Cozmic One Approaches Long-Awaited Debut

Inheritance can be a tricky thing.



What gets transmitted through bloodlines and what doesn't is essentially a genetic roll of the dice.



Cozmic One, the first foal out of Zenyatta, has already shown some of what his mother passed onto him—strength, stamina, and what appears to be an aspect of pent-up brilliance.



The last trait is what made a debut so long-awaited for the 3-year-old son of Bernardini  , who is finally scheduled to start for the first time April 17 in a mile maiden special weight event at Santa Anita Park. Cozmic One's occasionally high-strung nature wasn't something Zenyatta had to wrestle with as much, but it's something trainer John Shirreffs had to literally wrestle with—from mother and son.



The trainer of both horses for owners Jerry and Ann Moss, Shirreffs tells a story about the "lesson" taught to him by the 2010 Horse of the Year whose fans call her "The Queen."



One day, walking Zenyatta around the shedrow at Hollywood Park, the conditioner had an idea.



"I thought, 'Let's teach her a little patience,'" Shirreffs recalled. "We made it about three-quarters of the way through (the walk) and I could see her puffing herself up, ready to explode."



So the trainer decided to take her back to her stall, but a muck cart blocked the entrance.



No problem, "Let's just take her around one more time," Shirreffs remembered. Except there was a problem, because The Queen didn't want to go around one more time.



"We never made it," Shirreffs said. "She threw a fit, ran backwards, almost fell over, and from that day on, I said, 'I guess we're not going to be able to teach her to be patient.' We were just going to have to channel her energy in a different way."

GANTZ LONGFORM: Long Live The Queen



That same energy, like an internal furnace, also lives inside of Cozmic One—who Shirreffs affectionately calls "Coz"—so much so that, although the colt may have been physically ready to compete as a 2-year-old in 2014, he was miles away mentally.



When the dark bay colt first arrived at Belmont Park to begin training, his endless, pent-up energy could not be subdued.



"In order for us to even handle him, we had to put a lot of miles on him," Shirreffs said. "I never had a 2-year-old I trained more than Cozmic One and that was just to handle him. That wasn't even beginning to think about the lessons he would have to learn (to race him). It was in order to just hot walk him to get the edge off."

Then came a hard-to-shake biting habit and incidents walking the shedrow, just like his massive mother.



"How are you going to teach somebody anything when you can hardly handle him?" the trainer said. "He's big, he's strong, and he never gets tired. So you can't go, 'Oh, let's go jog him twice and he'll be OK.' That doesn't work."



When the work to iron out all those issues finally came to a close, the on-track tests of patience began. In one of his gallops at Saratoga Race Course, Cozmic One hit the brakes and made a sharp move right to the outside rail.



Once he figured out how to stay on a steady path, breezes became a weekly competition to see how fast he could get through the first quarter-mile.



"He knew where the pole was," Shirreffs said of the colt, insinuating he was almost too smart for his own good. "He'd take off for a quarter-mile and then he'd be done. He wouldn't be interested in finishing works. It was immaturity in the sense that you didn't have his attention. He was thinking about other stuff."



Jockey Victor Espinoza, who will guide Cozmic One in his debut Friday, has also been aboard for workouts now that the colt is stabled at Santa Anita. He greets questions about their occasional morning adventures with a laugh.



"Every time I work him, he comes up with something different," Espinoza said. "He still thinks he's playing around, but now he's starting to figure out what it's all about. He likes to do it his own way sometimes, but it's fun."



But even through seemingly endless works—beginning in late December, Cozmic One has breezed at Santa Anita 13 times—Shirreffs was intent on waiting until the colt was absolutely ready to race.



The trainer's mentality was straightforward. Rather than looking toward a specific race and hoping to get to colt ready in time, he waited until the colt was ready, then picked out a suitable race. He did the same with Zenyatta, waiting until November of her 3-year-old year to race her for the first time. Although he admits frustration, the tactic worked out for The Queen, who earned four Eclipse Awards, including Horse of the Year in 2010, and ended up with more than $7.3 million in earnings.



"It's only frustrating because we'd love to have him run earlier," Shirreffs said. "We'd have loved to see him get ready for a (Kentucky) Derby prep. That's the only frustrating part, because he's such a strong horse, but a horse can have a great career. It doesn't matter where they have it."



At 16.2 hands, Cozmic One is not quite the specimen Zenyatta was at 17.2 hands, but Shirreffs notes The Queen grew significantly late. Shirreffs glows about her first son's strength and endurance, but also beams about his foundation and says the bones in his legs, even early on, "felt like you were grabbing a tree trunk."



The trainer doesn't lack sentimentality, either. When Espinoza was overseas to ride California Chrome in the Dubai World Cup (UAE-I), Shirreffs put Mike Smith—Zenyatta's regular rider—aboard for a morning drill. The Hall of Fame rider couldn't help but smile through the whole ride.



"It was just neat getting on Zenyatta's baby," said Smith, who still ranks The Queen as the top horse he's ever ridden, even better than multiple grade I-winning mount Shared Belief. "It was just a lot of fun, because I remember petting him when he was a foal."



As nostalgic as it was to see Smith get in the irons on Cozmic One at the end of March, a reminder of The Queen's past also twisted its way into the colt's first start.



With Cozmic One drawing the rail, five slots to his right, a runner named Volume will try to ruin his debut. Volume's father, Blame  , played the villain in Zenyatta's last race—the 2010 Breeders' Cup Classic (gr. I)—breaking countless hearts while breaking The Queen's 19-race winning streak.



Cozmic One's potential ascent to racing royalty—"The Prince" could have a nice ring to it—is far from a known commodity. Shirreffs was able to channel the fire in Zenyatta, but some horses are puzzles never solved.



By all accounts, the colt has inherited several positive qualities from his mother, but has the unrelenting grit that enabled The Queen to fly past rivals in the stretch to win 19 straight races been passed down?



"We'll have to wait and see, won't we?" Shirreffs remarked.



What could be Cozmic One's greatest hurdle, however, is the burden of every great performer's progeny—living up to the original.



"He's got big shoes to fill," Smith said. "They're almost impossible to fill."