Trainer Barclay Tagg and his Triple Crown candidate Funny Cide pulled fast ones yesterday morning at Belmont Park, where the chestnut gelding turned in a teeth-rattling workout for Saturday’s Belmont Stakes.
Tagg, after saying Monday he planned to work Funny Cide at 8:45 a.m., beat the media crush by sending him out at the crack of dawn – 5:30 a.m.
Then Funny Cide sent shock waves through the backstretch, whistling through one of the fastest workouts in Belmont history: five furlongs in a “bullet” :57.4.
With assistant trainer-exercise rider Robin Smullen trying in vain to restrain his speed, Funny Cide ripped through scorching splits of :22 for the quarter-mile and :45 for the half. Tagg, astride his pony at the finish line, held up his hand like a traffic cop, signaling Smullen to slow down.
The clockers caught him galloping out six furlongs in 1:11.2, but Funny Cide wasn’t done yet. Around the clubhouse turn, he kept on rolling like a runaway freight train, Smullen with her feet on the dashboard, trying to pull him up.
“He finally relented,” she said.
By comparison, no horse worked four furlongs yesterday faster than :47, while the next-fastest of 49 five-furlong drills was :59.2 – eight lengths slower than Funny Cide.
Of previous Triple Crown winners, Secretariat worked a half in :46.3 in his final Belmont drill, Seattle Slew went six furlongs in 1:11.3, and Affirmed went five in 1:01.
Reaction to the blazing work was mixed, with several racetrackers calling it much too quick.
“I’m not going to knock a trainer who won the first two legs of the Triple Crown,” said Bobby Frankel, who’ll saddle second-choice Empire Maker. “Let’s just say that’s not my style. Maybe he is a superhorse. He’ll have to be.”
But Smullen remained “very confident. I knew he was going fast, but it felt like a normal work. By the time I took the tack off, he wasn’t blowing at all.”
Tagg wasn’t sure what to make of it.
“I didn’t want that sharp a work, nobody would,” he said. “It makes you feel a little squeamish going into a mile-and-a-half race. But he needed to do something.”
Addressing a horde of reporters and cameramen, only a handful of which got to see Funny Cide in the flesh, Tagg admitted, “Horses get pretty excited when they see a crowd, so I’d rather see three or four people out there than a hundred.”
