Bill Mott ducked out of the horse-path gap of the paddock Saturday afternoon and weaved through Travers Day fans on his way to Box F20 in the fifth row of the clubhouse. A man raised an oversized can of a Modelo Especial and shouted out Mott’s name. Another fan by the shoeshine stand in front of the racing office yelled, “Sovereignty” in a thousand syllables. Mott nodded, a Hall of Fame career long since chiseled, he had yet to win the Travers. The last big thing on the biggest list.
“Walking off the jitters,” Mott said, ducking around a red Igloo cooler on wheels.
Mott took a deep breath once he reached the escalator.
“You never know, small field, you can’t guess what they’re going to do,” he said. “If you’re looking at it, you’d say the inside two are probably going to go.”
Magnitude and Bracket Buster, forlorn tactics in a foregone conclusion.
“That’s fine, right?”
“Yeah.”
Asked if he had ever thought he was going to win the Travers, Mott offered the closest he had ever gotten in 12 previous tries.
“I was maybe optimistic with Tacitus,” Mott said. “Even though he had a reputation of having a lot of seconds.”
Tacitus finished second as the favorite in the 2019 Travers, one of six Grade 1 placings in a 17-start career. Six years later, “maybe optimistic” had turned into the closest thing a trainer can feel to confidence. Mott knew this was his best chance to knock off the one which had gotten away thus far. Sovereignty, Godolphin’s homebred colt, rode a three-race win streak into the Travers. The Kentucky Derby, the Belmont Stakes and the Jim Dandy, wickets on the way to stardom.
One minute and 34 seconds into the Travers, Mott, watching from the back right corner of his family-crammed box at Saratoga, allowed for the first hint of fruition. Sovereignty and Junior Alvarado rolled to Bracket Buster and Luis Saez nearing the quarter pole and Mott’s top lip quivered, an involuntary twitch, under a dead-set stare. That was it.
Mike Sellitto bellowed from the aisleway, the beginning of the bedlam.
“Come on big horse. Come on big horse. Come on big horse,” Alvarado’s agent yelled. “Pull away now. Pull away now. Pull away now. Pull away now.”
Sovereignty pulled away and away and away to a 10-length decimation job over a game but ultimately overmatched Bracket Buster.
Mott lowered his binoculars as Sovereignty passed the eighth pole and right before a group hug with his wife Tina, sons Brady and Riley and daughter-in-law Megan. Grandsons William and Tucker were in there somewhere.
Sovereignty finished 1 1/4 miles in 2:00.84.
Mott grabbed Tina by the hand and bounded toward the winner’s circle, accepting congratulations from a retired jock’s agent, a writer and a rival trainer’s family. Down the first flight of stairs, husband and wife shook their latched hands like relay runners after a gold medal before stopping on the platform between the final flights of stairs to watch the stretch run again.
“It didn’t look like for a minute he was going to pull away and then just . . . that last eighth,” Mott said. “The other horse, Vicki’s horse, held on pretty good, didn’t he, until the eighth pole.”
Bracket Buster, trained by Vicki Oliver, hung tough for as long as he could but couldn’t match the relentless last furlong produced yet again by Sovereignty.
“Wow,” Tina said. “What a horse. What a horse.”
Godolphin’s Michael Banahan was reduced to the same kind of superlatives.
“Some horse,” Banahan said from the edge of the winner’s circle. “Some horse.”
Waiting for a TV interview, Mott hugged Oliver as she stifled tears.
“Congratulations,” he said.
“Congratulations,” she said.
It was that kind of race. That kind of day.
Sovereignty topped a five-race skein of brilliance as favorites Thorpedo Anna, Patch Adams, Hope Road and Book’em Danno swept the first four Grade 1 stakes on a Travers Day belter.
“As much as anything, to have a horse for the fans,” Banahan said. “We need them. You don’t want them to get beaten. Book’em Danno. Thorpedo, you want them to win.”
Sovereignty won for the sixth time in his nine-race career, pushing his career earnings to $5,835,300 and firmly planted himself at the top of the 3-year-old division.
Sovereignty, stone still as longshot Strategic Focus rattled and reared in the stall next to him, broke well from post four. As Mott predicted, Ben Curtis urged Magnitude, a front-running winner of the Risen Star and Iowa Derby, to the front from the inside. Luis Saez nudged Bracket Buster, a pace-setting winner of the Pegasus and a pace presence in a Haskell fourth, from post two. Those two rolled into the first turn as John Velazquez and McAfee moved forward from the outside and Sovereignty stayed in between McAfee and Strategic Focus on the rail. After the first quarter mile in :23.47, Alvarado eased back.
