What might have been: Hoist The Flag

     When you follow sports, part of having fun with sports is remembering events and athletes, talking about who was better than whom, and learning about the history of the sports of interest. 

However, in every sport, there are stories of what might have been due to various reasons, events, or injuries.

And as time goes by with fewer and fewer remembering those athletes, their tales can sometimes be forgotten.

Which brings us to Hoist The Flag.

The 1970 Juvenile champion, Hoist The Flag was never defeated on the track and even though he would never achieve greatness on the track, he would show his courage and toughness in a manner that allowed future injured equine stars a fighting chance at life.

As a two-year-old, Hoist The Flag won five of his six starts, including the Cowdin Stakes, and in his only defeat in the 1970 Champagne Stakes at Belmont Park, Hoist The Flag won going away but was placed last due to interference in the early portion of the race.

Hoist The Flag was assigned 126 pounds by the Jockey Club's Experimental Free Handicap, which the Jockey Club rates two-year-old horses by weight (the higher weights are assigned to the best horses) for a mythical race among two-year-olds at a one-mile and a sixteenth distance.

After Hoist The Flag suffered sore shins, he was sent to winter in South Carolina.

As Hoist The Flag was traveling north to New York where he would be based for the season, trainer Sidney Watters decided to stop in Bowie, Maryland for an allowance race to make his season debut against competition that would not test him too much in his first start.

During the six furlongs, he wasn't tested a bit as he eased to a fifteen-length victory as the road to New York and the "winter Triple Crown" at Aqueduct Race Track awaited.

The three-race prep series for the Kentucky Derby started with the seven-furlong Bay Shore Stakes, moved to the one-mile Gotham before ending with the Wood Memorial at a mile and an eighth.

Hoist The Flag burnished his credentials with a destructive performance in the Bay Shore, winning by seven lengths in a track and stakes record 1:21, a world record for a three-year-old running at the seven-furlong distance.

Hoist The Flag was the winter book favorite to win the Kentucky Derby and only improved his odds after the Bay Shore win.

The Bay Shore would be the final race that Hoist The Flag would ever run.

On March 30, 1971, Hoist The Flag was finishing a training session of five furlongs under his regular jockey (but not his regular training rider) Jean Crugret, when Cruguet felt a jolt under him with Hoist The Flag breaking his right hind leg, yet his momentum continuing to carry him another half-furlong causing further injury.

Hoist The Flag had suffered a broken cannon bone and a shattered long pastern bone and his life was in danger.

The equine insurance company had authorized the veterinarian who was handling Hoist The Flag to humanely destroy him. Still, the colt's owner Jane Clark authorized permission for doctors to attempt to save the colt provided that he did not suffer.

Surgeons would take a bone graft from Hoist The Flag, use screws and metal plates around the break to add strength and security, and create the first fiberglass cast to place around the leg to hopefully allow healing and blood flow to the damaged leg.

Lack of blood flow is often the fatal part in leg injuries as the blood doesn't flow to the damaged area and eventually causes the horse to be unable to stand, which in the equine world is the end of the line as there is nothing that the doctors can then do to help.

Hoist The Flag's temperament would be the most important part of his recovery as other injured horses would later discover that some horses simply would not tolerate the cast on their leg, and thrash around to remove it, which would cause more damage and force the horse to be euthanized, most famously with the 1975 injury to the filly Ruffian after her match race with 1975 Kentucky Derby winner Foolish Pleasure.

Hoist The Flag's patience and tolerance allowed him to deal with the cast without damaging the cast or his leg, which helped the healing process enough that months later, Hoist The Flag was able to be transported to his new home, Claiborne Farm in Kentucky.

It wouldn't be until 1973 that Hoist The Flag would start to breed mares, which meant his first crop wouldn't hit the racetrack as a two-year-old until 1976.  

Hoist The Flag would be active at stud for only eight seasons before another leg injury forced him to succumb and be humanely destroyed in 1980.

Hoist The Flag sired Alleged, the 1977 European Horse of the Year and two-time winner of the Arc De Triomphe, and Sensational, the 1976 champion two-year-old filly in his first crop and he would later sire Linkage, who won several stakes and finished second in the 1982 Preakness.

Hoist The King, who set a record for a yearling colt in 1979, selling for 1.6 million was the progeny of Hoist The Flag but Hoist The King was a disappointment as a racehorse as he never broke his maiden in nine races and only twice finished in the money.

It was as a broodmare sire that Hoist The Flag made his mark as daughters of Hoist The Flag bearing such stars as multiple grade one winner's Broad Brush and Cryptoclearance, Breeders Cup Distaff winner and three-year-old filly champion Sacahuista, and arguably the great female racehorse ever in Personal Ensign, who was never defeated in thirteen starts with maybe the dramatic win in Breeders Cup history, her come from behind win to conclude her career in the 1988 Distaff over a sloppy track that she hated to nail 1988 Kentucky Derby winner Winning Colors at the wire.

So what might have been had Hoist The Flag not taken that bad step in 1971?

One never knows but Hoist The Flag was bred to last longer distances as a son of Tom Rolfe (Tom Rolfe won the 1965 Preakness, and lost by a neck in the Belmont) and I'd think that he would not have had an issue at a mile and a quarter in the Kentucky Derby.

The mile-and-a-half Belmont Stakes would have been anyone's guess but I'd say his chances wouldn't have been worse than any other horse in the race, if not better than most by his breeding.

Jean Cruguet was the regular ride of Hoist The Flag and 1977 Triple Crown winner Seattle Slew and Cruguet, who had nothing to gain by stating this, was quoted as believing that Hoist The Flag was the superior racehorse to Seattle Slew.

If you project greatness, that certainly removes the mania from the 1971 Triple Crown from the Caracas Cannonball Canonero II, who would win the Kentucky Derby and Preakness before a fourth-place finish in the Belmont Stakes.

If Hoist The Flag won the Triple Crown, it would have been Hoist The Flag as the first horse to win the Crown since Citation's 1948 Triple Crown and not Secretariat, so does that take away a little from Secretariat's achievement and mainstream media attention as a "Superhorse"?

It certainly affected the attention from Seattle Slew and Affirmed's win in 1977 and 78, coming so close to Secretariat's Crown run, so it makes sense that Secretariat would have received less than Hoist The Flag.

And for Secretariat vs Hoist The Flag, it's unlikely considering the value at stud even then for a Triple Crown winner that Hoist The Flag would have still been running at age five in 1973 but nor impossible that he could have still been racing, especially if something would have been at stake such as an all-time money winning racehorse, so there could have been a slim chance that a late fall matchup, likely in New York where the trainers of both horses (Sidney Watters for Hoist The Flag and Lucien Laurin for Secretariat) housed their stables, in either the Woodward Stakes or the Jockey Club Gold Cup could have happened.

What might have been is a series that will dwell on speculation and not on answers, and I hope that when I do these readers enjoy them.

For a far more detailed article on Hoist The Flag and one that was very valuable to me in writing this post read "The Will To Win, The Fight To Survive" from Past The Wire.com.