Breeders’ Cup 2024: So, What’s Fierceness Been Thinking Lately?

Fierceness has given Hall of Fame trainer Todd Pletcher, jockey John Velasquez, owner/breeder Mike Repole and the rest of the racing world an extremely entertaining, if slightly hellish in its juvenile ups and downs, 2024. Shall we recap? Coming off a resolutely stellar 2023 — as pictured above under the masterful John Velasquez last November 3 at Santa Anita, turning on the afterburners to leave the peloton in the dust as he stormed to victory in the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile — Fierceness seemed on track at the top of this year. He showed respectably in the Holy Bull in February and bounced right out of that with a commanding win in the Florida Derby on March 30, cinching a stall in the gate and a sterling, hotly-awaited “Pletcher’s-boy-to-watch” status at the Kentucky Derby.

All seemed well until the massive Churchill Downs 20-stall gate slammed opened, whereupon Fierceness put together a run of bumbling, sniffy reluctance. As we all know, he ran an infamously pitiful 15th against far lesser competition. Scribes and touts were flummoxed: What happened out there? Did he get a bad case of the Derby vapors and freak out? Write the race off or write the horse off? No idea!

The point is, Fierceness’ Derby was not simply an official “not good” performance. It was a nightmarish fun-house mirror image of a grand prospect gone off the rails. Not a lot of top flight Thoroughbreds do that in their third year, and the problem with that is, horse can’t much help us out with eloquent self-diagnoses, or, they can, but you have to know how to let them tell it. This Derby performance and its author clearly required time, and delicate de-coding.

The painstaking Pletcher was up to that task, putting the colt into a nearly 90-day layoff/back-to-school course of works, no racing, largely at Saratoga. As a finely tuned racing specimen, the horse needed little physical building — it was his slippery adolescent mind that needed the break. To his credit, Fierceness buckled down and bloomed, returning to racing with two tidy back-to-back wins just shy of a month apart, in the Jim Dandy and the Travers. Those two races have allowed Pletcher and Repole the chance to point him at the November 2 Breeders’ Classic. Yes, in winning the Travers, Fierceness did just barely scrape free of the on-storming filly Thorpedo Anna, and that possible ignominy in the last furlong was huge fun for just about everybody but Pletcher, Repole and Co. But Fierceness did hold her off to clock the win, and the fact that it was a consecutive victory went some way to ridding the racing hivemind of its weighty prejudice against his 2o24 trough.

Fierceness is still handily putting in the works at Saratoga with the Breeders’ Cup still firmly in his connections’ gunsights. The question is, how’s the boy doing?

He answered that on October 17 with a rock-steady five-furlong work in 1:01.69 over Saratoga’s “Oklahoma” track. The Saratoga clocker timed his last two furlongs at 24.85, or just a shade more than 12 seconds per, which is fast for that track now, with the Adirondack temperatures hovering just above freezing in the mornings. His gallop-out fractions were pleasing: 1:14.67 for six furlongs; 1:27.94 for second, and a mile at 1:42.57. Pletcher and Repole plan to ship him to Southern California on October 27, just five days and a bit before the classic on November 2.

The looming question is whether his mind is right, meaning, robust enough to deal with the heavy concentration of rivals that a Breeders’ Cup Classic draws, in this year’s case, Crupi, Tapit Trice, Sierra Leone, Arthur’s Ride, and Next, all of whose connections would be delighted to see Fierceness to bring his flibbertigibbet Derby-style run to Del Mar.