty Grand’s 70th, it is the 40th anniversary of Carry Back’s Derby win and the 30th for Canonero II.

Genetically, both Carry Back and Canonero II were from the wrong side of the tracks. It cost Jack Price $665 to breed Carry Back. Canonero II was a crooked-legged colt that cost $1,200 at a Keeneland yearling sale.

Price bred, trained and--with his wife Katherine--raced Carry Back, who had run 28 times by the time he got to Churchill Downs. As a 3-year-old, Carry Back won the Flamingo at Hialeah and the Florida Derby at Gulfstream Park, beating Fred Hooper’s Crozier by a head in both races.

They ran 1-2 in the 1961 Kentucky Derby as well, the margin this time three-quarters of a length. At the quarter pole, Crozier led the field and Carry Back was fourth, 4 1/2 lengths back.

“I thought to myself, ‘That SOB is finally going to beat me, today of all days,’ ” said John Sellers, who rode Carry Back. “But then I got into my horse for all he was worth. And if there was one thing you could have said about Carry Back, it was that he knew how to win.”

The favorite at 5-2 in the Derby, Carry Back was even-money as he won the Preakness by three-quarters of a length, with Globemaster second and Crozier third. In his bid for a Triple Crown sweep, Carry Back hit the wall in the Belmont Stakes’ 1 1/2-mile challenge. Sherluck, at 65-1, won as Carry Back limped home seventh, ahead of only two horses.

Ten years later, in 1971, Canonero II’s financially strapped owner, Venezuelan manufacturer Pedro Baptista, couldn’t afford a flight from Florida to Kentucky for his Derby prospect. The horse had started the week in Caracas, where his plane to Florida had to return after one of the engines caught fire. Once in Miami, Canonero II was vanned the final 1,100 miles, arriving at Churchill Downs two days before the Derby.

He was trained by Juan Arias, an unknown outside Caracas, and ridden by Gustavo Avila, a jockey who kept falling off horses in Venezuela after failing three times to graduate from a jockeys’ school.

In the Derby future book, Canonero II was 500-1. Lumped in with five other horses in the mutuel field, the colt came from 20 lengths behind and won by 3 3/4 lengths, paying $19.40. Laffit Pincay, riding in his first Derby, finished fifth with the favorite, Unconscious.

Two weeks later, at Pimlico, “the Caracas Cannonball” won by 1 1/2 lengths, breaking the Preakness record with a 1:54 time for 1 3/16 miles.

In New York, with its considerable Latino population, Canonero II drew 82,694--a Belmont record that stood for 28 years--as he aimed for the Triple Crown. But the first two races in the series had taken their toll. Canonero II had a sore hock and a skin rash. Pass Catcher won the Belmont at 34-1 and the Venezuelan horse finished fourth. Over the next year and a half, Canonero II would run eight more times, winning only once.

“They can’t take away his place in Derby lore,” said Chick Lang, the former general manager at Pimlico. “As the great trainer Hirsch Jacobs used to say, ‘You never know.’ ”