Eye of the Leopard took long route to Queen's Plate starting gate
Gangly colt is light on seasoning, long on talent
Last Updated: Tuesday, June 16, 2009 | 8:05 PM ET
By Malcolm Kelly, CBC Sports
Mark Frostad poses with Eye of the Leopard at Woodbine. (WEG/Michael Burns Photos)Mark Frostad has been training long enough to know you don't pick a horse to run in the Queen's Plate, the horse picks itself.
The man they call Frosty has won the Plate three times in almost 20 years as a trainer, and suffered disappointment on at least as many occasions.
So when Frostad takes the famous walk over from the barns on June 21 at Woodbine Racetrack in Toronto with Eye of the Leopard, there'll be some sense of relief that they got here at all with the big, brawny colt.
"The horse always takes you there, you don't take the horse there, and we're just under the wire getting there with this horse," says Frostad, whose current star student brought jockey Eurico Rosa da Silva home a winner at the Plate Trial on May 31, surprising more than a few observers.
"He's very light on seasoning and experience, that sort of thing, and you just hope his talent can overcome all of that."
In other words, it took Eye of the Leopard quite a while to tap Frostad on the shoulder and let him know he was ready for the 150th Gallop for the Guineas.
Battle scars
When Eye of the Leopard stares at you from almost 17 hands of height, he reminds you of a fighter who's gone 12 rounds with Muhammad Ali.
There's a hardened calcification on the left side of his face courtesy of another exuberant young colt who clobbered him with a rear hoof while all the males were playing "I'm more manly than you are" out in the fields while still weanlings.
It's quite common — part of the natural order for high-spirited young stallions — and the slight disfigurement both gives Leopard a real touch of character and helps tell the tale of how the horse got to this Plate.
Eye of the Leopard dropped into the world on March 2, 2006, at Sam-Son Farm in Milton, Ont., the first male foal of Eye of the Sphinx (winner of the Canadian Oaks) and top-class stallion A.P. Indy (1992 Belmont Stakes and Breeder's Cup Classic champ).
He arrived at around 100 pounds, all legs and carrying a lot of hopes.
"It took him quite a while to figure out how to use his legs," says David Whitford, Sam-Son Farm's broodmare manager. "We had to bottle feed him for about seven hours before he was strong enough to nurse from the mare. Normally they're nursing after two or three hours."
Being a slow learner was going to be part of his makeup for quite a while.
Taking a step backward
As with all the weanlings, Eye of the Leopard stayed with his mom for about six months in 2006, first going down to Kentucky where his dam was bred again to A.P. Indy, then after a summer back in Ontario it was off to Florida for the winter.
"He was tall and lanky and he looked like what he was going to be — a distance horse," says Frostad of how Leopard appeared once the colt got a little growing in.
But he was a long way from becoming a Plate candidate.
In August of 2007, once the horse had grown up over the summer as a yearling, the breaking process began and a month later a rider was up for the first time.
He landed in Frostad's lap in June of his two-year-old season, 12 months ago.
As a very big horse (just a bit smaller than his iconic great-grandfather Secretariat), things did not go as smoothly in the summer of 2008 as it might have for a smaller colt.
"We brought him here and trained for a while — he came along okay — but he was just big and backwards, and we didn't want to put the pressure on," says Frostad, whose been known to call his horse "a big, goofy kid."
"So we made the decision to send him home and give him the rest of the summer off and bring him back at three when he was more mature and could handle it."
That kind of a decision is a big deal because losing the two-year-old campaign year can set a horse way back.
The next steps
Brought to New Orleans at the beginning of 2009, another setback reared — an upper respiratory problem that cost hime a couple of weeks at a bad time.
"Those weeks can be critical, and being as big as he is you bring him along and give him things he can handle, so we were a bit behind the eight ball when we went to Keeneland [a thoroughbred horse racing facility in Lexington, Ky.]," Frostad says.
On April 15, Leopard finally made his first start at the Kentucky track — a sprint just to get him used to everything — and he finished third-last.
Then up to Woodbine for a maiden race win on May 10 (in blinkers for the first time, to stop Eye of the Leopard from looking around like a tourist), and finally the Plate Trial where he showed the work was worth it by nipping out Southdale at the line for the victory that has put him among the favourites for Sunday's Queen's Plate.
He did that while going four wide around both turns, by the way. Time to dream big? Not quite.
"To legitimize the horse and get serious money as a stallion you'd have to win a great race in the United States," Frostad says. "That's a long way away — that's dream time compared to right now."
Considering how far this colt has come, however, it's nice to know the dream is very much alive.
