He Needs a Red ‘S’ on Saddle

He might be Man o’ War. Secretariat. Citation. If nothing happens to him, he might make the world forget all of them.

He cost $350,000 as a weanling, but his owner recently sold a half-interest in him for $9 million. He is the first horse since Phar Lap to be the toast of two continents.

When he won the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile last November after coming from post position No. 14 and dead last by dozens of lengths in the first half of the race, the owner of the second-place horse, Bertrando, acknowledged in awed tones, “He’s a monster!”

Around a racetrack, monster does not signify something with rivets in its head or a thirst for human blood, or something that stomps out of the sea to eat cities. A monster is a horse so precocious that one comes along only every half-century or so, an animal that’s almost prehistoric in its performance.

Consider this: The 2-year-old colt named Arazi had never run in the United States before, had never run outside of France, in fact, but had won everything there was to win there. He was shipped to this country in late fall to take on the best 2-year-olds of North America on their turf, so to speak, on what may be the toughest track in America to win on, Churchill Downs. It has a homestretch you could land jets on, and most horses who leave their race on the backstretch need a cab to get to the wire.

Now, you have to understand they run races on grass in France. And they run clockwise.

So, you have to appreciate Arazi was running a race 5,000 miles from his normal habitat. He was running in North America for the first time. He was running on dirt for the first time. He was running counterclockwise for the first time. The post position he drew was atrocious. He had to run an extra eighth of a mile to get to the rest of the field from an auxiliary gate. This was not a field of claimers, shadow-jumpers, bit-spitters; they were the best young colts they could throw at him.

He had a million excuses to lose. He didn’t need any of them. He won by the length of Rhode Island. Well, the track callers put the margin at five lengths, but if you see the film, that’s preposterous. All you have to do is count the track panels.

It doesn’t matter. He won. He went past his company at the head of the stretch like an express train passing a sleeping village. Not since Secretariat had anyone seen a move like that at the top of the lane.

Now, for the audacious part: Arazi was shipped home after that. First of all, he had bone chips removed from his front leg. He had probably done all this in some pain.

His connections plan to run him in the Kentucky Derby next May. And, maybe, in the rest of the Triple Crown.

He is, of course, in demand all over the world. Everyone who ever read Black Beauty or watched a cowboy movie wants to see this wonder horse. They wonder if he can talk. Or save babies from burning buildings.

Now, the normal procedure when you take dead aim on a Kentucky Derby is to stick a few 3-year-old races in your horse in Florida or Santa Anita. Then you ship him to Kentucky for the Blue Grass or Derby Trial. You need a race in Kentucky, says conventional horse sense.

Arazi’s people figure to run him once in France, then drop him over to Louisville without further ado to do what he did in the Breeders’ Cup.

Now, this is what Napoleon called “Toujours, l’audace!” Or, “audacity always!” It worked for Bonaparte. But, of course, there was a Waterloo. Audacity has its limits.

Arazi’s owner, Allen E. Paulson, is a monster in his own right. He is to the business world what Secretariat--or Arazi?--was to the thoroughbred.

A self-made man--he has been on his own since the age of 13--Paulson has been a 20-length winner in every business venture he ever undertook. And he started from post position 14, too.

A stunt pilot, a World War II airman, Paulson flew for a commercial airline after the war. He parlayed a genius for restoring and reselling war surplus engines into a fortune, which he used to establish the corporation manufacturing Gulfstream corporate jets.

In 1987, he flew a production model of his corporate jet around the world westward (into the wind) in 45 hours 25 minutes 10 seconds, setting a globe-circling speed record. A year later, he flew eastbound in 36 hours 8 minutes 34 seconds for a total of 11 world speed records, including 637.71 m.p.h. for the overall distance. That was a little like Iacocca winning Indy or Daytona in a stock Le Baron.

You can buy one of Paulson’s planes for $25 million or so. But his half of Arazi is not for sale at any price.

As soft-spoken as a seminarian, Paulson is as unflamboyant as a night watchman. You find out only by overhearing his phone conversations that he is negotiating with Boris Yeltsin, no less, to co-build a new supersonic corporate jet with the Russians.

But when he talks of Arazi, diffidence goes out the window. Arazi won the Eclipse Award last Saturday as the 2-year-old colt of 1991. Paulson is indignant because he did not additionally win horse of the year. “No horse has ever done what he did last year,” he snaps.

No one ever even tried it. Of course, if he drops out of the sky over Louisville again and goes on to win the Triple Crown, he will not only be the horse of the year, or the horse of the quarter-century, he will be the horse of forever. He might take Man o’ War right out of the language.