Hopes, Dreams Riding on Mine That Bird

NEW YORK -- Chip Woolley sometimes looks like he wants to dart out of a room as fast as he can. He fidgets with his welterweight-sized belt buckle, adjusts his 10-gallon black hat, scuffs his cowboy boats on the marble floor and nervously smoothes the mustache that frames his mouth like parentheses. Put the cowboy on the track, training horses and bucking giant odds, and Woolley's as calm as a yogi.

But standing here in front of these slick, fast-talking traders at the New York Stock Exchange? Woolley hunches his 6-foot-something frame deep into his crutches until he's practically hiding behind jockey Calvin Borel, who's about to ring the morning bell. Borel is all gap-toothed charm and cockiness, not backing away from his guarantee that Mine That Bird will win Saturday's Belmont and create all kinds of history. The traders cheer him as if he's responsible for a huge stock market rise.

Woolley, the gelding's trainer, might look like he's stepped out of a John Wayne movie, and the script he's co-starring in is nearly Hollywood-perfect, but something about his body language suggests he can't wait to escape all this East Coast fuss and blather. He'd much rather be back home in Bloomfield, a tiny blot in the northwest corner of New Mexico, rather than being treated like racing royalty.

"It's OK, but I don't really belong here," Woolley says before leaving downtown Manhattan and heading for Belmont, the race track on the edge of Long Island that in a couple of days will be swarming with close to 100,000 folks who want to see if Woolley and Borel can team up for a feat that's never been done before.

If Mine That Bird wins the one-mile-and-a-half race -- and he's a 2-1 favorite to do just that -- Borel will be the first jockey to capture the Triple Crown on two different horses. He guided Mine That Bird in a spectacular run along the rail the first Saturday in May, going from last to first to win the Derby by six lengths and bringing mindless delirium to betters who had the 50-1 longshot. Honoring a previous commitment, Borel jumped horses and rode the filly Rachel Alexandra to victory two weeks later in the Preakness, with the hard-charging Mine That Bird coming in second.

Now Borel is back on Mine That Bird, and with Rachel Alexandra off getting her mane done or whatever it is fillies do when they aren't beating the boys (yeah, yeah, we know, girls almost never beat the boys, and not running Rachel is the wise, healthy option), Borel is channeling Patrick Ewing.

"No, sir," Borel says at a press conference when someone asks if he cares to temper his guarantee. "I'm going to ride him with so much confidence. I think that's why I win races, because I ride horses with confidence. And this is going good right now."

"And believe me, he's the greatest -- he's as great as her," adds Borel, refusing to play the game of who's better, the gelding who won the Derby or the filly who took the Preakness. "I want to win the race for Chip and the owners because I owe it to them for giving me the opportunity to ride this colt and make my dream true. Winning the Triple Crown, might not be on the same horse, but it's very good to me and my career. And it's another milestone. And I'm very, very high on the horse because I love him. He's bred to go all day long."

Bennie (Chip) Woolley, 45, is hardly an accidental tourist newly sprung on the sport, despite his hardscrabble background and middling pre-2009 record. He comes from a long line of Southwest horsemen, and for awhile he rode bareback on the rodeo circuit. But a bad spill off a bucking bronco when he was 19 tore up his shoulder, causing Woolley to gravitate to the racetrack. He spent years on the bush tracks, training quarter horses before moving to thoroughbreds in 1991, and until 2007 he won only nine of 183 races.

Woolley had victories in eight career stakes before the Derby; some trainers win that many stakes in a year. Then along came Mine That Bird, a little gelding out of Canada whose father, Birdstone, won the Belmont in 2004, denying Smarty Jones a Triple Crown. Mark Allen, now the horse's co-owner, asked Woolley to go up north and take a look. (Woolley had once come to Allen's aid in a bar fight, another script page from Woolley's colorful past). Know how dogs tend to look like their owners? Here was a horse that resembled Woolley, crooked and awkward, but it took some time for the trainer to fall.

"His legs went left and right was the first thing I noticed and he kind of turned me off, to be honest," says Woolley, who still has a few more weeks before he can shed the crutches he must use after his right leg was broken in a motorcycle accident."When I first went and looked at him, he's kind of a pretty colt. When they let him out and I looked at his legs, I kind of stepped back and eased away from him and called Mark and said, 'Man, this horse
is kind of crooked. I don't know. That's a lot of money.'

"But I stayed and watched him train and when you watch him train and get over the racetrack, it kind of changed, all you're looking at is him. He just moves so, so well. And we decided to take the gamble."

It has led to a whirl of social changes, of mixing amongst sheikhs and oil barons with million dollar pinky rings and tricked-out limos. Sheikh Mohammad, ruler of UAE, sends horses around the world in fancy jets. To get Mine That Bird from New Mexico to Churchill Downs, Woolley hitched a van behind his Ford truck and drove nearly 1,500 miles. After winning the Derby, he hauled the horse from Louisville to Baltimore, with a police escort
joining them for the last few miles.

"Cops are usually the ones chasing me, so that was kind of nice," Woolley jokes.

In their parallel worlds, the trainer and the horse are quite alike. Mine That Bird starts slow and comes home fast, the perfect closer with a lightning turn of the foot. He has an easy gait that makes it look as if he's floating above the ground, as calm as can be. He's also never run more than a mile-and-a-quarter, leading some railbirds to think if the pace isn't honest, the favorite out of the No. 7 post might be compromised.

"With this horse we kept him exactly the way we trained him in, the Derby to the Preakness," Woolley says. "You're not going to get him any fitter than he is already. His main thing, we're big on long, long open gallops and that gives him that cruising speed.

"And the main thing we waited up was a little bit of finishing to help him finish, because this extra quarter of mile test's there. Don't think it won't. The main thing we worked on between the Preakness and here is that finishing down the lane."

A mile-and-a-half is all that stands between the gregarious jockey and history, between Woolley adjusting his black hat and hobbling on his crutches into the winner's circle again.