Once More, With Feeling for McGaughey at Derby

A trainer who has won the Kentucky Derby (G1) always hopes to find the big horse again. 

It doesn't matter if the first one came along decades ago or last year, like a bolt out of the blue or as the result of carefully laid plans. The hope that springs eternal with the birth of every Thoroughbred runs deep in the hearts of those who make a life out of sleepless nights and early mornings, and a Derby contender fosters that hope, gives it wings.

In the doorway of a tack room in Barn 43 on the Churchill Downs backside, Shug McGaughey is channeling the overwhelming nature of such a feeling into the focused comfort of a familiar routine. Inside the closest stall, a copper-colored colt named Code of Honor is swishing his tale and moving about in feel-good fashion as a groom wraps protective bandages around his legs. The warm glow of golden stable lights cuts the pre-dawn darkness, but soon the sun will rise, and McGaughey will send his charge out to stride around the old dirt oval beneath the Twin Spires.

The weight of responsibility for this captivating animal rests squarely on McGaughey's 68-year-old shoulders, but the trainer is not daunted by it. He's been here before, has made good memories. Inside that very stall six years ago, his most recent Kentucky Derby starter—a dark bay colt named Orb —was prepped for his final, perfect mornings, riding a swell of peak form into the spotlight. 

"Coming here with him, I was very excited," McGaughey recalls, coffee cup in hand, nothing to do but bide his time until the track opens after a harrow break. "Everything had gone perfect all winter. When we wanted to breeze, it didn't rain, and all that kind of stuff. Everything went fine, and when we got here I was really excited about the way he had done. All winter he progressed along really in the right way. I thought we were going to have a big chance, and that day I was more excited than nervous.

"When we came in here with Orb, he was the story. Code of Honor isn't going to be the story, but he'll be a part of it, obviously."

When Orb  splashed home a 2 1/2-length winner in Kentucky Derby 139, McGaughey was already a Hall of Fame trainer who had taken his best swing at the Run for the Roses with six prior starters. The pair of Pine Circle (sixth) and Vanlandingham (16th) were his first in 1984; Seeking the Gold was seventh in 1988; the favored entry of Easy Goer and Awe Inspiring ran second and third, respectively, in 1989; and Saarland was 10th in 2002. 

The Lexington native is a little more settled now than he was back in the early days. He's been through the process and knows what to expect, but his competitive nature still simmers just beneath the surface. Homebred Orb was a 5-1 Derby favorite on the merit of three straight wins for Stuart Janney and Phipps Stable, capped by a powerful late run in the Besilu Stables Fountain of Youth Stakes (G2) and a 2 3/4-length victory in the Besilu Stables Florida Derby (G1).

Code of Honor, who won the Fountain of Youth but only managed third in the Florida Derby, is 12-1 on the Derby morning line. And if that slight longshot status may come with a small release, it also puts a different kind of pressure on a man who is always thinking, analyzing, internalizing.

"I wish he was going to be 1-5 in the program," McGaughey says, keeping an eye on the colt as the groom walks him out of the stall and around the shedrow. "I would rather be in that position. I think the last race he didn't run good, it sort of tempered everybody's enthusiasm a little bit, and I think he is being overlooked a little bit. I think he's a setup kind of horse. He's a midpack, one-run type of horse. I think that with this racetrack and the stretch here, with a big field, we ought to get plenty of place, and I think that'll help him. 

"His sire ran long on the grass in Europe, so hopefully that's where we get a little of our stamina from. I'd be very surprised if a mile and a quarter bothered him."

Within the coming hour, Code of Honor will take to the track, put in an easy gallop, and stroll back to the barn. He'll be given a bath, walk the shedrow to cool down, and head out to graze with Julio Gondola, one of his dedicated grooms, on the shank. Having already put in his final major workout, and with the days counting down until the greatest test of his young life, the straightforward colt has given McGaughey little cause for concern in the final run-up to the Run for the Roses. Instead, he's put his Hall of Fame conditioner squarely in pursuit of another victory, once more, with feeling.        

"My whole life—racetrack life, trainer life—that's what you dream of having, a contender in here and an opportunity to win," McGaughey says. "I don't care what anybody tells you. This is the race you want to win. To have opportunity to win it, and to have won it, and then to be back with what I think is a fairly live horse, is exciting again."

An Unlikely Path to a Familiar Place

Because he trains primarily for industry titans whose private breeding operations trace through generations of brilliant bloodlines—and because his clients do not often purchase horses at public auction, but more often sell them there—McGaughey almost did not have the opportunity to win this year. At least not with Code of Honor.

The colt was the result of a 2015 mating between breeder Will Farish's grade 3-winning Dixie Union mare Reunited and a relatively new stallion at his Lane's End Farm—Noble Mission , the brilliant group 1-winning full brother to champion Frankel whose first foals are 3-year-olds this season. 

Farish, a lifelong horseman, chairman of the board of Churchill Downs from 1992 to 2001, the former U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James, and founder of one of the world's premier Thoroughbred operations, has been represented as an owner by just three Kentucky Derby starters as owner or in partnership—Nostalgia, who ran 13th in 1977; Parade Ground, sixth in 1998; and Came Home, sixth in 2002. As a breeder, he has been involved in the matings of 14 Derby starters, with a 1-2-1 record highlighted by the 1999 victory of eventual Preakness Stakes (G1) winner and Horse of the Year Charismatic, whom he co-bred with Parrish Hill Farm. 

Farish, who will be inducted into the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame's "Pillars of the Turf" class this summer, also was co-breeder of a key member of Noble Mission's pedigree—Danzig, the sire of Danehill, whose daughter Kind is the dam of Frankel and Noble Mission. Adding Noble Mission to its roster in collaboration with breeder Juddmonte Farms in 2015 was a major coup for Lane's End and a reflection upon its quest to produce not only the best racehorses in North America, but in the world.



