In a major interview, trainer John Sadler tells Steve Dennis about the spectacular unbeaten four-year-old, set to run in the Pacific Classic at Del Mar before heading to the Breeders’ Cup
There’s a saying in racing that goes along the lines of only knowing how good a horse is when it’s beaten, as though we only know what it can do when we know what it can’t do.
It doesn’t apply in every case, because we can be fairly certain that Personal Ensign was pretty good, that Black Caviar wasn’t so bad, that Frankel was all right. The exceptions prove the rule, the exceptional ones prove the rule. So, then, how good is Flightline?
People have been wondering about that ever since the big, sleek son of Tapit started to run, but if anyone should have a clue it’s John Sadler, trainer of the latest candidate to be ‘one of the ones’, trainer of a catalogue of high-class horses including the champion Accelerate, winner of five G1s including a Breeders’ Cup Classic. Sadler waits patiently for the obvious question.
“Oh, Flightline is a lot better than Accelerate. He’s a once-in-a-generation type of horse,” he says, as matter-of-factly as if he’d been asked the time, with all the certainty of a man who has four aces in his hand and knows there’s another up his sleeve.
“You’re from England, right?” It’s true. Sadler runs a hand over that fifth ace, just to know it’s there. “Well, Frankel might be the equivalent.”
Audible intake of breath
Frankel? The intake of breath must have been audible, Ma Bell relaying the scale of the surprise all the way to California. Sadler chuckles.
“People who know me will say there’s no braggadocio about me, that’s not my style. But that’s just the way it is. He’s the kind of horse who comes along every 20, 30 years. The numbers he runs are unbelievable. I don’t think there are many people who’ve ever had a horse this good.”
There’s the echo of Allen Paulson’s old line about Arazi, that he wasn’t just the best horse he’d ever owned, but the best horse anyone had ever owned. Paulson was wrong, but going on what we’ve seen so far, Sadler could be right.
Flightline was unraced as a two-year-old, has run four times, has won four times, each time advertising his uncommon, unearthly brilliance. He demolished his rivals in his maiden at Santa Anita, destroyed them in an allowance at Del Mar, dismantled them in the G1 Malibu Stakes back at Santa Anita, devoured them in the G1 Metropolitan Handicap (familiarly known as the Met Mile) at Belmont Park. He’s a thesaurus kind of horse, sending us scurrying in search of new superlatives.
Numbers help. Flightline’s aggregate winning distance is 43½ lengths; when he won the Malibu he ran a 118 Beyer speed figure, the highest of 2021.
Million-dollar workout
Visuals, too. Photographs of him in the closing stages of the Met Mile show him cruising with one ear back and one forward, nowhere near top gear, Flavien Prat motionless in the saddle, his whip an unused accessory, a million-dollar race little more than a well-paid workout.
And audio. “What a racehorse!” howled Belmont race-caller John Imbriale. “He’s flawless and he’s freakishly fast. That’s as good as it gets.”
It was ever thus. “He’s been a ‘wow’ horse from day one,” says Sadler. “April Mayberry, who broke him in at her farm in Ocala, said the first time she saw him breeze she knew he was special.
“He’s a very strong, powerful horse. He hasn’t been easy to train, he used to pull too hard, always wanting to go faster, always on the bit. My assistant Juan Leyva has done a beautiful job with him, and Flavien says that he’s finally beginning to pay attention - but he’s still tough to train.”
Despite his lavish talent, Flightline’s progress towards the top has never been wholly straightforward, four starts by the summer of his four-year-old campaign a silent witness to tribulations behind the scenes. The million-dollar Saratoga purchase is accident-prone, a racecar engine concealed within a dinged-up chassis.
“Nothing too big, but a series of small things,” says Sadler. “He has a significant scar on his right hip near his tail, he caught his back end on a door latch down in Ocala and it was quite a deep wound. That was part of the reason he didn’t run at two.
“He picked up a crack in his foot that meant we had to wait out last summer, and he strained a hock this February, hence he didn’t run until June. I like to say he only loses to inanimate objects, a door latch, a wall.”
Sadler, 66, has seen it all before in a training career that stretches back to 1978, the second act of his life with horses after he tried out for the Olympic show-jumping team as a teenager but didn’t make the cut.
‘I can really appreciate it’
His parents owned an ear of a horse with Eddie Gregson, and the 22-year-old Sadler got his chance when Gregson asked him to take a few horses up to northern California and see how things went. He’s still there.
“I paid my dues, worked my way up, and in the last ten years or so I’ve been getting better horses, winning bigger races. Now, when a horse such as Flightline comes along, I can really appreciate it for what it is.
“He’s arrived at a good time in my career. But even though I’ve been training for more than 40 years, I still get sleepless nights about him. Good horses will do that to you.”
There have been lots of good ones aside from Flightline and Accelerate, notably champion three-year-old filly Stellar Wind and multiple G1 winners Switch and Lady Of Shamrock, who was the first good horse he trained for brothers Kosta and Pete Hronis, the fruit magnates whose dark green and white silks are borne along by the mighty Flightline. Their connection with Sadler came by pure chance, blind racing luck.
“They were at Santa Anita one day and asked one of the ushers if he could introduce them to a trainer,” says Sadler. “And he mentioned my name. That was it, that was all it was.
“We clicked right away, we’re both from Pasadena, they started slow as owners and reinvested astutely, building up a solid string of racehorses. You couldn’t ask for nicer people to be involved with, and now they have a really good horse.”
The conversation inevitably, irresistibly circles back to Flightline, who is already worth his burly weight in gold as a stallion prospect, the usual expectation being that financial imperatives will hurry him off to stud and, as in the mantra of every great performer, leave us forever wanting more. Sadler fields the notion, pauses for a moment.
“We’ll see where we are with him at the end of the year,” he says. “Yes, stallion values are very important, but Flightline is such an exciting horse, he’s captured the public’s attention, their imagination. Some things, sometimes, are about more than the money.”
It’s a sentiment almost unknown at the top level, but if any horse can buck the trend it may be this one. Flightline’s next date with destiny will be in the G1 Pacific Classic at Del Mar on September 3, his first test beyond a mile.
Stamina question
The question of his stamina is the last unknown, the only inanimate object standing between the colt and the Breeders’ Cup Classic at Keeneland, and from that question Sadler plucks an answer that may lie at the root of Flightline’s almost supernatural ability.
“From just four races, six furlongs, seven furlongs, a mile, I really don’t know what his optimum distance is,” he says. “A horse that fast … usually the further they go, the more their speed decreases, but he’s different.
“He has an incredible cruising speed and I’m confident he will carry it for a mile and a quarter; Flavien feels the same way. He has a great engine, he does what he does so fast, so effortlessly. He may have no limitations.”
That may be the closest we can come to answering the question ‘exactly how good is Flightline?’ For if he’s the horse Sadler thinks he is, and the old saying holds true, we may never find out.
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