Five am at Meydan racecourse when the stars had not yet yielded to the daylight.
Bob Baffert was watching the horse who has become the biggest star in world racing preparing to run in the Dubai World Cup tomorrow.
"He looks good," Baffert said. "We've got to stay focused now. Until he gets in the gate and gets the job done in the race, I'm going to be a nervous wreck."
Arrogate, the winner of both the Breeders’ Cup Classic and the Pegasus Cup, was breezed for an easy one-circuit gallop by his exercise rider, Dana Barnes, ahead of his attempt to win the three most valuable races in the world.
All of which is a world away from his first start in a maiden at Los Alamitos in California last April when he could finish only third despite starting as the odds-on favourite. At that point comparisons to American Pharoah, Baffert’s Triple Crown winner of 2015, seemed just a little fanciful but Baffert knew differently.
“When I worked him, I saw he could really run. I didn’t want to run there but he needed a race. It was like American Pharoah’s first race,”
Baffert later recalled. “It was just a disaster. He had a bad experience with the blinkers, but he finally figured it out and came flying late for third.”
Arrogate has been flying ever higher since to the point that Baffert believes that he can become America’s equivalent of Frankel and, in one measure, he has already eclipsed Sir Henry Cecil’s great champion.
When Arrogate won the Pegasus Cup at Gulfstream Park in January he took his career earnings to $9,658,673 and victory in the World Cup would take him past Japanese horse Gentildonna ($12,285,608) as the world’s leading money earner, while Frankel ended his racing career having won £2,998,302.
Given that the top-five in the money list all raced in Japan it simply underlines the disparity of prizemoney across the globe and a more meaningful measurement would be that Frankel handicap rating was 140 Arrogate currently rules the world’s Thoroughbreds from a mark of 134.
Little wonder that he is a heavy odds-on favourite once more when he lines up against 13 others, including stable companion Hoppertunity, in the $10 million race that Baffert won twice when it was contested at Nad Al Sheba.
"Both my horses are happy and healthy," Baffert said. "It is very exciting to be here with two such good horses and it would be great if they could run first and second."
The run to the first turn can be important in the World Cup but Baffert was not unduly fussed when Arrogate came out for stall nine in the post-position draw. "Nine is fine,” he said. “The main thing for him is to get away then it's up to Mike Smith [the jockey] to decide. I just didn't want to be number 14 or on the inside otherwise it really didn't matter. I know I have a great horse. If he just repeats his last race we'll be in good shape.”
Baffert is in better shape than five years ago when he followed events from a Dubai hospital bed following a heart attack, but he still wears his heart on his sleeve for his horses.
"This horse has been so good to me," he said, "and hopefully we’ll know after the race just how great he is."
When Arrogate breaks from the stalls it will be to the dramatic setting of a night sky and a floodlit track as Baffert hopes his shining star will yield to no-one.
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