Booking some of his best mares to Noble Mission and sending their progeny to public auction in order to support the new sire, Farish made Code of Honor part of the Lane's End draft to the 2017 Keeneland September Yearling Sale. But the colt failed to meet his reserve at $70,000, so after a time at Courtlandt Farm in Ocala, Fla., and a brief stint at Fair Hill Training Center for his early education, Farish sent him up to New York before the season got started at Saratoga Race Course.

McGaughey was pleasantly surprised when Code of Honor trained on the muscle, broke his maiden by 1 1/2 lengths in August at first asking, and put in a runner-up finish in the Champagne Stakes (G1) in October at Belmont Park, punching his ticket to the Breeders' Cup in November.  

The 5-1 third choice on the morning line for the Sentient Jet Breeders' Cup Juvenile (G1), Code of Honor spiked a fever the morning of the race and had to be withdrawn. He did not run again until January, and at that point, Derby dreams were nonexistent.

"Even when he was a 2-year-old and he was second in the Champagne and we came here (for Breeders' Cup), we didn't talk about Derby," McGaughey recalls. "We were going to let the horse tell us."

Lackluster training caused McGaughey to bypass the Dec. 1 Remsen Stakes (G2), and a fourth in the Jan. 5 Mucho Macho Man Stakes over a mile in his season debut didn't say much. The Fountain of Youth was the colt's last chance, "or I was going to kind of back off the situation," McGaughey recalls. But when Code of Honor took that race in his next start, it was a return to form that suddenly seemed to say something. It gave them the encouragement to go on.

"I wasn't happy with his race in the Florida Derby, but I kind of knew what the circumstances were," McGaughey says. "I'm still a little bit disappointed in it. It was a messed-up race. When you've got a horse that goes as slow as they can run, as Maximum Security did over a speed-favoring track, and you're sort of a midpack, one-run sort of a horse, it took us out of our game plan. But you can't worry about it. It's one of those things that happened. We were just kind of unlucky, so hopefully we get lucky this week."

McGaughey shipped Code of Honor up from Florida to Keeneland in early April for some fresh air and bluegrass, thinking he might give the colt a shot on the first Saturday in May. After his third behind Maximum Security and Bodexpress, who will both join him in the Derby starting gate, Code of Honor needed to train forwardly enough to merit moving on to Churchill. And that's exactly what he did.

"Horses do well in the spring in Kentucky," McGaughey says. "I feel good about it. I think the horse has done well. He came out of the Florida Derby in good shape, his works at Keeneland went really well, and he worked very well here."

That move, a sharp half-mile April 28 in :46 4/5, set McGaughey's mind at ease. Of course, that was after he spent the early morning hours worrying.

"I woke up at 3 a.m. hoping he was going to work OK," he says. "I was thinking about it, then I fell back asleep. You worry about it, that they'll go over there and go in :52 or something. That was what was on my mind."

Hoping to Win Again

McGaughey calls Code of Honor "kind of a bothersome, pesky, make-you-mad kind of a horse, because he doesn't want to let you in the stall without biting you or something, and I don't want to get bit."

Alison McGaughey, the trainer's wife of 22 years, does not have this problem.

"With me, all the horses are nice because I feed them peppermints," she says as Code of Honor crunches one from her hand. "You've got to watch him a little bit, he's a little frisky. He's bit Shug like three times. I say, 'Just bring him his candy, he'll be fine!'"

Humor like this keeps the worry at bay, or at least sends it packing until it circles back around for another visit. But while Shug McGaughey knows the importance of enjoying the journey, the sheer magnitude of what might happen winds him tighter and tighter as race day nears.

"With Orb, I was trying to have a little fun with it, but I think inside I was probably a little bit uptight because I wanted it to happen," he recalls. "That would have been the reason, because I just wanted to get through the week, get it done, and go from there. I was probably a bit uptight on the inside, but I was not at all out of sorts. 

"I knew he was going to have a big opportunity if things went right. I knew during the race, when he pushed the button and went, I said, 'They're going to know he's in here,' and obviously they did. That's what I was looking for. I thought he was going to go over there and run his race … and I think this horse is going to have a good opportunity, too."

Returning to the Kentucky Derby six years after Orb's win has Alison McGaughey reminiscing, sentimental. Now that they've made it back with a contender whose final preparations are done—one who has cleared all the hurdles, who will head postward with a chance to give it his best shot—she is doing her best to support the down-to-earth man who keeps his cards mostly close to his vest. She knows how he's feeling. 

"It's very exciting, and then again, it's nerve-wracking to be back," she says. "Shug's kind of a keep everything inside, bottled-up guy. But I know he's so emotional, and everything's on him. He would never blame the groom for anything, or the hotwalker, or the jockey. It's all about how he trained him. And if anything, God forbid, ever went wrong, it's 'I should have done this' or 'I shouldn't have done that'. He takes everything to heart and that's hard to watch sometimes. And he's very competitive."

While she lives in the moment with Code of Honor, her memories of their first Derby win drive Alison McGaughey's desire for a second. She remembers the tremendous release of pressure as they watched Orb gallop across the line, recalls the overwhelming happiness, laughs at the thought of the time she broke down crying in the grocery store back home several days later, when the deli guy greeted her with cheers of 'Yeah, you won!'

"You always wish for the big horse and that you get to do it again, because it's such a thrill and the emotions are ridiculous," she says. "If you happen to win, terrific, that's a bonus. And if it doesn't happen, you know, God bless—as long as they go home safe and they get to be moms and dads, then you're fine. But in your heart you're always like, 'Oh, I hope this is the one. I hope we can do it again.'"