LOUISVILLE — Pioneerof the Nile served notice yesterday he is going to be a major player in Saturday’s Kentucky Derby with a final drill that had his trainer and rider jumping through hoops.
“I’m really excited,” said his trainer, Bob Baffert. “He is training better here than he ever has. He’s getting better every day. After watching this work, I am confident he’s going to show up Saturday and run the race of his life.”
Joe Steiner, a former jockey who rode the colt in the workout, was ecstatic.
“He’s perfect,” said Steiner. “He’s focused, calm and confident, just the way you want them to be coming up to a big race. He’s like a dream to gallop.”
Pioneerof the Nile worked five furlongs in 1.01, which is not especially fast. But it was the way he did it that had Baffert and Steiner whoopin’ and hollerin’.
Until now, the horse had never run over a dirt surface as he will at Churchill Downs at the weekend. His eight races to date have been on grass and California’s synthetic tracks. The big question: How would he handle the switch?
No problem, Baffert said with a chortle.
“He can run on anything,” Baffert said. “He’s run on wet and dry, grass and synthetics and now dirt and he has handled them all the same. In fact, I think he moves better on dirt than anything else, because he has that big, long stride. He glides over it effortlessly.”
The trainer is so confident of Pioneer’s potential to win the Derby he said, “The whole key for us now will be racing luck.”
Pioneer, a son of Belmont Stakes winner Empire Maker, was bred and is owned by Ahmed Zayat, the Egyptian-born business tycoon, who currently has about 200 horses in training with six of the nation’s top trainers.
Pioneer started out last year in Bill Mott’s stable at Saratoga, where he won his second start, on grass. At the end of the year, Zayat decided to ship half a dozen of his horses to Baffert in California. One of them was Pioneer.
It was a gift from the gods for Baffert, because he had just had his 2-year-old champion — and prime Derby prospect — Midshipman pulled out of his stable by his Arab owners and sent to Dubai to prepare for the Derby. Midshipman didn’t make it, falling by the wayside.
But Pioneer is now an even hotter commodity with the defection of Quality Road.
“He was the horse we all had to beat,” said Baffert. “It is such a shame. I feel so badly for [his trainer] Jimmy Jerkens. You don’t get many chances to come to the Derby with a good, exciting horse like that.”
Pioneer really sprouted when moved to the synthetic tracks in California. He hasn’t lost a race since. He won the Cash Call Futurity at Hollywood Park, then blitzed three straight stakes at Santa Anita, including the Santa Anita Derby.
Since that race on April 4, Pioneer has worked in blacktype, the basic Baffert strategy which earned him the nickname Bullet Bob. Last week, the horse mesmerized Churchill’s clockers with a six-furlong workout.
“He’s very tenacious,” said Baffert. “He has a lot of fight in him. He wants to win. He has heart, ability, the right pedigree and a great jockey [Garrett Gomez]. But we still need a lot of luck in the running.”
Baffert noted that Pioneer has another virtue, seldom mentioned in these days of fashionably abbreviated Derby campaigns. He has eight races under his belt.
“He’s seasoned, he’s tough, just what you need to win a Derby and go through the whole Triple Crown,” said the trainer, who has won three Derbies and has just been elected to the Hall of Fame.
So Bobby B’s back big time in the Derby game. And, in his own lingo, he’s packing a bazooka.