Remembering Cigar

With Curlin on the brink of surpassing Cigar as racing's all-time leading money winner, we remember here the career of one of the most memorable horses of our time. Whether he was the best of his era remains a matter of debate, but his emergence from obscurity, whirlwind career and 16-race winning streak remain among the great stories in racing. Cigar resides in retirement at the Kentucky Horse Park. The stories presented here, never before published, were written as part of a never-executed project in early 1997.

By Paul Moran


"Grass grows, bird fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up."
-- Muhammad Ali, New York Times, April 6, 1971

A knot of reporters was gathered tightly around Jimmy Croll, septuagenarian owner and trainer of a gray missile named Holy Bull, who had been three-year-old champion and Horse of the Year in 1994. Holy Bull had just won the Olympic Handicap at Gulfstream Park, a minor January stakes intended to launch an ambitious tour planned by Croll for the charismatic colt who outran his pedigree by many lengths en route to unanimous landslides in the post-season Eclipse Award voting. He had won with appropriate aplomb and Croll was talking about a trip to the Santa Anita Handicap when the gate opened for the Saturday nightcap.

In their post-season evaluations, many Eastern handicappers concluded that 1994 had seen two world-class individual efforts over a flat mile -- Holy Bull's Metropolitan Handicap and Cigar's NYRA Mile. Holy Bull, who had been favored, albeit in vain, to win the Kentucky Derby, was a megastar at the threshold of a new season he was expected to dominate. Cigar was only beginning to reveal himself, layer by layer, one deeper than the next. With Croll still holding court, a nearby television monitor showed Cigar thrashing seven gasping opponents. Croll may not have realized what that meant at the time but Bill Mott did. Based upon that race, there was no question that Holy Bull would find Cigar in the cast for the upcoming Donn Handicap.

That race would mark the only time their stars would cross. Holy Bull was the main attraction that day, and was leading the field of nine into the Gulfstream backstretch when Jerry Bailey, aboard Cigar, heard a shaken Mike Smith shout, "Oh, no!"

A tendon had ruptured in Holy Bull's left foreleg. There was suspensory damage. A cold shiver went through the crowd at Gulfstream and those who watched the national telecast of Holy Bull's first major engagement as a four-year-old. Suddenly, Holy Bull’s head went up and Smith stood in the irons and pulling up the immensely popular colt. It was not a catastrophic injury, but it was a tragic injury nevertheless.

Cigar won the Donn by more than five lengths but the sport's reigning star would not race again. As Cigar ran past the wire at the end of nine crisply run furlongs, every eye at Gulfstream Park was trained on Holy Bull and an ambulance van that rushed to his aid.

Afterward, Mott could only offer Croll his condolences. What can you say to a man who has just lost the best horse he had ever trained just two starts into the new season? In retrospect, however, the mantle was passed that day from the horse who may have become one of the aristocrats of great thoroughbreds to one who would.

It was in that spring and summer that Cigar, the horse, blossomed into Cigar, the star, and eventually Cigar, the media figure. The Gulfstream Park Handicap, three weeks after the Donn, was a breakthrough, his best effort to that point and, importantly, over 10 furlongs. Bailey was motionless throughout. Cigar was never extended, a victory so facile it was eerie. It was time to take Cigar on the road. The Gulfstream Park Handicap had identified racing's next superstar.

Assistant trainer Tim Jones accompanied Cigar to Hot Springs, Arkansas, for the Oaklawn Handicap, which would be run on the Ides of April. This would be a different and in Mott's estimation a most-important test of Cigar's mettle. Concern, winner of the `94 Breeders' Cup Classic was there. So was the gritty California gelding, Best Pal, who had earned more than $5 million, and Urgent Request, who had beaten Best Pal in the Santa Anita Handicap. Silver Goblin, king of the Midwest, had won eight consecutive races and was the local favorite. Cigar crushed them, too.

The effort put forth by Cigar that afternoon in Arkansas was astounding.

Bailey, suffering painful ribs injured three days earlier in a fall at Keeneland, felt his hands and arms go numb as he strained to rate Cigar just off the pace and let out a bit of rein as Cigar entered the turn. In no more than a stride, Cigar accelerated. Silver Goblin was making his own move and was about to become the leader when Cigar moved to his flank. Dale Cordova, on Silver Goblin, raised his whip right-handed but rather than striking his own mount, brought the crop across Cigar's nose.

