I’ll Have Anotherwasn’t exactly a huge longshot, but he certainly was getting treated like one. But there was the horse, in Friday’s New York Times, predicted to come in dead last.
“Santa Anita winner has overachieved,” wrote the well-respected Times horse racing reporter Joe Drape,” but there won’t be any magic here.”
Drape was one of the few who boldly predicted how the entire field would finish and decided to put 12 horses with longer odds ahead of I’ll Have Another, who of course went on to win the Derby.
“I did hear about that particular prediction,” said J. Paul Reddam, the horse’s owner. “At first when you read what the pundits say it can kind of be a little bit unnerving because it will be different from your own opinion and you wonder how much bias you have. But if you go and you look, you’ll see that that particular writer had him last, but somebody else had him first.”
That actually would be quite hard to find.