While it’s been pretty much assumed Gamine is Kentucky Oaks-bound the day before the Derby (even Baffert admits that’s the current target), well, there’s wiggle room.
“I just haven’t figured anything out. I could get bold with her, I don’t know what to do with her yet. I like to wait about two weeks, see how they breeze back, see how they’re going.”
If she needs Derby qualifying points?
“I’d have to get bold somewhere along the line, and if I did that I’d have to run her in the Shared Belief (at Del Mar),” Baffert said.
This year, because of the wacky Derby schedule, the Shared Belief on Aug. 1 is worth 50 qualifying points to the winner.
Baffert has run only one filly in the Derby (Excellent Meeting finished fifth in 1999), but she didn’t have the speed Gamine possesses.
“This filly, she would probably be the kind that would run in the Derby because she’s speed,” Baffert said. “Like Winning Colors (1988), where they get out there and they’re so fast they just keep going.
“It would have to be the right type, and she’d have to be doing exceptionally well. I wouldn’t want to do it just to do it. If I felt like she had a legitimate chance to win it … like what she showed me the other day, but she’s gonna have to learn to relax a little bit more.”
Is she good enough to beat Tiz the Law, Honor A.P., Authentic and the other top 3-year-old colts?
“I’ve always thought she was as good as my 2-year-old colts,” Baffert said.
She displayed that ability right from the start.
“We knew she was really special,” he said. “We got a late start running her here because everybody on the backside knew all about her and we couldn’t get a race to fill for her for a month.”
When it did, she won a maiden special weight by 6 1/4 lengths on March 7 at Santa Anita, followed that up with a neck victory over Speech in an Oaklawn Park allowance on May 2 and then turned on the afterburners for jockey Johnny Velazquez in the Acorn.
“I’ve been working her off (the pace), getting her to relax, but drawing the one post (for the Acorn), I told Johnny, ‘You’re going to have to put her on the lead,’” Baffert said. “She’s fast. She’s really fast. But you don’t know she’s going that fast. She’s one of those, those good ones, where they look like they’re galloping, but they’re really going pretty fast.
“He turned her loose at the eighth pole there and she just took off. Turning for home, I knew she was going to win, but I thought she was going to win by three or four lengths. I didn’t know she was going to do that. That was just incredible.”