A sharp blow across the nose at a point so critical will stop the momentum of most horses but not this one. Cigar's reaction was quite the opposite, almost a rage. He shook his head and accelerated again, the drive to the wire uninterrupted and he reached the final pole well clear of Silver Goblin and at the threshold of history. It would endure as one of Cigar's best efforts at nine furlongs, perhaps his best effort, period.

"Oaklawn answered a lot of questions," Mott said at the end of that season when asked to assess a streak of victories that stood at a dozen. "That was a tremendous race, as big a race as a horse can run."

The drumbeat of victory upon victory continued toward summer. In Baltimore, in May, Cigar overpowered Devil His Due and Concern in the Pimlico Special. Lured to Suffolk Downs, near Boston, by a substantial bonus, he won the hearts of New England fans with a decisive, lopsided triumph in the Massachusetts Handicap in early June. His presence as a national figure elevated by the network television exposure afforded by the Pimlico Special, which was run on Preakness Day in `95, Cigar began filling racetracks wherever he went. Fan mail was beginning to arrive at Mott's barn at Belmont. By then, however. Mott was looking toward the autumn and the prestigious, lucrative handicap events run in New York that led toward the Breeders' Cup Classic, which would be run at Belmont Park.

Mott hoped to rest Cigar briefly during the hot summer months, a respite at idyllic Saratoga. Paulson had other ideas.

Cigar's owner had designs on the Hollywood Gold Cup and a triumphant return to California for the horse remembered in the West as a mediocre grass horse.

Mott found no firm ground for disagreement. He told Paulson that he believed Cigar would need a break before the important autumn campaign. But the race at Suffolk had been little more than an afternoon workout and Cigar's morning gallops remained typically strong.

Paulson countered with the mantra that was his and would become Cigar's: "The reward is only as great as the risk."

In California, Cigar was led into the Hollywood Park walking ring and greeted by a chorus of shouted insults that shocked Paulson, Mott and Bailey. Best Pal, though well beyond his prime at age 7, was the object of their affection, not the colt they remembered as a disappointment that had risen to prominence 3,000 miles away.

Handicappers in Southern California massed behind Concern, who had won the Californian after being thrashed by Cigar at Oaklawn and Pimlico. Some liked Tinner's Way, others went for Urgent Request, though he had been no match for Cigar at Oaklawn. Cigar was not among the top three choices in the Los Angeles Times handicappers' consensus that morning.

Horseplayers in the East, meanwhile, were in shock when they saw what they viewed as generous odds. Cigar was 2-5 the day the last time he defeated Concern at Pimlico; 1-10 at Suffolk. At post time at Hollywood Park, Cigar's odds lingered near even money and settled at 9-10.

The Gold Cup was no contest. By the time he left the first bend and entered the backstretch Cigar, angered at having been struck in the face by a clot of dirt, was pulling Bailey out of the saddle and, as he had in Arkansas, the rider felt the feeling beginning to leave his hands. He let Cigar take over and Cigar left no doubt in the minds of those who watched that he was without peer on either coast. He has won nine straight races at six tracks in as many states, five of those Grade I stakes. Now, it was time to rest.

Affirmation

"Sometimes I'll wake up, or stop and think … I'm training Cigar. It's like Secretariat and Lucien Lauren, Affirmed and Laz Barrera. When I get older and look back, it will be nice to know I was associated with Cigar."
-- Bill Mott, February, 1996.

Cigar was the first horse led into the walking ring at Gulfstream Park, 20 minutes before post time for the Donn Handicap of 1996. His coat, stretched taut over rippling muscles, gleamed in the pink late-afternoon Florida sunshine and those in the crowd assembled deep around the perimeter strained for a glimpse.

Allen Paulson, standing next to his wife, watched nervously. The night before, in San Diego, he had accepted the two Eclipse Awards on behalf of the champion older male of 1995 and Horse of the Year, another for himself as the season's outstanding owner. He had spent the winter thinking about this first race of the new year even while accepting congratulations and adulation befitting the remarkable season of accomplishments his horse had layered one upon another from January to late October without a close call or anxious moment.

