In a Tizzy Over Izzy

Kinghaven Farms’ David Willmot didn’t foresee a sparkling future for Izvestia when he first laid eyes on the rakish little grey as a foal. Izestia wasn’t exactly a showstopper.

“Izzy was one of the smallest, worst-looking, pathetic foals we ever had born on the farm,” said Willmot, the former president and CEO of the Woodbine Entertainment Group. “He was never a big, strapping horse.”

Still, Izzy managed to become not only the easiest of Queen’s Plate winners in 131 years and only the fourth Triple Crown winner in history, but he marched through his three-year-old season draped in superlatives.

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The crown was supposed to have fallen to Sam-Son’s marvelous looker Sky Classic, a royally bred son of Nijinsky II that had been marked for the Kentucky Derby trail until he cracked a hind cannon bone early in his three-year-old season. While Sky Classic had been chosen Canada’s top two-year-old colt in 1989, Izestia was flying under the radar, racing only twice, finishing sixth in the Coronation Futurity on a sloppy track that he didn’t seem to relish. His first race was more impressive. In the paddock before the race, a horse nearby kicked a wall, prompting Izzy to jump over backwards and fall. The colt seemed so dazed afterward that trainer Roger Attfield told rider Don Seymour to have him scratched if he didn’t wake up. But he went out and won the race by six lengths.

In 1990, Izvestia blossomed. Even before he faced the starting gate of the $392,000 Queen’s Plate, most deemed him unbeatable. With five wins in seven starts under his belt, Izvestia didn’t disappoint at odds of 3-5. From post 12, he absolutely destroyed his 12 opponents, winning by 13 lengths, the greatest winning margin in the race’s history. Even though Seymour never cocked his whip, Izvestia sped the distance in an astonishing 2:01 4/5, shaving one-fifth of a second of the 30-year-old stakes record set by Victoria Park and equaled in 1978 by Regal Embrace. The time was two-fifths faster than Northern Dancer’s clocking in 1964 and a fifth faster than With Approval’s time the previous year. His time was as fast or faster than all but 11 Kentucky Derby winners, including Unbridled, the Derby winner of 1990. Izvestia ran the final two furlongs in 24 1/5 seconds, unpushed and unthreatened. With Approval did it in 25 3/5 seconds the year before. There are few that have run faster final quarters in any of the Kentucky Derbies or Queen’s Plate to date. Only Secretariat’s final quarter clocking of 23 seconds in 1973 was faster than Izvestia’s final sprint to the wire. As for lopsided victories, Izvestia’s effort was the ultimate. Young Kitty won the Plate in 1928 by 12 lengths. Lyford Cay won the 1957 Plate by 11-and-a-half lengths.

Izvestia earned Canadian Horse of the Year honours for 1990, but died tragically just a year later while running in the Rothman’s International at Woodbine.

As the field moved in front of the grandstand for the first time in the one-and-a-half mile race, Izvestia broke a hind leg, suffering a compound fracture of his left hind cannon bone and demolishing his pastern in 15 pieces. He could not be saved.

50 Years Ago | Whistling Sea

Whistling Sea definitely did something for Canadian racing when he became the first Plate winner to have been foaled outside Ontario. In proving that a Windfields Farm address was not essential to the Plate — although the record certainly indicated that it helped since all but three of the previous 16 winners had been bred by E.P. Taylor — Paul Olivier’s triumph with an unfashionably bred colt from Okotoks, AB, might have set Canadian breeding back a step or two.

On a sunny June afternoon, a Woodbine crowd of almost 30,000, including the Queen Mother, saw Whistling Sea go from rags-to-riches with a gate-to-wire victory.

The horse was sired by Alibastro, a stallion that Olivier had bought for $1,600 — about the amount he earned while losing 33 consecutive races. The dam was by 1938 Plate winner Bunty Lawless, but breeder Les Saunders was able to buy B Fast for a mere $300. Go back a generation in Whistling Sea’s pedigree and the bloodlines were quality. The class had skipped a generation, but the colt reestablished it on Plate Day for trainer Roy Johnson and jockey Tak Inouye, who was raised in the BC interior after his family of Japanese immigrants was shipped there during World War II, lest — went the oppressive and wrong-headed thinking of the day —they provide aid to an enemy that might invade the West Coast.

100 Years Ago | Tartarean

Aroused by the daily dispatches of heavy Allied casualties suffered at Ypres and Gallipoli, anti-German feeling in Toronto was at its height in the spring of 1915 when Charles Vance Millar, a wealthy, but eccentric lawyer chose to ignore the ceremonies honouring the upset triumph of his King’s Plate winner, Tartarean.

The consternation provoked by Millar’s absence was tranquil compared to the outrage fomented in 1926 by his “uncommon and capricious” will. It bequeathed the bulk of his estate to the woman (or women) who gave birth to the most children in Toronto over the next 10 years. The father of the maligned “Great Stork Derby” during the Depression years apparently perceived that much poverty stemmed from “uncontrolled child-bearing” and it was Millar’s way of embarrassing the city into relaxing its strictures against birth control.

While Millar railed against injustices throughout his career, his acquisition of Tartarean for the Plate was solely possible because of a restriction that discriminated against horse owners who were not British subjects. Club directors were not in agreement when faced with the problem of allowing a non-British subject to enter a horse that otherwise would qualify. But a “British majority” ruled the boardroom and Mrs. Lily Livingston was forced to sell her Plate eligibles two of which (Tartarean and Fair Montague) were acquired by Millar. Both horses were maidens, but they easily outclassed the 10 other Plate starters as Tartarean hit the wire a short neck in front of his stablemate, who was thought to be the superior one in trainer John Nixon’s barn.