Triple Crown winner Justify led all the way at Saturday’s Belmont Stakes, but controversy arose Sunday after some raised questions about the role of another horse in the victory.
One owner believes that there was something suspicious about how the race was handled by Restoring Hope, a stablemate of Justify’s, with both horses trained by Bob Baffert.
Mike Repole, who co-owned two horses that raced at Belmont, thinks Restoring Hope’s jockey Florent Geroux should be questioned about whether he served as protection for Justify. Restoring Hope spent much of the race just behind the eventual winner and to his outside, though never passed him.
“Justify is a super horse. He is a Triple Crown winner and he’s undefeated,” Repole told Tom Pedulla of the New York Post. “But I can see the stewards looking into this over the next couple of days. I probably expect them to look into reckless riding by Florent and bring him in to question him about what he was thinking and what his tactics were.
“It definitely seemed to me he was more of an offensive lineman than a racehorse trying to win the Belmont, and Justify was a running back trying to run for a touchdown.”
Restoring Hope’s owner Gary West certainly didn’t seem enamored with the job his jockey did either.
“I have no earthly idea what Florent was thinking or what his race strategy was,” West said in an email. “Had I known better, the first eighth of a mile I would have thought it was a quarter-horse race, not the mile-and-a-half Belmont. Maybe the horse was completely out of control and Florent had no choice. I will never know.”
Baffert himself dismissed the conspiracy theories, saying that Restoring Hope “has natural speed. His only chance was to be up near the lead.”
Justify’s jockey noted after the Preakness that his horse was a little bit tired, so things probably weren’t a lot better at the Belmont. It’s certainly fuel for a good conspiracy theory, anyway.
