By Bloodhorse.com
DEL MAR, Calif. (Nov. 3, 2017) — The decision was made. The ownership group agreed to put up $40,000 to claim Skye Diamonds.
One of the owners, Jon Lindo, had picked out the First Dude filly as one to claim in August of 2016. As a 3-year-old California-bred, she fit some potentially lucrative conditions, and he liked the way she tried during races. Trainer Bill Spawr agreed, as did the other owners in the group—Jeff Bloom, Tom Acker, and Chuck Allen.
But when they saw the chestnut filly in the paddock before the 6 1/2-furlong test at Del Mar, Bloom and Allen lacked enthusiasm.
“I said, ‘Wait, this is who we’re claiming?’ ” Bloom remembered. “She didn’t look the part. She just didn’t really look that great. I was standing there with Chuck Allen, and he and I are joking, ‘Maybe we’ll get lucky and there’ll be a shake and we’ll lose the shake.’
“Her coat just wasn’t great. She didn’t pop.”
Then they watched Skye Diamonds close from sixth to take the claiming race by 2 1/4 lengths.
“After the race we looked at each other and said, ‘Man, I hope we don’t get a shake,’ ” Bloom said
There was no shake. They got their filly. Just more than 14 months later, she’s the second choice on the morning line in the $1 million Breeders’ Cup Filly & Mare Sprint (G1) at Del Mar, the place the journey began. Spawr is as old-school as it gets. The 77-year-old trainer is renowned for arriving at his barn between 3-4 a.m. every morning.
He’s also willing to play the claiming game, where a risk or two can bring handsome rewards. Maybe it was because they weren’t all that high on her at the time, or maybe it was a game of poker, but Spawr and the ownership group ran Skye Diamonds back in another claiming race at Santa Anita Park—albeit for $50,000—just less than two months after they picked her up.
In that window of time, if she got claimed, it still would have been a win for her connections. She won the race by 1 1/4 lengths—which brought a $26,400 winner’s share of the purse—and the claiming price would have been $10,000 more than they paid for her.
“There wasn’t really anything else to run in. Let’s play a little poker, let’s win a race, and let’s get our expenses back,” Lindo said. “You never turn down a profit, because things happen. I didn’t know she could win an open allowance condition.”
Skye Diamonds was not claimed. No one called to see what they had in their hand. But there would be no more gambling with the filly, who never ran for a tag again. While Spawr and some in the ownership group were still unsure to a point about what they had, Bloom contends that first race in his red and white silks convinced him.
“I was the one—I kept saying, ‘This filly is the real deal,'” said Bloom, the former jockey who won 95 races in the 1980s. “Everyone else was so careful. If I’m wrong, who cares? I just knew she was legit. I’ve been around a lot of good horses, but there was something about her that day—she’s got it.”
Lindo was more comfortable trusting Spawr, who he’s had horses with for 29 years, and the conditioner wasn’t getting ahead of himself.
“You work with a horseman you trust, and you let him do his job,” Lindo said.
So the trainer who turned Amazombie (a toss-in horse in a deal for another) and Exchange (a $50,000 claim) into grade 1 winners went to work.
Skye Diamonds’ first conditional allowance try was a second to the streaking Bad Ju Ju, who also took her next allowance try and the Kalookan Queen Stakes, but Skye Diamonds cleared the condition in her next start and first as a 4-year-old by 1 1/4 lengths on a sloppy track at Santa Anita in January.
Her connections were happy they had a good horse, but they still weren’t sold they had a stakes type—well, except maybe for Bloom. Her next start made them all believers.
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Spawr has a special spot at a bar in the Santa Anita grandstand where the bartender allows him to view each race on two different televisions—one for the pan view and another for the head-on—and he takes notes on the races.
At Santa Anita Feb. 16, Skye Diamonds was jumping up in allowance conditions, and Spawr was in his spot at the bar. The race was a little shorter (six furlongs) than she was used to running, and she popped the gate under jockey Tiago Pereira. Two other horses rushed up on the inside. She dropped into a stalking third-place position. Pereira began to ask his filly early in the turn, and she moved by the frontrunners three-wide. With the lead at the top of the lane, she continued to pull away, and finished 5 3/4 lengths ahead at the wire under a hand ride.
Spawr froze.
“She ran by those horses like they’re standing still,” the trainer remembered. “I’ve been around a long time—seen a lot of races. I couldn’t move. I looked at my assistant and said, ‘Did you see what just happened?’ It had to be a dream. This is something special.
“Now, in my mind, she’s a stakes horse.”
