By San Jose Mercury News
COALINGA — Here at Harris Farms, just a whiff away from the cattle feed lots along Interstate 5, an all-female foaling crew helped deliver a precocious chestnut colt named California Chrome, smothering him with hugs and kisses.
It was here that exercise rider Chendo Michel cinched the future champion’s first saddle, groomer Chuy Horta iced his tender white ankles, and co-owners Steve Coburn and Perry Martin first won his affections with a bag of Mrs. Pastures cookies.
This is the birthplace of California Chrome, who on Saturday will attempt to become the first horse in 36 years to win racing’s coveted Triple Crown — and the first ever from California.
The white rail fences and mulberry trees, foaling pens and training barns of his first two years are more than 2,000 miles away from where the 3-year-old colt won the Kentucky Derby and Preakness last month and even farther from the Belmont Stakes.
It’s where his most-devoted followers will crowd around a television in a back office next to the barn on Saturday to ride along with him on the final stretch of his improbable journey.
“It’s a thrill. Everybody helped him grow up. Everybody had a hand on him when he was here,” said Per Antonsen, California Chrome’s lead trainer until he “graduated” last year and started racing and living with a new crew in Southern California. “This is like everybody’s baby.”
In the blue-blood sport dominated by billionaires and sheiks, the story of Chrome’s blue-collar owners, his humble lineage and his underdog odyssey to the most prestigious horse-racing trophy has captivated the nation. And in the countdown to the Belmont Stakes on Saturday, everyone, it seems, is claiming California Chrome as their own.
In Yuba City, home to co-owner Perry Martin, the main street downtown will be closed for a festival with big-screen TVs tuned into Saturday’s race. At Golden Gate Fields in the East Bay, where California Chrome’s current trainer, Art Sherman, raced and trained for decades before moving south, the Turf Room above the grandstands with TVs on every white-clothed table is sold out.
Hamdogs diner in Gardnerville, Nev., where California Chrome’s other owner, Steve Coburn, has a bowl of soup and a Coors beer for lunch every day, will be offering a “two-drink special, third one’s free,” during the Belmont. When Coburn comes for lunch during his break at a small company that makes magnetic strips for credit cards, he shows waitress Wendy Davis pictures of the horse he calls “Junior” and home videos of the colt’s first steps.
“From the minute he was born, Steve knew it was destined for something special,” said Davis, who has known Coburn for 15 years. “He just believes. We’re just all trying to believe.”
A common-stock colt
No horse has won racing’s Triple Crown — the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness and the Belmont Stakes — since Affirmed in 1978. And before Chrome’s decisive victory last month at Churchill Downs, no California horse had won the Kentucky Derby since Decidedly in 1962.
In a world of million-dollar mares and $300,000 stud fees, it’s baffling to think a horse born to an $8,000 mare and a stallion with a $2,500 stud fee could be the odds-on favorite to make history. It was even more surprising when Martin and Coburn turned down $6 million — before winning the Kentucky Derby — for half interest in the horse. The offer was rumored to be from a sheik from Dubai.
The story behind their gamble is now famously monogrammed on the horse’s purple and green racing silks: DAP. It stands for “Dumbass Partners,” the name they chose after a groom mocked the pair for buying the low-budget mare, “Love the Chase,” which they brought to Harris Farms to breed. Now, she is Chrome’s celebrated mother.
“It’s really a long shot when you have the best of pedigrees,” said Eric Mitchell, editorial director of Blood-Horse magazine in the horse-breeding capital of Kentucky. “But these people really caught lightning in the smallest of bottles.”
Coburn and Martin were confident from the start that their foal would not only be a champion but win the Kentucky Derby. Coburn had a dream about it even before the colt was born. But the odds were never in their favor, considering the state of Kentucky breeds some 12,000 mares per year, compared with California’s 2,300. Further stacking those odds: Only 20 of the national foal crop of 28,000 make it to the Derby, and 76 percent of Kentucky Derby winners are Kentucky-bred. Last year’s Derby champion, Orb, won with an impeccable pedigree.
So forgive veteran breeder and Harris Ranch patriarch John Harris for having been a bit skeptical of the owners’ early optimism.
“You admire the enthusiasm, but you question the wisdom. There’s a lot of horses you gotta outrun before you do that,” said Harris, 70, who’s spent millions of dollars to raise 40 to 50 foals a year for five decades. While he’s had thoroughbreds place in the prestigious Breeders’ Cup, he’s never sent one to the renowned Kentucky Derby. “I’ve had so many horses I was high on get beat.”
