Hansen and the 2012 Gotham Stakes: a historical retrospective

The context Hansen carried into the 2012 Gotham Stakes

To understand the 2012 Gotham, you have to start with how much Hansen had already accomplished. A striking, near-white gray colt by the top sire Tapit and out of the mare Stormy Sunday, he was owned and bred by Dr. Kendall E. Hansen and trained by Michael Maker. As a juvenile in 2011 he was perfect, winning all three of his starts, and he capped the year by holding off the favored Union Rags by a head in the Breeders' Cup Juvenile (G1) at Churchill Downs.

That performance earned him the 2011 Eclipse Award as champion two-year-old male and made him one of the winter-book names for the following spring's Kentucky Derby. But the road to that Derby did not begin smoothly. In his three-year-old debut, the Grade 3 Holy Bull Stakes at Gulfstream Park on January 29, 2012, Hansen was sent off as the heavy favorite and finished second to the previously undefeated Algorithms, the first defeat of his career.

It was not a disgrace, but it revived a familiar question about fast, free-running horses: could Hansen rate his speed and carry it far enough to win a Classic at a mile and a quarter? The Gotham, five weeks later, was the race chosen to start answering it. By the calendar the timing made sense, deep enough into the prep season to matter but early enough to leave room for one more start before the first Saturday in May, and against Grade 3 company rather than the toughest names on the trail.

See also: What graded stakes actually mean · The Triple Crown series

The Gotham Stakes conditions and its place on the Derby trail

The Gotham Stakes is a race for three-year-olds run by the New York Racing Association at Aqueduct in Queens, New York. In 2012 it was a Grade 3 event contested at one mile and one sixteenth, roughly eight and a half furlongs, on the main dirt track. Its role in the sport is specific: it is a spring stepping-stone on the road to the Triple Crown, a place where Derby hopefuls stretch out in distance and test themselves before the Grade 1 preps that follow.

In that era the Gotham was commonly paired with the Grade 1 Wood Memorial, run at the same Aqueduct track about five weeks later, so a New York-based colt could use the two races as a natural two-step build toward Louisville. The distance was the point. A horse that had been sprinting or running one-turn miles needed to prove it could carry its speed around two turns, and the Gotham's mile and a sixteenth was a reasonable first examination of that question without the full Classic demands still to come.

This is a historical view of a race that has long since been run, so nothing here is a live handicapping angle. The purpose of setting out the conditions is to make clear what the Gotham could and could not tell anyone about a Derby horse in March, and to place Hansen's start in the schedule that led, in that year, to the 138th running of the Kentucky Derby.

See also: Kentucky Derby race guide

The field and the tactical question

Thirteen three-year-olds were entered for the 2012 Gotham, and Hansen drew post 12, one gate in from the far outside. He was the clear class of the field on paper and went off as the heavy public choice. The interesting story, though, was not who he was racing but how his team planned to race him.

Maker made a deliberate equipment change for the Gotham, removing Hansen's blinkers and switching his bit. The goal was to teach a naturally aggressive front-runner to relax and settle off the pace rather than burn his energy dueling for the early lead, exactly the tactical flexibility a colt needs to last a mile and a quarter in the Derby. That set up the genuine question entering the race: not whether Hansen was fast enough, which was never in doubt, but whether he could be taken back and still deliver his run.

This retrospective does not offer a betting angle on a race that finished more than a decade ago; the point of revisiting the field is to understand the experiment. If you want to see how those pre-race questions are framed in a horse's running lines, the guide to reading past performances explains the shorthand. What matters here is that the Gotham was, above all, a schooling exercise for the favorite.

See also: How to read past performances

What happened when Hansen ran the Gotham Stakes

The experiment worked. Under his regular rider Ramon Dominguez, and with the blinkers off, Hansen did something he had never done before: he came from off the pace. Instead of gunning to the front, he was restrained early, tracked the leaders, and then took over when asked, drawing off to win by three lengths. My Adonis finished second and Finnegans Wake was third. The winning time for the mile and a sixteenth was 1:43.84.