As Paulson anxiously awaited that dreaded first start of the new season he looked up and saw a small airplane trailing a banner that read: "Thank you, Madeleine and Allen Paulson for the Horse of the Year."

Could anything be better than `95? In this game every stride might be the last and any morning could bring disaster. When you're on a roll long enough, you start wondering where the wall is, where do you fall over the cliff?

If he felt the pressure attendant to a winning streak of potentially historic proportions -- and he did -- Mott concealed his anxiety and fatigue admirably as he watched Cigar tour the walking ring. Mott had, the evening before, accepted his own Eclipse Award as the outstanding trainer of 1995. He and his wife, Tina Marie, accompanied the Paulsons on the transcontinental overnight flight to Florida and the ever-dutiful trainer arrived at his barn at Gulfstream before six o'clock that morning. Yet there was no sign of fatigue at five o'clock in the afternoon. There was, however, a hint of tension in the jaw just above the knot in a tie provided by the publishers of Cigar Aficionado magazine and around the eyes, but somehow Cigar's jet-lagged trainer looked fresh.

"Nervous?" someone answered.

"Very nervous," Mott answered, his eyes never off Cigar.

Mott walked to a stall in which he saddled Wekiva Springs, another horse he trained whose owners insisted upon running in the Donn. Were Cigar not in the race, Wekiva Springs would have been favored. Should Cigar somehow falter, Mott faced the prospect of beating Cigar with a lesser horse from his own barn, snuffing his own star's streak in what would probably have been the most embarrassing victory for any trainer since Angle Light upset stablemate Secretariat in the `73 Wood Memorial and left Lucien Lauren ashen and dumbfounded in the winner's circle at Aqueduct.

Cigar, first into the ring, was the last saddled for and when he reappeared with Bailey astride he was on his toes, neck bowed, a coil of energy. Bailey smiled.

A half-hour later, Paulson had the look of a man who just cleared a dreaded first hurdle he anticipated anxiously during the days and weeks leading up to the Donn. "We've got that thirteen thing out of the way," after Cigar's first overpowering victory of the new season. At Gulfstream Park, over a course he relished, Cigar extended his streak of consecutive victories which stood three short of Citation's North American record and launched a season that lingers in the memories of all who watched, mesmerized.

There are pressures attached to running the best horse in the world for the first time in a new season. When you own the best horse in the world or train the best horse in the world and have a twelve-race winning streak in progress, anticipation is understandably high and there is no margin for error. The world watches; dissects every workout. Second-guessing is a cherished and inalienable right at the racetrack and Mott had been training Cigar in a fishbowl for almost a year.

In case the time between the Breeders' Cup Classic and the Donn had dulled the memory, Cigar provided an emphatic reminder with a sharp-edged illustration of what dominance means. His second Donn victory was effortless while his own stablemate, Wekiva Springs, was fully extended in his wake and embarrassed when he attempted in impudent challenge a quarter-mile out. "If anybody was going to beat him, today was their best shot," Bailey said after dismounting.

Remarkably, Cigar seemed to have broken through the ebb and flow of form cycles that in ordinary horses are repetitive as tides and seemed oblivious to the minor maladies that afflict the mortal. He had come out of the Hollywood Gold Cup with an inflamed ankle, but recovered quickly and suffered a minor hoof injury in the Breeders' Cup Classic that was salved by the winter’s brief respite. Otherwise, he was amazingly sound for a horse so large and with so much speed. Cigar's schedule had not been interrupted.

"That's the beauty," said Paulson. "He wins so easily and he comes out of his races so good. When you win that easily, you can last a long time."

Equine fortune can turn on a dime and soon after the Donn Cigar's suffered a setback. The Santa Anita Handicap, in early March, was the second race on Cigar's 1996 schedule but Mott writes schedules in pencil and keeps and eraser at hand. The horse's condition determines the final call and on the morning of February 21 it began to appear doubtful that Cigar would make Big Cap after Mott found the horse standing in his stall favoring his right hoof. Mott called his veterinarian, Dr. Jim Prendergast. There was evidence of a bruise and an abscess.

Later that day, Mott ordered the shoe and the abscess lanced, relieving the internal pressure. Cigar appeared more comfortable almost immediately. But he would not leave the shedrow for a fortnight. "Everything," Mott said, "is on hold."

