Page 34 - New Mexico Summer 2022
P. 34
Fleeting Fame?
Not For
Mine That Bird
by Pete Herrera
Leonard Blach and Mark Allen with Mine That Bird.
32 New Mexico Horse Breeder
Fame can be very fleeting. Sometimes it goes away almost as quickly as it took to achieve it.
Take the winners of the Kentucky Derby,
a race that takes just over two minutes to run from start to finish. It’s not a stretch to say even the most avid fans of the sport would probably be hard-pressed to name the winners of the last six or seven Kentucky Derbies without some help from Google or some other research.
But then there are horses like Mine That Bird. Thirteen years after his spectacular, totally out of the blue win at Churchill Downs, he continues to fascinate his fans. His popularity doesn’t seem to have waned over the years. They even made a movie of the gelding’s run for the roses. It was titled, 50-to-1, the same as the odds that Mine That Bird carried when he left the starting gate that year.
His is one of those feel-good stories that gets a rerun almost every year when derby week rolls around. Apparently, the storyline that a virtually unknown horse from New Mexico and a blue-collar farm like the Double Eagle in Roswell could go to Kentucky and beat the blue bloods of Thoroughbred racing never gets old.
