Charlie Whittingham on Kentucky Derby trail

Press, 20 April 1989, Page 36

Charlie Whittingham on Kentucky Derby trail

By DAVID MCCARTHY The great American trainer, Charlie Whittingham, is back on the Kentucky Derby trail with a colt called Sunday Silence which has emerged from virtual obscurity to become a leading hope in the annual "Run for the Roses” next month. Whittingham, known affectionately as the “Bald Eagle” by American racegoers produced Sunday Silence to win the Santa Anita Derby by eleven lengths last week-end rocking the hopes of another leading American trainer D. Wayne Lukas whose charge, Houston, favourite for the race, was wejl beaten. Whittingham, aged 75, has achieved the rare feat of training more Group One winners than he has had birthdays but he has often been wary of trekk-

ing to Kentucky from his native California for the Derby. Whittingham has won the race only once, when the Nijinksi colt, Ferdinand, won in 1986, and had his first runner in 1958. But the Santa Anita win is almost certain to put Sunday Silence on the road to Kentucky where he will clash with the brilliant New York colt, Easy Goer, which is being hailed as another Secretariat in his home state.

"I suppose if we don’t go they’ll be saying we’re scared of Easy Goer,” was Whittingham’s laconic remark after the Santa Anita race.

Sunday Silence is another racing bargain. As a yearling he was apparently sold for SUSI7,OOO but reappeared in a Horses in Training sale in

California as a two-year-old where he changed hands for just $U532,000. Whittingham has a share in him along with two others.

Sunday Silence had shown promise as a younger horse but Whittingham had kept him to allowance races (handicaps) until recently. He is by Halo, a veteran Hail To Reason stallion which is from a half-sister to Northern Dancer and whose 1988 fee was $U575,000. He has sired 39 stakes winners and, until the end of 1987, had an almost 60 per cent winners-to-foals ratio.

Halo was the leading U.S. sire of 1983 when Sunny Halo won the Kentucky Derby. Easy Goer is a sensation in New York where he recently set a new record for a mile at the

Aqueduct. What many of his fans believe is significant is that the same race (the Gotham Stakes) was won by Secretariat in track record time in 1973 shortly before that racing phenomenon made a clean sweep of the American classics.

Easy Goer ran the journey in 1:32.4. The fastest time ever run for the mile in the Untied States is 1:32.2 by Dr Fager in 1968. Much of the timing in the United States is done from just after the start when the horses are moving though the dirt tracks there are not as fast as a top grass surface.

Easy Goer won his race by thirteen lengths. He is by the Raise A Native stallion, Alydar, from Relaxing, a mare by a former champion sire, Buckpasser.