Now, though, he said with a smile, “I wish I was a Dumbass Partner.”
Cal born and bred
California Chrome’s success is a boost for the credibility of the “Cal-bred” industry, in a state known more for its racing circuit than its breeding and training operations. But for the working folks at Harris Farms, the ones up before the sun who swab out the stables and brush down the horses and put on their first saddles, it’s a point of deep pride.
“I have 26 years galloping horses. I’ve never had this kind of horse,” said Michel, 40, California Chrome’s exercise rider until the colt moved to Hollywood Park when he was 2. “I gave him his first breaking and I taught him a little bit how to run. Since the first ride, he went forward, never backed up. He looked like a professional from the beginning.”
California Chrome was born in February 2011 at the horse division of Harris Farms, where they breed and train more than 500 thoroughbreds each year, readying them for the racetrack.
The colt, the first foal to his mother, “Love the Chase,” kicked his way out, scraping his mother’s uterine wall. Because she needed a month of recuperation in close quarters with her newborn foal, the vet and the all-female foaling crew at Harris Farms gave them extra attention. They like to think their special care had something to do with California Chrome being a “happy horse.”
“It’s the nurturing. You want to pet it and kiss its little nose. We’re scratching him and baby talking. I love to hug. Some horses hug me back” by curling their necks around her, said vet Dr. Jeanne Bowers. “Did it connect with this horse? Maybe it meant a lot.”
When he turned 1, Chrome and the other yearlings were sent to River Ranch, John Harris’s home and auxiliary ranch along the Kings River in Sanger, east of Fresno, where ranch manager Laurie Brown’s job is to make sure the young ones grow up healthy and strong.
It wasn’t as much his athletic physique but his “flashy” white coloring that made him stand out in the pasture, from his four white “socks” to the blaze of white streaking down his face. As horse people like to say, he showed “a lot of chrome.”
Martin and Coburn and their wives, Denise and Carolyn, visited so often that Brown didn’t take any pictures of the handsome colt, like she usually does for the absentee owners who miss out watching their horses grow up.
“They were always here,” she said. “I used to tell him, ‘You better do good, people are counting on you.'”
She was worried at first when the owners tried to beckon over the horse by shaking a plastic bag of Mrs. Pastures horse cookies, a sound that would easily spook most horses. But Brown now wonders if that bag of cookies helped prepare Chrome for the roaring crowds and flashing cameras. He even managed to ignore an opossum that crossed the track during a recent practice gallop at Belmont.
Unbridled optimism
Before California Chrome started his racing career with his new trainer, Sherman, at Hollywood Park and then Los Alamitos race tracks, he spent his last three months back at Harris Farms getting schooled in the basics — learning to run with a bit in his mouth and a rider on his back — and endearing himself to the ranch crew.
“That horse used to nap and snore all day,” said Horta, 35, California Chrome’s groom who would clean out his stall and hose him down after his morning runs.
“Old trainers say a horse who takes naps knows how to take care of himself,” chimed in Lisa Torres-Antonsen, 46, a gallop girl who used to exercise horses herself and credits the staff’s gentle touch for shaping the champion’s disposition.
As Debbie Winick, Harris Farms’ race manager, puts it: “You can make a horse run, but you can’t make a horse want to win.”
And California Chrome has won six straight.
Now everybody at Harris Farms is anxiously hoping for No. 7. They get chills just thinking about it. But as with horses past, they know things can go wrong.
Eighteen horses have won the first two races and failed to win the third. The Belmont is not only the longest so far at a mile and a half, the dirt is also the deepest.
He will be competing against fresh horses that haven’t been moving from state to state over the past month. And just last year, “I’ll Have Another,” who was on the verge of racing for the Triple Crown, was forced to withdraw with a leg injury the day before the Belmont Stakes.
Even if California Chrome loses, the groomers and gallop girls, trainers and vets at the Harris Farms will be proud of the flashy chestnut colt they knew back when.
“I love the horse. He’s a champion,” Michel said one early morning in the training barn last week. Then he saddled up and galloped a new crop of young thoroughbreds around the track.
Contact Julia Prodis Sulek at 408-278-3409. Follow her at twitter.com/juliasulek