Word: barrera
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...Luis Barrera to try for the Belmont...
Last week came the biggest blow: Trainer Laz Barrera pulled Cauthen off Affirmed, the horse he rode to the Triple Crown last year. Horsemen do not show slumping jockeys quite the paternal support that Leo Durocher, manager of the old New York Giants, gave a weeping rookie named Willie Mays after he had gone 1 for 26 in his major league debut ("Tomorrow's another day, kid, and you're going to be playing centerfield tomorrow"). Barrera said the decision not to let Cauthen ride Affirmed in the $200,000 Strub Stakes was "one of my hardest...
...heighten his concentration; a year earlier he was flailing at hay bales to improve his whip technique. But simple cures are often hard to find for slumping athletes. Cauthen, however, does not appear to have picked up any bad technical habits. "He's not doing anything different," growls Barrera. Nor is growth the problem; Cauthen is less than an inch taller than he was when he won the Triple Crown, and he weighs only 104. Some have suggested that after Goodman had a heart attack in July, he stopped hustling for good mounts; and that after Cauthen injured...
...believes is Lazaro "Laz" Barrera, Affirmed's trainer and a kind of latterday, Cuban-style Hirsch Jacobs. Son of a part-time jockey, Barrera, 53, was born on land that later became a racetrack in Havana. He began training at 16, moved to California in 1959, and worked for almost anyone who would hire him. In 1976 Barrera developed Bold Forbes, a sprinter notoriously weak at long distances, into the winner of the Kentucky Derby and the Belmont. He was the leading trainer in both 1976 and 1977. Last year his horses earned $2.7 mil lion, and this year...
...Barrera raised eyebrows when he kept Affirmed in Cali fornia this spring, where heavy rains hampered training and the horse ran against competition considered to be inferior to that back East. But Affirmed won the Santa Anita Derby and the Hollywood Derby, and obviously was in magnificent shape for the Derby and the Preakness. Like Cauthen, Barrera has enormous confidence in his horse. Says he: "If Affirmed was a baseball player, he'd be Joe DiMaggio. He does things so easy...