Jockey Ryusei Sakai’s bold and very public throwdown threat of taking revenge this week — for the 2024 Kentucky Derby bump that Forever Young took from Sierra Leone — seemed to have worked out in the 47th running of the Breeders’ Cup Classic, as Sakai and his mount snatched the victory from Sierra Leone, who ran a thunderous, game second in his last race before retiring to stud at Coolmore. Also in his last appearance on the track (before retiring to Coolmore as well) was Sierra Leone’s rival Fierceness, who showed.
The rest of the order of finish was pretty much as expected: Journalism mustered to finish just fourth, Todd Pletcher’s Mindframe managed fifth, along the way besting Baeza, who clocked in at a somewhat disappointing sixth. Bob Baffert’s Nevada Beach never figured in the race and ran seventh, the longshot Antiquarian did what was expected and put in eighth, and the putative speed, ultra-longshot-who-was-intended-to-fade Contrary Thinking, ran dead last.
With the exception of Forever Young, who was a contender but by no means a favorite, and for all the delicate calculation that the surfeit of talent in the field required, the race was not terribly remunerative for the exotics players. Forever Young provided a whisper of relief at $9.00 on the nose to win, Sierra Leone, whose odds had dropped by post time, paid the expected low $4.60 in place, and Fierceness paid $3.40 in show.
The race was, in a sense, a cliffhanger. Coming out of the final turn into the stretch, it seemed as if Forever Young, who was neck-and-neck with Fierceness at the front of the peloton, actually slowed up a bit before detaching from the group and moving in the last hundred yards to the line. The race looked in that moment largely to be over, but as if powered by a pair of rocket engines, Sierra Leone arrived in the heat of his great close, breezing by Fierceness as if he were standing still. He was within two or three strides of overtaking Forever Young, but the finish line intervened. Sierra Leone’s breathtaking show of puissance-to-the-very-last-second was one of his trademark grand finishes, but he had left himself with just a bit too much to do. Philosophically speaking, his run was mythic Greek — a lesson in magnificence brought too late.
That finish dashed the great hope held widely for Sierra Leone to enter the history books as the second-ever horse to win the Classic twice. That noted, the victor Forever Young did very much enter the history books as the first Classic winner for an owner from Japan, and his win also cemented the position of Japan’s onrushing coterie of quality Thoroughbreds as a group of horses to be taken very seriously. That result is just plain good for the sport.