WHAT ARE WE TO MAKE OF WONDER GADOT?
She is Canadian, eh, and named after the brilliant Israeli actor Gal Gadot, the woman perfectly cast as Wonder Woman, about the only film in the DC canon right now worth the price of admission.
In any case, Wonder Gadot (5-1) will be worth the price of admission on Travers Day 2018 for the buzz alone. But is she equipped to take on this set of three-year-old colts or is she looking like a T-rex sitting at a piano?
An objective look at this field suggests that she’ll need Amazonian strength to beat the likes of Good Magic (2-1), Gronkowski (4-1), Bravazo (12-1) and Tenfold (8-1).
Her latest win, a triumph in the Prince of Wales Stakes at Woodbine was over muddy going and she won easily, by about six lengths. What works in her favor is she appears to have the tactical speed to be in the mix for the entirety of the 10-furlong distance.
Any horse that has a penchant for being a late closer must give a trainer a certain set of mixed feelings, kind of like a disappointing child. The late closer needs so many things to go his or her way: pace and traffic being the primary levers of that machine.
At least with Wonder Gadot, she can be up in the first third of the field and this gives her a better chance than if she were trying to run down ten colts in the final quarter mile.
Whenever we have this crossover, when a filly takes on the boys, it adds extra seasoning to an already tasty race. In order to qualify, so to speak, certain boxes must be checked off.
When we see a filly in a race of this nature, we shouldn’t be surprised, necessarily. To run in a G1 stake, objective speed standards are set. Is she within a certain RAG or Beyer Speed Figure of the other horses? Yes? Is she sound? Yes? Then, yes, you take your shot. Five-pound weight allowance? Please and thank you.
Todd Pletcher, a trainer who ran the talented filly Rags to Riches to his Triple Crown-race win in 2007, knows what it takes.
“It’s something you put a lot of thought into,” Pletcher said in a Richard Rosenblatt story. “The one thing we knew about Rags to Riches is she was capable of getting the mile-and-a-half. Obviously, with Wonder Gadot, she’s been successful at a mile-and-a-quarter.”
What doesn’t get talked about at all, really, is the purse factor. Wonder Gadot could have run in the third leg of the Canadian Triple Crown. She could have even run in the Grade 1 Alabama Stakes at the Spa, a top-five race for three-year-old fillies. The purse of the ’Bama is $600,000. The winner’s share of the $1.25 million Travers? $750,000. The winner’s share of the Alabama? $325,000.
Both are nice paydays, but one means you can get extra whipped cream on your latte without a second thought.
If you have a meal-ticket filly, you can run for the sure thing, as Jerry Hollendorfer always did with Songbird. Keep them in restricted company, cash the check, and move on. Sure, there will be barbarian hordes of people who need to see fillies run against the boys, but what good does that actually serve, like, 99 percent of the time?
Aside from the physical risks that we’ve seen with horses like Eight Belles and Ruffian running against the boys, there’s also the mental toll it might take on them to fully exert themselves in service of physical transcendence.
I’m thinking about what happened with Rachel Alexandra. She categorically bottomed out in the Woodward Stakes. It was her eighth race of the season, third against the boys, and she was the victorious equivalent of Y.A. Tittle kneeling on the turf bloodied and worn.
Her four-year-old year you kept waiting for her to turn it on. She didn’t just lose a step. She lost all her steps. She won the races she won in races more or less drawn up for her against junior varsity fields and never, not once, had that volcanic turn of foot we saw in the Kentucky Oaks, the Preakness, the Haskell, and finally the Woodward in 2009.
Fillies and mares tend to run longer in their careers, even the good ones. But the ones that are so good that they take on the boys, there’s a price in that barcode that we can’t fully register until it’s too late.
Maybe not. Who knows? She has beaten two sets of Canucks in the Great White North, so it’s anybody’s guess.
And Saturday’s test against a big field in the Travers could be the race that defines the rest of her life. Nay, will be the race, because win or lose, it might break her in between the ears, so even if she does come back to race against her own class, say, in the Cotillion, Beldame, or Distaff, she might be drained of all what made her wonderful.
Brendan O’Meara is a freelance writer and author of Six Weeks in Saratoga.
