Word: jockey
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...race was even a bigger test for his unproven jockey, 19-year-old Ronnie Franklin. He came to Churchill Downs a vulnerable boy. He rode past the finish line a triumphant young man, his fist stabbed aloft in celebration...
Like Seattle Slew, Triple Crown winner in 1977, Spectacular Bid is an auction-bargain colt with a trainer who has never handled a big-time horse and a jockey whose skills have often been criticized. Owner Meyerhoff made an unspectacular bid of just $37,000 at the Keeneland Sales in the fall of 1977 for the sturdy son of Bold Bidder and grandson of Supersire Bold Ruler (his offspring have won six of the last nine Kentucky Derbies). Meyerhoff now spends $78,000 a year just for premiums on Spectacular Bid's $14 million insurance policy...
...Spectacular Bid fails to win the Derby-and the Preakness and the Belmont Stakes-many backstretchers would blame the inexperience of Jockey Ron Franklin, 19. Three years ago, Franklin was a high school dropout whose lifetime experience with horses consisted of working alongside posters of Trigger in a Roy Rogers Roast Beef restaurant in his home town near Baltimore. During a visit to the city's Pimlico Race Course in 1976, Franklin heard the track announcer advertising an opening in Delp's stable. The youngster applied and was hired on the spot as a "hot-walker," the lowest...
Only last year did Franklin ride his first race. (He won.) The 5-ft. 106-lb. jockey came home a winner 262 times in 1978 and received his own Eclipse Award as the nation's top apprentice jockey. Yet Franklin's handling of Spectacular Bid has sometimes been amateurish. In two races he has allowed the horse to be boxed in at the rail, then failed to take advantage of an opening. On one of those occasions, the Florida Derby, Franklin rode Spectacular Bid into so many roadblocks that the colt had to come from 14 lengths behind...
Nonetheless, Spectacular Bid may have the speed and poise to overcome his jockey's uneven performances. "He just glides," reports Franklin. "I'm sitting on a Rolls-Royce." The horse will have only two serious rivals in the Derby: Flying Paster, the three-year-old California champion, and General Assembly, the first Secretariat colt to reach Derby status. Flying Paster lost but one race this spring, to a colt carrying 8 Ibs. less weight. General Assembly ran twice against Spectacular Bid last year and twice was soundly beaten. Eddie Arcaro admires the colt's delicate skill...