Coal Battle won’t run in Preakness, owner says

 

By JIMMY WIGFIELD

Coal Battle won’t race in the Preakness on May 17, partly to protect the horse and partly to make some money in races he has a better chance of winning, owner Robbie Norman said Wednesday.

“We’re not going to the Preakness,” said Norman, who also owns a chain of grocery stores, including Super Foods in Thomasville.

After Coal Battle finished 11^th in last week’s Kentucky Derby, Norman said he would consider the Preakness — the second leg of the fabled Triple Crown — after consulting with trainer Lonnie Briley. By Wednesday, Norman still hadn’t spoken with Briley but made up his mind.

“I know what Lonnie’s going to say when I do talk to him but we don’t have any plans to go there,” Norman said. “I don’t think he would want to go and I know I don’t want to go there. Nothing against the Preakness but sometimes you just don’t like to race back on that two weeks. You like to give the horse a little bit of a break. Now, if he had won the Derby or got top five, we would have definitely looked at it.”

Owners are increasingly skipping the Preakness because of the short window to recover from the Kentucky Derby. Even Sovereignty, the Derby winner, won’t run in the Preakness, so Justify in 2018 remains the last Triple Crown winner.

Norman said resting his colt and paying the bills were factors in his decision. Coal Battle will likely run in the $400,000 Matt Winn Stakes at Churchill Downs on June 8 and possibly the Indiana Derby in July. Both are grade-3 races at 1-1/16^th miles. Coal Battle is still enjoying a stall at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Ky., where the Matt Winn Stakes will be held.

“Sometimes, you’ve just got to pick better spots because you’ve got bills coming in, training bills, and you just want to make a purse that you can win,” Norman said. “It’s a business decision, too, but I’ll tell you, there’s something in your gut that wants to do the other but you know, at the end of the day, you’ve got to do the right thing by Coal Battle. You want to space his races out, you want to put him at the right distance because a horse that wins is a very happy horse. You don’t want to put them in a situation where they’re not winning very much because it could break their spirit a little bit.”

The Kentucky Derby is 1¼ miles and the Preakness, at Pimlico in Baltimore, is 1-3/16^th miles.

“It’s probably best for Coal Battle to be the mile-and-a-sixteenth horse,” Norman said. “The Matt Winn’s a mile and a sixteenth and then the Indiana Derby’s a mile and a sixteenth. You don’t have to travel very much. You don’t have to travel at all for the Matt Winn.”

Norman believes the Triple Crown races will eventually be more spaced out. A popular proposal is to run the Kentucky Derby on the first Saturday of May, the Preakness on the first Saturday in June and the 1½-mile Belmont on the first Saturday in July.

“I think that’s going to happen within a few years,” Norman said. “Then you would see (more horses) doing it. If you go back 30, 40, 50 years ago, they would race these horses a week apart. I guess just through breeding, that has sort of been bred out. Like with Coal Battle, if (the Preakness) was a month out, we would definitely look at it but also then you’d have every other horse looking at it. That lure is there to almost want to go into it but we just decided that we like the Matt Winn and then possibly the Indiana Derby.”

Winning the Triple Crown isn’t easy, as only 13 thoroughbreds have accomplished the feat.

“It takes a good horse to be able to do that,” Norman said. “Even when California Chrome won the first two (races in 2014), his owner got all emotional at the Belmont when he lost because all the other horses skipped the Preakness. They got the full rest. He made a big thing out of it. He was saying they did not take the champion’s heart in racing the Preakness, too. I think it’ll be spread out in a few years because you do want to see the best of the best run all three. That’s how you get a rivalry.”

After the Kentucky Derby, Norman returned to the more mundane world of groceries at his Thomasville store and said he hasn’t caught up on his mail yet.

“I’m back to being the accounting nerd,” he said. “I’ve got a lot of work to do and I’m looking at it now, it’s almost depressing. You get these horses and you like them so much and they all have their different personalities and you really want to support them. But sometimes, you just have to stay home and watch them on television.

“The grocery store business is very demanding and when I got back from being gone a week and a few days, my post-office box couldn’t hardly hold another piece of mail. I’m looking at the stack right now.”