Bump with favorite in backstretch sends Coal Battle to 11th-place finish in Kentucky Derby; owner to consider Preakness run

 

 

By JIMMY WIGFIELD

Coal Battle did precisely what he was supposed to do in Saturday’s 151^st Kentucky Derby. He surged cleanly out of the starting gate from the 16^th post and jockey Juan Vargas promptly nudged him into the middle of the muddy track, stalked the leaders and even had the colt ahead of heavily favored Journalism halfway through the race.

But on the backstretch, once Journalism and Coal Battle drew eye to eye, the two thoroughbreds bumped and Coal Battle faded while Journalism charged down the stretch only to lose by a length in an upset to Sovereignty.

Coal Battle, owned by Thomasville grocery store owner Robbie Norman, finished 11^th in the 19-horse field. Sovereignty — who started in the 18th post, two slots wider than Coal Battle — won in 2:02.31 in the 1¼-mile Derby in front of 147,000 fans at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Ky.

Coal Battle, who went off at 26-1 odds despite being the only five-time winner in the Derby field, was knocked off his stride by Journalism and could not recover, according to trainer Lonnie Briley.

“Juan had him in the right position,” Norman said afterward while enjoying a winner’s circle party at Churchill Downs. “Juan told Lonnie after the race that (Journalism), when he came up on him, he bumped him a little bit and Juan said it looked like it knocked a little bit of air out of him. Once he did that, it was like he just never got back going again. You could tell that was the turning point in the race. I’ve seen it so many times with so many other horses. If he got bumped or knocked there, sometimes it breaks their heart a little bit when they get passed like that. I was happy up until that point, when the eight (Journalism) got to him. He was the heavy favorite and I knew that was the time that it wasn’t going to quite go our way. But we’re still very happy with the way he ran.”

Norman said the Coal Battle team would have preferred a dry track but he didn’t use the slippery surface as an excuse.

“I don’t think it affected him because he has won two races over the mud,” Norman said. “We actually thought the mud would probably help him. We’d have liked a dry track but there is no excuse on the muddy track. We were prepared to run on it.”

Coal Battle’s Triple Crown career might not be over, as Norman said he will consider running his horse in the Preakness on May 17.

“He can run the Preakness,” Norman said. “Lonnie said we would talk about that (Sunday). You want to make sure he came out of the race good because it’s in two weeks. Then, I would want to look at the other horses that are pointing to the Preakness and which ones in this race might be pointing to the Preakness. We’d have to determine if we really thought he had a chance to finish top three in the Preakness. Right now, it’s probably 20 percent that we would go that direction.”

Unless he runs in the Preakness, Coal Battle will remain at Churchill Downs until late June. Norman has four horses there, with two scheduled to run in the next two weeks, and he plans to race Coal Battle as a 4-year-old.

“Absolutely,” Norman said. “We think he’ll be a great mile horse. And then during the summer, you can give him a little bit of a break and you have races like the Iowa Derby, the Ohio Derby, the Indiana Derby, the Super Derby and then, when we won the Springboard Mile, we get free entry into the Oklahoma Derby at the end of September. There’s lot of great races left out there for him. And this good crop that he raced against today, they’ll spread out, so it should be some races that he could win or should win. It’s going to be a fun summer.”

While the support from Clarke County and his hometown of Ramer was uplifting, Norman said the drive back to Thomasville on Sunday would be somber.

“I joked with Lonnie that if you win, the 10-hour drive feels like you get home in 10 minutes,” Norman said. “The 10-hour drive will seem like 24 tomorrow. But I think the little coffee shop in Grove Hill had a Coal Battle cookie today and a Coal Battle coffee and some Derby treats. Even people in Ramer saw it. I got so many texts, it was blowing up my phone like the Fourth of July. The day was wonderful. Most of my family was here. My 82-year-old uncle was here. Getting everybody here and organized and where they needed to be really tied up a lot of my day. So, I didn’t have too much time to worry about the race. Everybody had a wonderful time and the Derby is a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”