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Stepped up into Cal-bred stakes competition, Skye Diamonds won the Dream of Summer March 26 at Santa Anita, even though the two-turn mile wasn’t exactly in her comfort zone. Again going a bit farther than she would like to go in the 1 1/16-mile Adoration Stakes (G3) May 7, she still almost got to grade 1 winner Vale Dori, who at that point was riding a five-race win streak that featured four graded victories.
Even though it wasn’t her best distance, she kept wearing Vale Dori down in the final furlong and nearly got her. Only a half-length separated the pair at the wire.
“She has that will. She wants to win,” Spawr said. “She has that fight—that want. A lot of horses, they’re really good horses if things go their way. If they get an easy lead or the pace sets up for a closer, they can win. But she’s the type, if things don’t go her way, she wants to beat you anyway. And that’s special.”
Back in her wheelhouse at 6 1/2 furlongs in the July 8 Great Lady M. Stakes at Los Alamitos Race Course, Skye Diamonds started to get some steam behind her from “wise-guy” handicappers. Up against grade 1 winners Constellation and Finest City, also the champion female sprinter of 2016, she took significant action at the betting windows and went off at 2-1.
Looming in third early on, as Constellation and Pretty N Cool dueled on the front end, Skye Diamonds and Finest City moved together on the outside to attack the top pair. The former claimer put away the champion a few strides into the long stretch run at Los Al, then went right on by Constellation to win her first graded stakes by 2 1/2 lengths.
The victory was impressive enough, but Spawr got confirmation a couple days later.
Jockey David Flores, who rode Constellation in the Great Lady M., grabbed Spawr’s arm on the Santa Anita backstretch two days after the race and spun the trainer around.
“I was loaded with horse,” Flores told him. “And I looked over my shoulder and she ran by me. What your filly just did—congratulations.”
She won her next race just for good measure—to remove any doubt she was Breeders’ Cup bound—in the Rancho Bernardo Handicap (G3) at Del Mar Aug. 13 with the same stalk-and-pounce style. Constellation again played the runner-up, 1 1/4 lengths behind.
“We’ve already beat the Breeders’ Cup champion (Finest City), and you could argue she was bad at the time, but we also beat Constellation, who is a really good filly,” Bloom said. “The way she did it in those two races, and who she did it against, I thought this was a Breeders’ Cup horse. How is she not?”
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The Cinderella story heading into the Breeders’ Cup took a hit in August, when it was announced that Spawr would be suspended for 30 days and fined $3,000 for an overage of clenbuterol in Skye Diamonds following her runner-up effort in the Adoration.
Spawr did not want to talk about the overage, and said the stipulated agreement he made with the California Horse Racing Board prevents him from doing so, but he points to his previous record—he’d never been suspended for a drug violation before—as his defense.
Skye Diamonds’ ownership group is more than happy to come to his defense as well. A post-race urine sample detected clenbuterol, a class 3 prohibited substance, at a level of 196 picograms per milliliter. A picogram is one trillionth of a gram. The authorized level for clenbutrol is 140 picograms per milliliter.
“We discussed it as a group and told him, ‘Whatever you want to do—if you want to fight it, we’ll fight it. We’ve got your back. If you want to sit out, that’s fine, but you decide what you want,'” Lindo said. “We support him 1,000%. We followed the guidelines (regarding withdrawal time). We weren’t trying to get an edge.”
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Before her Rancho Bernardo score, Bloom hopped aboard Skye Diamonds, mostly just to say he did. He doesn’t get on a ton of horses in the mornings any longer, but he still gets on a few. They took a trip around the track, mostly in a jog, but it was enough for the former jockey to feel what was underneath him.
“It was great to be able to get on her and be able to say I’ve been on her,” Bloom said. “You could just tell—she’s really strong. She’s a really sweet filly, but…”
Spawr likes to say that Skye Diamonds only gets aggressive in two circumstances, when she’s on the racetrack and when the feed tub comes by. In every other instance, she’s a cool customer. Before her last timed work for the Filly & Mare Sprint, a three-furlong breeze in :38 flat Nov. 1, she was a picture of professionalism schooling in the Del Mar paddock, then waited for the track to open after a renovation break just outside the tunnel, as a lead pony in front of her went through a full freak-out session.
On the track, however, she’s a ferocious runner. Put a target in front of her and she’ll attack. If all goes as planned in the Filly & Mare Sprint Nov. 4, she’ll have race favorite Unique Bella in her crosshairs in the stretch.
“If Unique Bella runs her best race, we’re not going to beat her, because I think she has that kind of talent,” Lindo said. “On paper we just follow her around the track. … Give (Skye Diamonds) a target and let’s see what happens.
“If we have one horse to beat, I don’t know if she’s good enough, but if she looks that horse in the eye—every time she does, she runs by them.
“I’ve got a street fighter. I know that.”