It's Hail To The Chief At Long Last

Turkoman likes to come from behind, but his rider, Darrel McHargue, had reluctantly taken the lead when all the others declined it, tiptoeing through the tulips in a 24[1/5]-second first quarter. Don's Choice, after breaking tardily from the gate, sleepwalked to the lead at the half mile in :48[1/5]. But the Choice never truly got his legs under him and appeared lost once he made the lead. Meanwhile, Cordero had Chief's Crown in a half nelson through the early going, trying to keep him in check.

Somehow Cordero got the colt to relax, and that was the key. By the final turn, Don's Choice had burped the bit, leaving Turkoman and Skip Trial out front, with Chief's Crown bearing down on both, full of himself. Racing off the turn, the two leaders moved over as if to wave the Chief on. He swallowed them through the top of the stretch and won as he pleased, covering the mile and a quarter in 2:01[1/5] and vindicating Laurin's strategy.

"I'm ecstatic," said Robert Clay, the breeder who had syndicated the colt last fall for Three Chimneys farm. "This reaffirms his original value. The horse has to be worth $25 to $30 million now."

"I'm glad to get it off my shoulders," said Cordero, who had been 0 for 13 for the Travers.

"I finally did something before Woody did," said the 49-year-old Laurin, after winning his first Travers.

More important, from the breeders' point of view, the Chief had finally done something right beyond nine furlongs. "It certainly was the most important race of his career because people had started to say, well, maybe he can't go a mile and a quarter," said Andrew Rosen, one of the Chiefs principal owners. "It was just a question of time before we notched one of the big ones."

There are even bigger ones to come, in New York's fall championship series leading up to the Nov. 2 Breeders' Cup at Aqueduct, and the Chief will be there racing to win honors as the nation's top 3-year-old. He may have some tough competition. Earlier on Saturday, Kentucky Derby winner Spend a Buck won the Monmouth Handicap at New Jersey's Monmouth Park, beating the 4-year-old Carr de Naskra—last year's Travers winner—by a short head in the track record time of 1:46[4/5]. It seems the Travers had launched the second half of the 3-year-old racing season. Perhaps the fun has just begun.