Favorite Hard Spun hits tough times at Southwest Stakes

HOT SPRINGS, Ark. - Jockey Mario Pino had often talked of never being on a horse quite like Hard Spun. Yesterday was different. The horse had never felt quite like this.

"Right off the bat, he wasn't getting hold of the racetrack, the first 10 yards out of there," Pino said. "He's usually faster."

This time of year, Kentucky Derby aspirations rise and fall, race to race. After winning his first four starts, Hard Spun found hard times yesterday at the $250,000 Southwest Stakes, finishing fourth, three lengths back, over the one-mile course at Oaklawn Park in front of 29,972 fans who had made him the 1-2 favorite.

The Pennsylvania-bred 3-year-old owned by Wilmington's Rick Porter got up to second place on the second turn but fell back behind eventual winner Teuflesberg, a colt that had finished 83/4 lengths behind Hard Spun last month in the LeComte at the Fair Grounds in New Orleans.

"At the three-eighths pole, I felt like he was going to put us right into the race, but he didn't," said Pino, who has ridden nearly 6,000 winners in his career. "Actually, I thought when he got to that point, he was moving kind of nice. But then when he was at the turn, he started working a little bit, and that's not really him."

The winning horse was ridden by a most familiar name, Stewart Elliott of Smarty Jones fame, who is riding at Oaklawn this winter and was on Teuflesberg for the first time.

"I got into him about midway on the final turn when I saw the favorite coming up on the outside of us," Elliott said. "I decided I wasn't going to let him creep up on us and wanted to make him run. When we hit the stretch, I said to myself, 'If he isn't here by now, he's not going to get here.' "

Pino didn't think that starting from the outside No. 9 gate helped his horse, but didn't think it was the determining factor, either. Hard Spun was four wide around the first turn and along the backstretch before moving up.

"He actually had a pretty good trip, considering," said trainer Larry Jones, who works out of Delaware Park. Jones said later that Hard Spun was a tired horse after he got back to the barn, but otherwise healthy. "It just didn't look like he got over this track as well as he has some of them."

But Jones also said it was difficult to understand why Hard Spun seemed to struggle with the surface "because he has trained so well over it." His 59-second five-furlong workout on Feb. 12 was one of the fastest at Oaklawn this year.

This doesn't end Hard Spun's Kentucky Derby hopes. The 20 horses who accumulate the most graded-stakes earnings are eligible to run in the Derby, and the Southwest wasn't even a graded stake. If Hard Spun continues on the same path planned for him, he'll run here in the Rebel Stakes next month and the Arkansas Derby in April. Both are graded stakes.

"We're still thinking Rebel," Jones said.

It certainly wasn't the pace that did Hard Spun in, not after a tepid half-mile pace of 47.90. While Hard Spun's connections hoped this was just a bad day, the Teuflesberg group talked of the last race, the LeComte won by Hard Spun, as the one being out of the norm for them.

"We tried rating the horse and asking him to do something he really didn't want to do," said Teuflesberg's trainer Jaime Sanders, who used to work for Nick Zito. "Today, we let him do just what he wanted to do."

Meanwhile, Hard Spun will drop in those Derby watches that had him in the top 10, and there will be no talk at all of him being in the class of local greats like Smarty Jones, Afleet Alex and Barbaro, not after a couple of horses named Officer Rocket and Forty Grams ran him down in the stretch.

Until then, all the talk around here yesterday had been about Hard Spun. Porter's entourage was just starting to grow, and yesterday it included legendary basketball coach Chuck Daly, a longtime friend.

"This puts a damper on things," Porter pointed out later.