Mo Forza Primed for Breeders' Cup Mile

There are certain natural phenomena that infrequently occur but are worth the wait. Halley's Comet, wide ties, or the next Audrey Hepburn come immediately to mind.

Likewise, there are Thoroughbreds who have made an impact without clocking much time in terms of billable hours, at least in the afternoon. Personal Ensign spread 13 starts over three seasons and never went home without the trophy. Ghostzapper   was rationed like water in the Sahara, with just 11 starts in parts of four seasons, but by then he had already made his point.

After a 3-year-old campaign of nine starts in 2019, Mo Forza  began pulling a pretty good imitation of Greta Garbo. Sightings became rare. He was rumored to be in witness protection, maybe the Foreign Legion.

Racetrackers would sit around the campfire trading stories of the Mo Forza they remembered—the colt who broke his maiden, then won the Qatar Twilight Derby (G2T) and Hollywood Derby (G1T) in a two-month burst—and if they had a turf miler, they kind of hoped he would stay away.

Then—boom!—Mo Forza would come roaring back, tail on fire, older, better, more determined than ever. He was never as good as he was in winning the 2020 Del Mar Mile (G2T), coming off seven months on the sidelines, or when he followed that with a race of similar pizzazz in the City of Hope Mile (G2T) six weeks later. That parlay put him on the threshold of a FanDuel Breeders' Cup Mile Presented by PDJF (G1T) appearance at Keeneland, a race that seemed dead in his crosshairs. And then—poof!—he was gone again.

There is an explanation of course, and it is fairly mundane. Shin splints and a soft tissue issue kept Mo Forza away from the races at 2, and the occasional flare-up has put him on the shelf for several healing months at a time over the past two seasons.

"Brian Lynch had him at first, and I give him full credit and gratitude for not going on with him like some might have done," said Peter Miller, who has stabled Mo Forza primarily at the San Luis Rey Downs Training Center, 30 miles northeast of Del Mar. "When he needs time, we give it to him. It's as simple as that."

After another one of those long breaks, Mo Forza reemerged this year to win a couple of the usual races and present himself as the North American horse to beat in the Nov. 6 $2 million Breeders' Cup Mile at Del Mar.

"Some things are meant to be," Miller said. "We had to stop on him right before the Mile last year. But I'm not so sure he would have liked the softer turf at Keeneland anyway. Now he's on his home track, over a course we know he loves."

WATCH: Miller Discusses Breeders' Cup Starters, Feel-Good Story of Mo Forza

As often happens with marquee Thoroughbreds, Mo Forza comes with a backstory tangled with characters who defy conventional expectations, beginning with Barry Abrams, the all-purpose California horseman who died at age 66 in October of 2020 after battling cancer to a draw more than once over a merciless 15 years of surgeries and treatments, characterized by his stubborn refusal to stay away from the game he loved.

Dyan Abrams, Barry's wife of 38 years, continues to race Mo Forza in partnership with Onofrio Pecoraro, a native of San Diego who embodies the idea of Saturday's Mile being a Breeders' Cup home game.

"My dad still lives in the house my great-grandfather built in 1950," Pecoraro said at Del Mar this week, after watching Mo Forza breeze through his final Breeders' Cup work. "I first met Barry when he was working with his brother, David, putting in a floor across the street from us in a building where I worked cleaning up at the Wine Connection."

Abrams, who already had enjoyed success training Standardbreds, was between careers at the time but soon on his way to a great run in the Thoroughbred game, while Pecoraro, just 19 when they met, had his sights on a future with the family's commercial painting business. They both turned out OK.

Abrams won his share of races and a handful of graded stakes, but he left his deepest mark as the guy who claimed Unusual Heat, a son of Nureyev, for $80,000 and helped turn him into California's all-time leading sire.

Mo Forza is a son of champion and Breeders' Cup winner Uncle Mo   out of the lightly-raced Inflamed, a daughter of Unusual Heat bred by Abrams and former California Horse Racing Board commissioner Madeline Auerbach and Sonny Pais. Inflamed's female line tracks back to none other than Politely, the Amerigo mare who picked up the Bohemia Stable torch from Kelso in the late 1960s to do everything but win a championship. Among the mares Politely defeated were Gamely, Straight Deal, Lady Pitt, and Princessnesian.

Inflamed's dam, Little Hottie, was bred by Burt Bacharach and purchased privately by Abrams and Auerbach from a subsequent owner at the end of her career. Inflamed's full brother, named Burns, won the 2011 La Jolla Handicap (G2T) at Del Mar for Abrams and Auerbach, but then suffered a fatal injury while running in the Del Mar Derby (G2T) that summer.

By then, Pecoraro was investing in Thoroughbreds with Abrams and enjoying modest returns. Then came that day in the summer of 2016 when Pecoraro's phone buzzed at a moment his mind was on anything but horses.

"I was with my mother at her dialysis," Pecoraro said. "It was just an impulse to answer, because you worry whenever you see it's your trainer calling. Barry was always good about saying right away that 'everything's OK at the barn.' This time he wanted to know if I wanted to buy in on his Uncle Mo colt who was not much more than six weeks old. He said if I didn't, he'd have to sell him outright, because he'd bring enough that he couldn't afford to keep him. I didn't need to be talked into it. We went 50-50."

About two months later, on Sept. 23, 2016, Josephine Pecoraro died. Pecoraro's father, Nick, a native of Sicily, is a neighborhood mainstay on the front porch of the family's bright yellow house on India Street, the boulevard that snakes north to south through San Diego's Little Italy. Pecoraro's company offices are located adjacent to the home in which he was raised.

"My dad is not really into the horses," Pecoraro said. "He's very old-fashioned, doesn't gamble at all. My mom, though, liked to send ten dollars with me to make a bet sometimes, and I almost got her to the races. I think back on losing her about the same time Mo Forza came into our lives. When we started to know what we had, Barry asked me to come up with a name. 'Forza' is 'strong' in Italian."

In his most recent comeback races, Mo Forza won the Del Mar Mile by a head and the City of Hope Mile by a half-length over his arch-rival, Smooth Like Strait . The Miller crew has been diligent in monitoring any small change in the suspensory that kept their star out of the Breeders' Cup last year, and so far he has shown nothing that would prevent him from producing another one of his relentless finishes. Whether or not it can be as effective against a field that includes quality Europeans like Space Blues , Mother Earth , and Pearls Galore , along with the usual tough contingent from the East and Midwest, remains up in the air.

"There have been considerable inquiries about him as a stallion," Pecoraro said. "But all that is for after Saturday. Just having a shot at winning a Breeders' Cup race is overwhelming enough. I wish Barry could have been here to see it, because Barry is the reason we're here. Him and Mo Forza."