The Star That Fell To Earth

Among the other old Claiborne clients who bought in were Virginia breeder Bertram Firestone, whose filly, Genuine Risk, won the 1980 Kentucky Derby; and fellow Virginians Paul Mellon, the philanthropist; Alice Mills of Hickory Tree Farm; Mark Hardin of Newstead Farm; and William Haggin Perry, whose ties to the Hancocks go back decades. Ogden Phipps and his son, Ogden Mills Phipps, whose family had boarded its mares at Claiborne for 50 years, went in as partners in a share.

They weren't alone in easing the burden by splitting a share. Martha Gerry, whose great gelding Forego was born at Claiborne, purchased a share in partnership with the Calumet Farm. And Warner Jones and William Farish, who breed horses, joined forces on another. Jones, the owner of Hermitage Farm in Goshen, Ky., had been warned not to buy one.

"Two trainers called me from New York during Travers week and told me the horse was sore as a boil," Jones says. " 'Warner, don't buy a share in this horse,' they said. I did it because I'm competitive. I didn't want some other commercial breeders leading a yearling by Conquistador Cielo into the Keeneland summer sale with Hermitage not having one. If we didn't have one by Conquistador Cielo, we'd feel bad that the other breeders did have one. You've got to be competitive in this business."

By the time Hancock left Saratoga that weekend, heading for Chicago to see one of his horses run, he had sold 21 of the 30 available shares, but it had been a struggle. Jones wasn't the only breeder to hear the word that Cielo was sore. Rumors to that effect had been flying like kites all week—there were even hints that Cielo might not run in the Travers—and they didn't make the syndication process any easier. In fact, by the time Hancock actually started the selling of shares, the horse was sore.

For months Stephens had been keeping a daily watch on Cielo's left front ankle, tubbing him in hot water to open his pores, then tubbing him in ice, then dressing his ankle in a mud poultice to draw out the heat and keep the ankle tight and cool. The regimen was effective through the spring and summer, until Cielo got to Saratoga, when the strain of his campaign began to tell.

Shortly after the Jim Dandy, Stephens' stable veterinarian, Dr. Robert Fritz, discovered that Cielo had sprained his superficial and middle sesamoidean ligaments. Fritz suspects that it had occurred during the running of the race. There was swelling in the ankle, a filling of the digital flexor tendon sheath with synovial fluid, and considerable heat. On the Wednesday following the Jim Dandy, the day that Hancock began the syndication, Fritz knew there was really no way to relieve the pressure and ease the pain—to get the horse to the Travers sound—except by tapping the ankle, a relatively routine procedure he performs on horses four or five times a month.

Stephens worked Cielo half a mile on Saturday, a week before the Travers. Following the work, Fritz gave the colt a shot of Butazolidin, an anti-inflammatory drug on which a horse is permitted to train, but not race, in New York. On Monday, Stephens worked Cielo again; the colt went three quarters in 1:13, a second slower than Stephens had wanted him to go. "I felt the horse was pulling his punches a little bit," Stephens says. It was after this outing that Jones got the call from the New York trainers warning him away from Cielo.

"We've got to take the pressure off," Stephens told Fritz, "and the only way to take it off is with that needle."

At 8:30 p.m. on Aug. 16, after the last of the stable hands had left Stephens' barn and drifted off for home and dinner in the warm summer twilight three men, Stephens, Fritz and Assistant Trainer Scotty Penrod, gathered at one end of the deserted barn. Privacy is what Stephens wanted most of all now—no owners, no reporters, no one but Fritz to insert the needle into Cielo's ankle, Stephens himself to hold the light so the doc could see what he was doing and Penrod to hold the horse.

It was four days and 21 hours before post time for the Travers. Stephens had insisted on secrecy for obvious competitive reasons. A healthy Cielo was viewed as a mortal lock to win the Travers, and any sign of weakness or vulnerability could only embolden trainers otherwise wavering on whether to run, to take a shot at whipping the favorite. "You let out one little iota of information about a horse's condition before a race like that, and they jump on you," Stephens says. "So the psychology of the thing is to keep everything as secret as possible."