Spectacular Bid Had No Equals

Trainer Bud Delp was asked the other day if any horse in the last 20 years could have beaten Spectacular Bid.

“Last 20 years?” said Delp, thinking for a few moments. You could almost hear him clicking off several names in his head. “I don’t see any. Not when the Bid was at the top of his game.”

When wasn’t he? Spectacular Bid, who raced for Delp from 1978 through 1980, won 26 of 30 starts. In three of those losses--two as a 2-year-old--he was ridden by the erratic Ronnie Franklin. After Bill Shoemaker took over for the Bid’s last 13 starts, there was only one defeat--by three-quarters of a length at Belmont Park in the 1979 Jockey Club Gold Cup, on a day when Affirmed capped his career with another of those you’ll-never-pass-me ultimatums.

Spectacular Bid’s name had come up because Delp is running Include tonight in the $500,000 Meadowlands Cup in New Jersey. The stake was only 2 years old when Spectacular Bid won it, at 1-10 odds, a month after Affirmed beat him in the Gold Cup. The metallic-gray colt ran the board after that, winning nine more races, including the Santa Anita Handicap, before he was retired after the betless walkover in the 1980 Woodward at Belmont.

When the old Thoroughbred Racing Action weekly polled 100 turf experts in 1988, Spectacular Bid finished 13th on the list of best horses of the 20th century. Of his contemporaries, John Henry (seventh) and Affirmed (10th) finished ahead of him. A much smaller sample, done by The Blood-Horse magazine in 1999, ranked Spectacular Bid 10th, two spots ahead of Affirmed and well ahead of John Henry, who was ranked 23rd. Man o’ War, Secretariat, Citation and Kelso finished 1-2-3-4 in both polls.

“Of the horses I’m familiar with,” Delp said, “only Citation and Secretariat would have run with the Bid.”

Horse of the year in 1980, Spectacular Bid won Eclipse Awards all three years he raced. After Seattle Slew and Affirmed, he came within one race of becoming the third Triple Crown champion in as many years, but Coastal, a partly blind, lightly raced colt, was an upset winner in the 1979 Belmont. Delp second-guessed himself later, revealing that he found a safety pin, probably from a bandage, stuck in a hoof the morning of the race.

“Bid could do everything,” Delp said. “He had bullet speed if he needed it. He could have been the sprint champion every year if we had run him short.”

Spectacular Bid holds two track records at Santa Anita--1:20 for seven furlongs and 1:574/5 for 11/4 miles.

“He would do anything you asked,” Delp said. “He would go fast if you wanted him, and he would slow it down if you wanted him, too. I knew before he ever started that he was special. I didn’t know how special until we had the campaign. Then I knew he was super special.”

JW Big Jag, who never fully recovered from injuries suffered in February, was euthanized last week in Dubai. The Santa Anita-based 8-year-old gelding, trained by Tim Pinfield, won the Dubai Golden Shaheen Stakes in 2000 and was training for this year’s running when he was injured. Big Jag, third in the 1999 Breeders’ Cup Sprint, won 13 of 30 races and earned $1.8 million.