Perfect. East met West on the final turn. No. 1 caught No. 1-A as the crowd stood. Mohaymen threatened Nyquist as they came down the stretch Saturday in the most anticipated Florida Derby in decades.
This was exactly how the day at Gulfstream Park Racing and Casino was billed to be, what the bettors threw down money to see, and the kind of natural rivalry this sport embraced as it moves toward the Kentucky Derby.
It was a heavyweight bout at the top of the stretch.
“We were right where we wanted,” Mohaymen jockey Junior Alvarado said.
It was a cultural clash of coasts and style.
“When I saw (Mohaymen) coming to my side and I went wide,” Nyquist jockey Mario Gutierrez said. “I knew if he was going to pass me he was going to have to go wider.”
This, also was as good as it got, this tease at the top of the stretch between previously unbeaten 3-year-olds.
“No one in our group would say anything coming in — that’s not our style — but this was the kind of performance (from Nyquist) we expected,” trainer Doug O’Neill said.
So the biggest race on the East Coast this season wasn’t won by the local favorite, the one comfortable on his home track or who just a few weeks earlier dominated the Holy Bull Stakes.
So what? It was won by the horse with enough personality that celebrated down the stretch, West-Coast style.
“He was show-boating a little,” O’Neill said.
There’s also a tidy, $1 million back-story that allowed Nyquist to call this home. He was bought out of the Gulfstream winter sale when owner Paul Reddam listened in good part to O’Neill’s brother, Dennis, a horse agent.
“He said there wasn’t a better-looking horse for sale,” Reddam said
As a bonus, any horse sold there was offered a $1 million bonus if it won the Florida Derby.
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Reddam, a big Detroit Red Wings hockey fan, immediately named the horse for player Gustav Nyquist. That’s the fifth time he’s named a horse for a Red Wing player.
“This is the only one that’s amounted to anything,” he said.
Still, Reddam didn’t know about the $1 million bonus as Doug O’Neill began making plans to bring Nyquist to the Florida Derby. The main idea, Reddam said, was a better schedule and geography for May’s Kentucky Derby.
“I found out pretty quickly about the $1 million, though,” he said.
Only when Mohaymen won the Holy Bull was there some hesitation in the plans. Go East to face a hot horse? On its own track?
“My feeling was if you’re afraid to go run against someone how do you really think you have a derby horse? We just stuck to our plan and we thought if we got beat, we got beat.
“If you’re afraid in this business, you’re not going anywhere.”
Everything went well on the trip right down to a little rain before Saturday’s race. That tamped down the track into something they wanted.
“We got lucky in every way,” O’Neill said.
Nyquist has the same team — owner, trainer, jockey — that won the Kentucky Derby with I’ll Have Another. O’Neill framed it as a, “blue collar group,” that just goes about its work in the sport of kings and enjoys the being the underdog.
“That might change now,” O’Neill said.
Gulfstream got the day it wanted. It overflowed with people. It set a betting record for a non-Breeders Cup event of more than $32 million. But as for the finish most of the people would have preferred?
East met West. But West beat East in the kind of drubbing that will define the talk heading into the Kentucky Derby.