Forever Young Wins, Sierra Leone Places, Fierceness Shows

Jockey Ryusei Sakai’s bold and very public throwdown threat of exacting “revenge” in the $7-million Breeders’ Cup Classic might at first seem to have come from the mixed martial arts weigh-in “disrespect” playbook. But what the jocular Sakai was joking about meant that he was thinking about revenge for the 2024 Kentucky Derby bump that Forever Young took from Sierra Leone in their embattled finish in that race, before Sierra Leone finished ahead of Forever Young by a nose. But in the doing at Del Mar, the jockey’s lightly tossed-off threat seemed to have worked out in the 47th running of the Classic, as Sakai and Forever Young staved off Sierra Leone, who ran a thunderous, game second in his last race before retiring to stud at Coolmore.

Also toiling in his last appearance on the track (before retiring to Coolmore as well) was Sierra Leone’s rival Fierceness, who showed, mightily blazed by Sierra Leone in the last strides of the big race. Fierceness is out of trainer Todd Pletcher’s hands now, but that show placing and its implied fade will not necessarily have pleased the Texan Hall of Famer. Put another way, Fierceness may not actually have been fading, but the sheer rocketlike thrust of Sierra Leone’s overtaking made it look as if Fierceness was out of gas.

For his part, Forever Young’s besting of Sierra Leone was deserved in that he and Sakai had established themselves up front well before Sierra Leone brought his majestic run, but the victory was terribly skinny; the victor held on just barely and was saved by the line. Put bluntly, the surge Sierra Leone brought in the last furlong made Forever Young seem like he, too, was out of gas — and in fact he was, Sakai had just enough horse left to eke it out through the line. Said differently, Forever Young and Sakai did not win their lion’s share of the $7-million purse actually at the line, although technically they did — they won the race two furlongs before the line when Sakai surged his horse out of the peloton to the fore, just far enough out of Sierra Leone’s reach to make it home first.

The rest of the order of finish was pretty much as expected: Journalism mustered to finish just fourth, Todd Pletcher’s Mindframe managed fifth, along the way beating Baeza, who clocked in at a somewhat disappointing sixth. Bob Baffert’s Nevada Beach never figured in the race and ran seventh, the longshot Antiquarian did what was expected and put in eighth, and the putative speed, ultra-longshot-who-was-intended-to-fade Contrary Thinking, ran dead last.

With the exception of Forever Young, who was a contender but by no means a major favorite like Fierceness, and despite all the delicate calculation that the surfeit of talent in the field required, the race was not terribly remunerative for the exotics players. Forever Young’s semi-unexpected victory provided a whisper of relief at $9.00 on the nose to win, Sierra Leone, whose odds had dropped by post time, paid the expected low $4.60 in place, and Fierceness paid $3.40 in show.

The race was, in the last furlong, a cliffhanger. Coming out of the final turn into the stretch, it seemed as if Forever Young, who was neck-and-neck with Fierceness at the front of the peloton, actually slowed up a bit before gunning himself from the group and moving in the last hundred yards toward the line. In those few moments the race looked largely to be over, but — as if powered by a pair of invisible rocket engines attached somehow to either side of his rump — Sierra Leone arrived in the great heat of his close, breezing by Fierceness as if he were standing still. He was within a couple of strides of overtaking Forever Young when the finish line intervened.

This breathtaking valedictory show of puissance-to-the-very-last-second did form yet another of Sierra Leone’s trademark grand finishes, but this time he had left himself with just a shade too much to do. Across his fine career, the time of ignition of his rockets’ burn was always his Achilles heel. Philosophically speaking, this particularly grand surge was mythic Greek, the stuff of tragedy: a lesson in magnificence brought too late.

Hewing to Aristotle, then, the inevitable price to be paid: That finish dashed the widely-held hope for Sierra Leone to enter the history books as the second-ever horse to win the Classic twice. That noted, the victor Forever Young did very much enter the history books as the first Classic winner for an owner from Japan, and his win also delightfully cemented the position of Japan’s onrushing coterie of quality Thoroughbreds as a group of horses to be taken very seriously. Forever Young set a monumental roadmarker for Japan’s talented horses, trainers, and riders.

That result was just plain good for the sport.