God Help Us!

Congratulations are in order—to Mike Repole and Todd Pletcher, yes, undeniably deserved. Fierceness, that tempest in a bridle, delivered a performance of true grit. He stumbled—not literally, but metaphorically—at the start, a moment of self-inflicted chaos, and yet, like all great champions, he adjusted. He didn't crumble. He calculated. And perhaps most importantly, he had the steady hands of John Velazquez aboard, a man who has long known that in the theater of racing, panic is the enemy of poetry.

Johnny V didn’t fight him, he listened. And in doing so, he let Fierceness carry him like a wave pulls a lone surfer into shore. No wasted motion, no theatrics. Just timing. Just trust. It was that patience—that ruthless patience—that allowed Fierceness to get the jump on Journalism.

Ah, Journalism. A name that has, in recent months, come to represent not merely a horse but a crusade. Seventeen encounters with the Baffert brigade, and only once did he blink. Only once did he yield. An extraordinary record of resilience. And yet… perhaps Saturday was simply not his day. He chased, he tried, he swallowed mouthfuls of Del Mar’s infamous kickback like sand in a desert storm, but the mountain was just too steep this time. There is no shame in that. Only silence. And the rustle of ticket stubs being folded back into pockets.

The kick back was fierce, no pun and perfecty captured in this post:

And speaking of Del Mar… the track. Hard as a gangster’s heart. Fast as rumor. A veritable tarmac of blistering splits and unforgiving surfaces. You could hear it in the hooves—a percussive symphony of pressure and physics. A track like that doesn’t just favor speed, it requires it. Demands it. And if you’re coming from the back? Well, bring a parachute and a goalie mask—or a miracle.

The concern was there all week. Morning works were absurd. A quarter of the worktab went in a minute flat or faster on August 23rd . That's not training. That’s testing. And Del Mar has never been kind to closers this time of year. Fierceness took advantage of it. Journalism tried to defy it. And in the end, we were left with something bittersweet. A duel between two elite

horses.

But missing… missing was the storm we were all waiting for. Nysos. A scratch that drained the color from the canvas before the paint could dry. He wasn’t just another runner—he was the test. The gauge. The measure of what this generation might be. And without him, we were forced to imagine the race that wasn’t run. A cruel habit of this game.

Still, history notes what it must. Nineteen three-year-olds have dared take on the elders in the Pacific Classic. Only six have succeeded:

• Best Pal, 1991 — the hometown hero.

• General Challenge, 1999 — stubborn and bold.

• Came Home, 2002 — elegant as a swan and twice as deadly.

• Dullahan, 2012 — ghosting over synthetic like a whisper.

• Shared Belief, 2014 — unyielding, a true champion.

• Arabian Knight, 2023 — a knight, yes, but no gentleman.

Journalism was gallant.

And now… Fierceness, 2025. Add him to the ledger. Whether you like the camp or not, the record books don’t traffic in sentiment. They deal in winners. And today, Mike Repole’s voice just got a little louder.

Ah… yes. The Green Flash. A race named after a rare and fleeting optical illusion… how fitting. Because what transpired at Del Mar was equally brief, equally baffling, and—let’s not mince words here—equally manufactured.

Now, let’s be clear. I’m no stranger to moral gray zones. I’ve inhabited more than a few myself. But what the stewards executed in that turf sprint was not the art of judgment—it was the blunt instrument of selective enforcement.

Reef Runner—ridden by Paco Lopez, who, to be fair, has accumulated more red flags than a Soviet parade—did indeed come over after the break. Yes, he tightened up Queen Maxima. Yes, the optics weren’t great. But what followed wasn’t justice. It was performance art, and not the kind anyone pays admission for.

They DQ’d Reef Runner. Fine. Expected, even. The moment Paco looked inside, the ink on the incident report may as well have been dry. But then, like a magician waving one hand while slipping the card up his sleeve with the other, they performed a sleight of hand that was… brazen.

They elevated Motorious. Motorious. A horse who was not the aggrieved party, but the convenient benefactor. A horse who, quite conveniently, checked back—not directly from Reef Runner’s interference, mind you, but from the general mess of a turf sprint funneling into a corner tighter than a backroom cigar lounge. She was already backing out when the trouble unfolded. But hey, she looked like a victim, and maybe that’s all the stewards needed: a face for the narrative.

And Queen Maxima? She was erased. Not figuratively. Literally. As though her role in the opening chaos never happened. She was the horse who was actually fouled—pinched, shuffled, essentially interfered with into irrelevance—and the stewards treated her as if she were an extra in a film she was supposed to star in. It’s insulting. Not just to connections, but to anyone who watched the head-on replay or drone shot and dared to understand cause and effect.

You see, this wasn’t just a poor decision and there has been many starting with Bayern in 2014, where he was allowed to wipe out the competition at the start and survive to tell about it, and now this a curated one. One that felt… purposeful. And if the stewards had simply announced, “We really believe Motorious deserved to win,” I would’ve nodded and moved on. At least then the lie would’ve had the courtesy to tell the truth.

But instead, they offered silence and obfuscation. No transparency. No clarity. Just a reshuffled result and a slap in the face to Queen Maxima’s camp, who were owed at least the dignity of recognition, if not rectification.

This is the problem with racing governance—consistency is as rare as a clean trip in a turf sprint. And when stewards act not as arbiters of fairness but as co-authors of outcomes, you begin to wonder if they’re watching the same race the rest of us are… or merely writing the ending they prefer.

But hey, that's racing. Another judgment call that left us all feeling like we’d just seen a magic trick, but knew exactly where the wires were.

So yes, Reef Runner got DQ’d. But the real crime? That Queen Maxima was made invisible. And that, my friend… is unforgivable.

God help us all.