Toast of the Big Apple

"I always think there's nothing he can't do as long as it's on dirt." -- Jerry Bailey

Search the planet pole-to-pole and you will find no tougher audience than the horseplayers of New York, the ground-floor, paddock-to-apron and back again stalwarts. They have seen it all. Seen them all. Generation upon generation of champions have raced before generation upon generation of New Yorkers. Every Triple Crown winner is required to rise to the occasion on the huge, 12-furlong course on the eastern edge of the greatest city on the planet. Their losing tickets fall upon hallowed ground. They know a big-time horse when they see it and to the New Yorker, no horse can be considered great without having won an important race at Belmont Park.

Not all the 37,264 people at Belmont Park on October 28, 1995 were New Yorkers, only the loudest, but they stood in unison as Cigar inhaled the muddy final furlong of the 12th Breeders' Cup Classic and they were still standing and applauding when Bailey, helmet held aloft, returned to be unsaddled.

By then, Cigar had waltzed through the Woodward Stakes and the Jockey Club Gold Cup. He had not run at the track where Mott is based for most of the year until the Woodward. His summer layoff had spanned more than two months but he was razor sharp. Three weeks later, he caught the first wet track of his career in the Jockey Club Gold Cup without difficulty but without his usual voracity. With every victory, paddock crowds grew larger and the winner's circle ovations grew louder and more raucous. In the autumn of `95, Cigar's New York races were celebrations.

Now, they stood and cheered in salute to a horse they had embraced as their own, a phenomenon that took place everywhere he would race. Cigar had just run the fastest ten furlongs in the Classic's history, sweeping to the lead in a heart-pounding flurry while railing against the bit on the stretch turn thundering into the straight, the issue decided long before the wire. They stood transfixed at the sight of a huge, burnished mass of hooved muscle, coiled and screaming to be turned loose. Tom Durkin fanned the flame from the announcer's booth. "Unconquerable! Invincible! Unbeatable! Cigar!"

They cheered Bailey, who had just ridden his fourth Classic winner and third in succession and who they would curse after his next loss on a favorite. They cheered Mott and owner Allen Paulson as they embraced. They would realize in the afterglow that they had just seen one of those rare successions of moments that will always be remembered in slow motion.

The sky, leaden at the outset of Breeders' Cup Day, had cleared as if in tribute to Cigar's last race of a perfect season and the mud underfoot left by torrential thunderstorms that plundered Long Island through the night and into the morning had produced fast times throughout the afternoon. Conditions, damp though they were, were perfect for a brazen display of speed and unmistakable equine superiority. This is where Cigar established not only that he was clearly the world's best thoroughbred; he was alone on another plane.

Mott was understandably aglow. "Today, they brought the best and you saw the outcome. He overcame the ten post. He's won ten times this year, twelve in a row. He did the job again. It's a thing of beauty to watch him run. He's fluid and beautiful."

Desert Storm

"We have not formed the right theory of history until we see history itself as a spiritual drama, moving toward a significant denouement and at the same time a process which has meaning and value as it goes on." -- Rufus Jones, The Eternal Gospel, 1938

They do not give away t-shirts and tote bags to entice people to attend Nad al-Sheba race track. Each night during the racing season they raffle a Lexus and one-kilogram blocks of gold. There are no exotic multiple wagers to tempt the fans. The track built by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum has no betting windows.


Cigar was as far from Aqueduct, where all this began, as a horse can get. His star was still in ascent and it took him in late March to the sheikhdom of Dubai in a part of the world familiar to few Americans, the ancestral home of the thoroughbred.

A bruised hoof cost Cigar the date at Santa Anita Park and an unprecedented, globally anticipated trip to Dubai, on the Persian Gulf shore, was in grave doubt a month before the inaugural running of the $4-million World Cup.

Twenty-four days before the race in Dubai, a large morning gathering at Gulfstream watched Cigar jog for the first time since he suffered the bruise. Mott, alongside on a pony, was encouraged. The champion wore a bar shoe for protection, but Mott soon removed it when it became apparent that Cigar was uncomfortable. Ten days later, only a fiberglass patch supported the hoof when Cigar worked six furlongs over a muddy track at Gulfstream.

