Monday, August 20, 2018

Whicker: The fast and furious story of Unique Bella

You mention “sesamoid,” especially around a race track, and it darkens the conversation.

The sesamoid is a small bone inside a tendon. Tim Tam, in 1958, hurt his while he was trying to win the Belmont Stakes and the Triple Crown.

It’s kind of like “radiator.” You don’t talk about it until it’s a problem.

Unique Bella worked out at Del Mar Saturday morning. Dan Ward, the assistant to trainer Jerry Hollendorfer, was at the wire. When Unique Bella came back to the barn, she wasn’t walking naturally, and that meant a quick trip to the X-ray.

She had a chipped sesamoid, and Don Alberto Stable announced her retirement.

Grief was followed closely by relief. Unique Bella was a fabulous 4-year-old with unfinished business. She had won almost everything except the Breeders’ Cup, and she was bearing down on that. The sport already took a hit when Justify had to retire. Now this.

“But it could have happened in a race, it could have been a lot worse,” jockey Mike Smith said on Monday. “Now she’ll have a nice career coming up in the barn. Who knows? I might be riding one of her fillies.”

Smith has won 12 Breeders’ Cup races aboard fillies and mares, and two Kentucky Oaks. He rode Zenyattta and Songbird. None, he said, had a deeper well of talent than Unique Bella.

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And why not? Her sire was Tapit, who commands the largest stud fee in racing today and fathered horses that won three Belmont Stakes in a four-year span.

Bella’s dam was Unrivaled Belle, who won the Breeders Cup distaff. Breeder Mandy Pope bought her for $3.8 million.

“I’m done shopping today,” Pope said at the time. “What a hell of a racehorse.”

What came forth was a gray monster who was not to be trifled with.

Ward talks of how she “intimidated” her competitors, to the point that few of them had their best races thereafter.

“She would look right over you, like you weren’t there,” Smith said. “Zenyatta was that way, too. Plus she was big enough to do that.”

But Unique Bella was just as troublesome for her team. Her insistence on running without limits  was a problem that all trainers would envy, but a problem nonetheless.

Hollendorfer and Ward tried to get Unique Bella to work out behind other horses, just to get the feel of it. That worked for a while. The best thing, Ward said, was to get her on the track at 5:30 a.m., with nobody else around.

“She would fight you if you tried to hold her back,” Smith said. “You had to convince her it was her idea, not yours.”

And, as Smith said, nothing is a crisis when you win nine of 12 races. The Don Alberto firm, based in Chile, bought her for $400,000 and she brought home $1.27 million.

“Everything was so easy for her,” Smith said. “I never thought we were going as fast as we actually were. I’d come around thinking we’d worked out in 49 seconds or so, and Jerry would be there saying, ‘45 and change.’”

“She was really big when she was two years old,” Ward said. “At that point you knew it might be a challenge to keep her sound through two, three and four but for the most part she was. That’s not easy to do.”

Unique Bella won eight stakes, including three Grade 1s. Her last race was the Clement Hirsch at Del Mar, and she threw a shoe just after takeoff and still won.

“She just got mad when that happened,” Ward said. “She was still mad a couple of days later.”

But Unique Bella leaves opportunities on the table. She finished fifth in the Breeders’ Cup Filly & Mare Sprint last year, beaten by 66-to-1 shot Bar of Gold. She roared out to a 21.8-second start and then hit a wall at the top of the stretch.

At Churchill Downs this fall she would have been the Breeders’ Cup Distaff favorite.

“We were going to Santa Anita (for the Zenyatta), and she was nearly unbeatable there,” Ward said. “Then the Breeders’ Cup might have been some revenge for us.”

Hollendorfer trained Songbird, which lost that indelible duel to Beholder in the Breeders’ Cup Distaff two years ago.

Last August, Songbird finished second in the Personal Ensign Stakes at Saratoga. The team spotted some injuries afterward and Songbird retired.

On July 18, a 2-year-old filly named Brill came out of Hollendorfer’s barn and won her 5-furlong debut at 57:86.

Brill is short for “brilliant.” Only one can be Unique.

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