“He broke good, had to move forward, just to make sure we put some heat into the pace, don’t want anybody to walk the dog,” Alvarado said. “I was holding my spot, then I saw Johnny, I didn’t think he would be that close, I thought he was just trying to pick some kind of pieces. He put pressure on the pace, so I took back a little just to save ground into the first turn, I didn’t want to be five wide.”
Magnitude cruised through a half mile in :47.43 as Bracket Buster latched to his girth. McAfee continued to pressure from the outside and Strategic Focus slid through on the inside. Sovereignty loped along, third for a few strides, then back to last for a few more. Just a few. Passing the half-mile pole after three quarters in 1:11.23, Sovereignty split McAfee and Strategic Focus.
“They were struggling past the five pole. They’re trying to hold their spot, I’m not fighting it, I’m just sitting there. I’m in a gallop, in a gallop. Their horses are running and my horse is in a gallop,” Alvarado said. “It’s a good feeling, like, ‘I’ve got them.’ There is no way. Then you’re just paying attention to the horses in front, they were running but my horse right now is at a different level. It’s a good feeling, I’ll tell you that, it’s a good feeling. You haven’t gotten to the wire, but you know you’ve got them already.”
That’s about when Mott’s lip twitched.
Bracket Buster put away Magnitude after a mile in 1:36.02 and took over. For a moment. Sovereignty slung past Magnitude and swung to Bracket Buster as Alvarado gradually turned it up, from a long, slow hand ride to throwing three left-handed crosses to an underhanded tap. Sovereignty picking at strings before a final jam.
“He knows. He knows. He knows. You can see when he gets to the horses, he stays with them for a few strides,” Alvarado said. “He won by 10 lengths, he didn’t have to stay with Bracket Buster, he could have gone by and opened up. Same thing with Journalism, he gets there, stays with him for a little bit and then gone. He does that. I think he just likes to look them in the eye, to play with them, like, ‘Hey, what’s up? See ya.’ That’s what he does. He’s that kind of horse.”
In a furlong, Sovereignty turned the Travers from workmanlike to otherworldly. And completed a one-year arc. The son of Into Mischief finished fourth in his debut going 6 furlongs on the Travers undercard last summer. A typical Mott first-time starter, taking dirt, learning lessons and passing horses. Sovereignty finished second in his next start at a mile and won the Grade 3 Street Sense to finish his juvenile season. This year, he won the Grade 2 Fountain of Youth, finished second from the outside post in the Grade 1 Florida Derby and then ousted Journalism in the Grade 1 Kentucky Derby and Belmont Stakes. A prep in the Grade 2 Jim Dandy landed him as the favorite for the Travers.
“To come back and put up a performance like he did today is unbelievable. In what looks like a very, very good crop of 3-year-olds, to be the class leader is all we can dream of really,” Banahan said. “For Sheikh Mohammed to breed a horse like this, it gives everyone in the organization such great pride. These are the types of races that we want to win. He looks like the best horse we’ve had in the U.S. We’ve always ranked Bernardini as one of our great racehorses here in America, but he ran in the old Darley colors. In Godolphin colors, I’d have to rank Sovereignty up there as the best and he still has some races to go down the road.”
Mott, ever the horse trainer, was thinking about that road minutes after the post-race press conference and minutes before a celebration drink in the Carmen Barrera Room.
“It makes me feel like we got the job done. That’s what we’re doing every day. I’m extremely happy but we’re not done. I guess that’s it. If we’re going on to the Breeders’ Cup, we’ve got another big challenge. You wake up tomorrow and go again.” Mott said. “I’m sure he’s in line for champion 3-year-old. I don’t know if he’d have to win the race in California to be Horse of the Year. I don’t know. After Cigar, I never thought I’d find another one. How would it be possible? I’d say this horse is right there.”
Back at the barn at the end of the day, a Jack Russell ran circles on the sealed Oklahoma track, Billy Joel played in the distance, the last drops of a roadie bottle of champagne were passed around.
Thirty-four people, industry lifers in blue suits, an assistant trainer, a couple of photographers, a toddler in a mud puddle, stood around and ogled Mott’s first Travers winner, the closest thing to Mott’s horse of a lifetime, four-time Eclipse Award winner Cigar.
“Look at his condition. Look at the hip on this horse,” Mott said as he ran his hands across Sovereignty’s right hip, gaskin and stifle.
A few minutes later, five men finished grooming Sovereignty, pulled off his leather halter and fled his stall.
“You could stand here and set your timer and see how long it takes him to eat,” Mott said, offering 20 minutes as the over/under.
Watching Sovereignty bounce and bound toward his feed tub hanging in the front right corner of stall three, nobody would have taken the over.
Mott smiled way bigger than that quarter-pole twitch.
“We’ve been doing it for 55 years,” Mott said. “And it’s the first time we’ve had a 3-year-old like him.”