The performance earned a 95 Beyer Speed Figure, a solid number for a March three-year-old, and it came with the added value of a new dimension to his game. For a horse whose entire reputation had been built on raw, uncomplicated speed, learning to relax and still finish powerfully was arguably more important than the winning margin itself. It was the first concrete evidence that his connections had found a way to manage the trait that made him both thrilling and vulnerable.

What the Gotham win showed, and what it did not

The most encouraging takeaway from the Gotham was tactical rather than physical. Hansen proved he could be rated off the pace and still produce a strong, sustained run, a direct answer to the doubt raised by the Holy Bull and the single most useful thing a Derby contender could show in early March.

What the race could not settle was the harder question. The Gotham was a Grade 3 against ordinary opposition, not a meeting with the best of his generation, and its mile and a sixteenth still left a quarter-mile of Classic distance untested. Beating that field by three lengths said Hansen was tractable and in form; it did not prove he could reproduce the effort at ten furlongs against the deeper fields waiting in the Grade 1 preps and the Derby itself.

That distinction matters when reading any prep race in hindsight. Strong prep form is a necessary condition for a Derby run, not a sufficient one, and a speed figure earned against modest rivals over a shorter trip travels only so far. The Gotham showed that the tactical problem could be solved on a given afternoon. Whether the solution would hold under real Classic pressure was a separate matter that only later races could decide.

See also: Grade 3 versus Grade 1: why class matters

From the Gotham to the Kentucky Derby

Immediately after the Gotham, Maker told reporters the plan was to bring Hansen back to Aqueduct for the Grade 1 Wood Memorial in April, using the two New York races as a bridge to the Derby. In the end the connections changed course. Rather than the Wood, Hansen shipped to Kentucky for the Grade 1 Blue Grass Stakes at Keeneland on April 14, 2012.

There, on Keeneland's synthetic Polytrack surface, Hansen reverted to type. Sent off the odds-on favorite, he went straight to the lead and set the pace, only to be run down late by the closer Dullahan, who won by a length and a quarter in a track-record 1:47.94. Hansen's second-place finish was respectable, but it revisited the old worry: given the lead, he wanted to use his speed, and a strong late-runner had reeled him in.

In the Kentucky Derby itself, on May 5, 2012, Hansen went postward at about 13-1 in a full field of twenty. The official chart tells the story plainly. He "carried in early, was a bit eager when forwardly placed between rivals, made a mild run into the stretch but tired," finishing ninth and beaten roughly ten lengths as I'll Have Another closed to beat the pacesetter Bodemeister by a length and a half. The blinkers-off lesson of the Gotham had not carried through to racing's most demanding stage.

See also: Kentucky Derby race guide · Another Grade 2 Derby prep of that era · Breeders' Cup guide

Where the Gotham fits in Hansen's full career

Placed against his whole career, the Gotham stands as the high point of a three-year-old spring that never quite recaptured his juvenile brilliance on the Triple Crown trail. Hansen raced nine times in all, winning five, and retired with earnings of $1,810,805. His championship two-year-old season and his Breeders' Cup Juvenile score, not his Classic campaign, are what secured his place in the record book.

After the Derby he did return to the winner's circle, taking the Grade 3 Iowa Derby at Prairie Meadows on June 30, 2012, which showed the ability was still there in the right spot. A well-beaten fourth in the Grade 2 West Virginia Derby that August proved to be his final start. A tendon injury ended his racing career that autumn, and he was retired to stud, standing first in Kentucky before being sold to Korean breeding interests.

Seen in that full context, the 2012 Gotham was neither a turning point nor a fluke. It was the one race in which Hansen's connections successfully solved the tactical puzzle at the heart of his career, how to harness his speed, and the fact that the solution did not hold up against better horses at longer distances is what ultimately separated a brilliant juvenile champion from a Classic winner.

See also: Major race guides

Common questions