IN THE rain-sodden backstretch at Pimlico yesterday, in the aftermath of the shock Preakness result, trainer Joe Orseno was in no mood for excuses for beaten horses especially the odds-on favorite, Fusaichi Pegasus.

“Before we went into this thing, I said that if my horse [Red Bullet] won, I didn’t want track conditions or anything else as an

excuse for the others,” he said. “We won because we were the best horse. We drew away from Fusaichi Pegasus easily.”

Orseno was responding to the alibi trainer Neil Drysdale offered for FuPeg’s dramatic failure in the Preakness at 1-5. Said Drysdale, “He could not handle the track. It was greasy. I’m disappointed for the horse that he had a track he could not handle.”

Orseno was not impressed, saying, “When Fusaichi beat us in the Wood Memorial at Aqueduct, the track was every bit as greasy as Pimlico. We didn’t make any excuses when we lost.”

Orseno is taking dead aim at winning the three-year-old championship of 2000 with Red Bullet and he doesn’t want to be beaten by a bunch of excuses.

Winning his first big classic was an exciting experience for Orseno, a 44-year-old graduate of the south Jersey school of training, who won his first race with a $4,000 claimer named Mr Tiffany at Atlantic City back in 1977.

Joe got a bit lucky when he grabbed Jerry Bailey to ride Red Bullet in the Preakness. Bailey won an allowance on the horse at Gulfstream Park in February, then jumped off him to ride another horse. So Orseno hired the Californian Alex Solis to ride Red Bullet in the Gotham, which they won, and the Wood, which they lost in part because of a badly misjudged ride.

So when Bailey opened up for the Preakness, Orseno grabbed him and Solis was given the boot. Besides, Orseno had had enough of California-based jockeys.

“Joey Bravo [the jockey] and I have been friends forever.” he said. “I brought Joey back from California to ride a filly, Tap to Music, and he sent me the plane bill for $3,100. I said, ‘God, what is this? I can’t give the owners a bill like this.’ That’s when I realized it’s expensive to fly jocks around the country.

“You know, jocks have little short legs but for some reason they got to travel first class with all that leg room. Me, I’m always in the back of the plane.

“So we went for Jerry Bailey to ride Red Bullet because, among other things, he lives in New York and you don’t have to pay those California plane bills.”

If Orseno were on top of the world, D. Wayne Lukas, a few yards down the shed row, was openly licking his wounds. His trip to Pimlico this year was a disaster. He saddled a bunch of highly-fancied horses, including Sun Cat and Yes It’s True, and they all bit the dust, while High Yield bit the mud in the Preakness.

“It was the worst week I’ve ever had at Pimlico,” he acknowledged. “I have always done well at this track over the years.

“But if I got up this morning and was kicking the dirt and feeling sorry for myself, there would be something drastically wrong with me. I have had so many great days here. No one has ever had a better run in Baltimore than I have had. Now, I’m going back to Louisville to see my dog. His tail will be wagging all over.”

It’s there that Lukas will also have to go back to the drawing board and regroup. He doesn’t know what he is going to do with his horses yet. The plan was to have High Yield settled off the pace, no closer than third, in the Preakness, but rival jockeys blew the plan to smithereens.

“That kid [Victor Espinoza, on Hugh Hefner] on the rail was hootin’ and scootin’ and I don’t think he realized you have to go a mile and three-sixteenths in the Preakness,” said Lukas.

“Every time my jock [Pat Day] tried to take High Yield back, Hugh Hefner and that kamikaze pilot [Roger Velez] on Hal’s Hope would be screamin’ and hollerin’ and High Yield would take off.”

Lukas evaluated the Preakness as a race run over a very demanding track with a good, competitive field of horses.

“The Derby horses came back in two weeks running over that peanut-butter surface and facing that competition made it very tough,” he said. “I think those horses could legitimately hang.

“If that had been a nice, fluffy track, the outcome might have been changed. The winner was so much stronger than the rest of the field; you have to think about that. “Put them in the gate 10 times and you would not expect Red Bullet to dominate them as he did.”

So there will be no Triple Crown winner this year, and Lukas offered a reason.

“A Triple Crown winner has to be a damn good horse running against a weak class,” he said. “When everyone’s got a good horse, it’s hard to win the Triple Crown.”

It’s also hard to win under a weird ride. Take Captain Steve, who, given Saturday’s conditions of a good, drying-out track after 24 hours of rain, drew the ideal post position, No. 6, way off the rail.

So what did his rider Robby Albarado do? Right out of the gate, he steered the horse to the inside, which was Death Valley all day. It was only when the field hit the turn that Albarado finally swung Captain Steve six wide to make a run. At the finish, he was a mere head and a neck behind Fusaichi Pegasus.

Now it’s on to the Belmont. If Fusaichi Pegasus and Red Bullet both go for it, it would be a terrific shootout. If both duck it, the Belmont Stakes will be what the jokesters love to call it: the eighth race on the card.