"The Greatest Horse to Ever Look Through a Bridle"

The last of the great racehorses of the 1970s has died. Spectacular Bid, 27, died Monday of a heart attack.

Bud Delp, the Bid's trainer, called him, with a lot of justification, the "greatest horse ever to look through a bridle." He was the son of a mare called Spectacular, and sired by the great sire Bold Bidder, who in turn was sired by the greatest sire of the twentieth century, Bold Ruler (Secretariat's sire, Seattle Slew's great-grandsire). He was two-year-old champion in 1978, and he was a shoo-in for the 1979 Triple Crown. He had it all, it seemed.

Except an experienced, competent jockey. The Bid nearly got killed in the 1979 Florida Derby, which he miraculously won, and jockey Ronnie Franklin was verbally and publicly chewed out by Delp. "Bill Shoemaker is just a phone call away," "you idiot," that sort of thing. Franklin was a mere 18 or 19, and I suppose some thought he was the second coming of Steve Cauthen. However, events would prove otherwise.

Bid won the Kentucky Derby and Preakness with flair. But the Belmont was an unmitigated disaster, the one time I screamed at the television set and cussed out Franklin because he so screwed up the ride. Unlike Funny Cide this past Saturday, who was so rank jockey Jose Santos couldn't control him and thus the horse lost his chance at a Triple, Bid was NOT rank, but the idiot jockey put Bid in front too early, and the horse lost out to Coastal (a son of Majestic Prince, who in turn lost his chance at the Triple Crown in 1969 to Arts and Letters) and second-place Golden Act.

Although Delp and racing lore have it a safety pin that poked into Bid's foot earlier had contributed to the defeat, almost everybody who saw the race that day knew Franklin fucked up big time. He never rode Bid again. Instead, the horse's connections brought in Bill Shoemaker, who to this day says the horse is the best he ever rode, even better than the great Forego. Bid lost only one more time, to Affirmed in the 1979 Jockey Club Gold Cup.

Bid didn't win Horse of the Year that year; Affirmed won it for the second straight year, but Bid was three-year-old champion. The next year, 1980, was nothing short of sensational. Spectacular Bid was unbeaten as a four-year-old, winning nine races out of nine. He won the California Triple Crown, and set the world record for a mile-and-a-quarter, 1:57 4/5, at Santa Anita. He set five track records in all that year. To top off his career, nobody challenged him in the 1980 Woodward Stakes, and the Bid "won" in a walkover, the first one since Citation had done it decades before (there's been only one or two walkovers since). I remember seeing that race, and the crowd booed, not at Bid or Shoemaker, but at the fact everybody else was too scared to go up against them.

But getting back to the 1979 Belmont, Delp told ESPN that he had tapes of all of the Bid's races. He has seen the Belmont only once, and he will never watch it again. To this day, Delp, 70, is sickened by that race, a race Bid never should have lost, a race which should have made him the third consecutive Triple Crown winner.

Spectacular Bid, who was at another section of Claiborne Farm when I visited the farm back in 1989 (and thus was the only great of the 1970s who I didn't get to see), moved to Milfer Farm in New York later on. His remains will be buried there.