BARBARO'S GLORY AN UPLIFTING TALE.

Byline: KEVIN MODESTI

HORSE RACING 

When you remember Barbaro, do you think first of the glory or the gore?

Horse-racing promoters are going counterintuitive and betting on the glory.

Instead of hiding from Barbaro's bittersweet memory, racetracks and TV networks seem to be reveling in the colt's story in the run-up to Saturday's 133rd Kentucky Derby, which will mark a year since the 6 1/2-length victory that introduced him to the general public.

But why would they want to remind people of a Derby winner who broke down grotesquely in the Preakness two weeks later and died in January? Weren't his injury and death supposed to be black marks for a struggling sport? Won't all this Barbaro talk turn fans off from this year's Triple Crown?

"I think it makes it that much better," said Rick Hammerle, the racing secretary at Santa Anita Park in Arcadia. "It adds to the mystique (of the Derby). The way it turned out was unfortunate. But in a sense it opened people's eyes to how much we care for these horses."

By "we," Hammerle means the horse owners and veterinarians who tried for months to save Barbaro from the multiple fractures in his right hind leg and the many complications, and the industry leaders who have stepped up the move to safer racing surfaces that might reduce such occurrences.

"We" could also mean a public that rediscovered its bond with thoroughbreds as it rooted for Barbaro's recovery and realized there can be something special about a mere horse when he happens to be the most convincing Derby winner since the 1940s.

Either way, racing apparently thinks that despite the unpleasantness, it's not a bad idea to make Barbaro a backdrop to this year's Derby, to be run in six days at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Ky., likely matching the maximum 20 horses and featuring no single compelling story line.

NBC, the network that broadcasts the Derby, will show its documentary "Barbaro: A Nation's Horse" today at 2p.m. PDT. (HBO will have a documentary simply titled "Barbaro" debuting June6, three days before the Belmont Stakes.)

Delaware Park, where Barbaro won his first race, holds a "Celebration of Barbaro's Life" today. It's one of several tracks scheduling memorials for the fourth anniversary of Barbaro's birth.

And at Churchill Downs, not only has Barbaro's electrifying performance in 2006 duly represented in the Kentucky Derby Museum's 360-degree theater, but track executives will honor Barbaro owners Roy and Gretchen Jackson in a winner's-circle ceremony on Derby day. Volunteers at Churchill will raise money for National Thoroughbred Racing Association Charities' Barbaro Memorial Fund by selling Lance Armstrong-style wristbands all week.

Apparently, they don't think promoting a dead horse will cast a pall over America's most famous horse race. As Todd Pletcher, trainer of five potential Derby starters this year, said: "Barbaro's story ended up sad ... But it brought a lot positive recognition to our sport and to the Kentucky Derby and the glory that surrounds the race itself. So I've got to think it's going to have a positive impact."

I think that's right. Barbaro didn't become a singular figure in U.S. sports because he broke down. He became a singular figure in U.S. sports and then broke down.

As critics of thoroughbred racing correctly pointed out in the days after Barbaro's misstep at Pimlico: If he weren't a Derby winner, given a good chance of sweeping the Triple Crown, he would have been one of the hundreds of broken-down horses who are forgotten every season.

It mattered that he was the Derby champion. That he was a rare undefeated winner of the race, among the few horses ever to use that stage to run away from the fastest representatives of his generation, an individual everybody envisioned blowing through the Preakness and Belmont just as easily.

So isn't the Derby bigger for having launched the Barbaro saga? Doesn't it make sense then to promote this instant legend? Might Churchill Downs be advised to keep bringing the Jacksons back to the winner's circle year after year to remind us of the glory that grows there?

"I think they're doing it (the commemoration) for racing fans," said Bob Edwards, the public radio and XM Satellite Radio host who grew up in Louisville and is a Derby fan. "(Barbaro) was a champion, a runaway champion, a horse that just lit people up and got them excited about horse racing again."

On the phone from his Washington, D.C., home, Edwards paused.

"Then came the Preakness."

A cynic might say horse racing would embrace any subject, with connotations positive or negative, that would give the sport a little network time.

But this seems to be something more than that: The sport really, truly believes Barbaro's legacy is substantially uplifting instead of depressing. That he reminds people of the sport's humanity more than its dark side. That he sweetened Kentucky Derby lore more than he soured it.

That's no sure thing, but it looks like a winner from here.

heymodesti(AT_SIGN)aol.com

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