Cigar's plane was scheduled to leave in twelve hours when Mott accompanied Cigar and Jerry Bailey to the track for a workout upon which the trip hinged. The Florida weather had cleared and the footing was fast. Cigar blistered seven furlongs in 1:23. He had missed a dozen training days and had worked only once, three days before this move, but Cigar was razor sharp. It was time to pack. Destiny beckoned from afar.

The Oxford-educated Crown Prince of Dubai owns more thoroughbreds than any man in the world. Combined with those owned by his brother, Hamdan, and others in the family, the Maktoum holdings in breeding, racing and property incidental to those pursuits qualify as a global dynasty, long dominant in Europe and increasingly important in the United States. The World Cup was conceived by Sheikh Mohammed as a vehicle to bring the world's attention to Dubai as a racing center and he had sufficient resources to make something happen at the Eastern tip of the Arabian Peninsula. Entry was by invitation and horses were present in Dubai from Europe, Japan and Australia and the United States along with those owned by the Maktoum family. But the race would mean nothing without Cigar.

Cigar, perhaps jet-lagged, was listless and off his feed for days after his arrival in Dubai but came around after Mott's arrival and soon was acting like a horse in top form. The unusual winter rains concerned Mott. No one remembered a winter so wet in the Persian Gulf. So did the sand surface over which the World Cup would be run. There is no surface more taxing than wet sand. But Cigar was on top of a big race and the whole world was watching.

Three nights before the World Cup a crowd of about 500 that included a throng of international racing press and Dubai's leading citizens gathered at Nad al Sheba, where several World Cup horses were to work beneath the lights. Sheikh Mohammed was dressed in a golden robe. The Paulsons brought their dogs.

Cigar appeared to handle the strange new situation quite well.

"I saw Cigar when he won the Breeders' Cup," Sheikh Mohammed said. "He looked like a lion."

March 27, 1996. It was late morning in New York, mid-afternoon in London and dusk in Dubai when televisions around the globe clicked on. Cigar and the other World Cup horses were led to the saddling enclosure. White-robed Sudanese Muslims kneeling in rows, bowed in prayer as the horses passed. In the elegant grandstand, men in white gloves waited on the Arabian elite. In the crowd, people from Abu Dhabi, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Europe and the United States, awaited Cigar's arrival. Sheikh Mohammed's vision had materialized. "I had a dream," he said, "and now they are here."

They will remember this night for a very long time in Dubai.

The sandy ground gave way beneath the thrust of Cigar's initial stride and suddenly Bailey found himself father behind the pacemakers than he intended but before a sixteenth-mile had been run, Cigar has settled into a powerful stride that took him to within a few lengths of the leaders despite Bailey's stern restraint.

By the time he turned into a stretch three furlongs-long, Cigar was raging with run on the outside, pulling hard at Bailey, who was determined to wait as long as possible before pulling the trigger. Behind them, Soul of the Matter moved into contention beneath Gary Stevens. A quarter-mile above the finish, Cigar had a clear lead but seemed to gear down, almost as if overconfident. Suddenly, Bailey saw the blue silks he recognized as Bert Bacharach's and knew it was Soul of the Matter alongside. Mott swallowed hard. Bailey reached back and put the whip to Cigar's right flank. Bacharach was on his feet, screaming.

There had been no threat to Cigar since he first raced on dirt, but Soul of the Matter loomed ominously alongside. Allen Paulson watched in disbelief. The rest of the field melted behind the pair shoulder to shoulder in the desert. Around the globe, people leaned closer to television screens.

For a few strides, Soul of the Matter's nose was in front of Cigar's. Bailey switched the whip to his left hand and drove Cigar out toward his challenger. Bailey hit Cigar again and he responded with a last burst that put him a neck in front, then a half-length. From there, almost a furlong out and both exhausted, they maintained that margin to the wire.

As Bailey rose in the irons and raised his fist toward the black desert sky, cheers rolled over the track, a cacophony of Arabic, English and tongues not readily identified. For the first time, there was a horse that could unquestionably be identified as best in the world.

"It was the most he's ever been challenged and we often wondered what would happen," Mott observed. "This proves how good a horse he really is."

Cigar's unprecedented success in Dubai took the streak to fourteen. Since World War II, only two American horses had won more races in succession -- Buckpasser, who won fifteen, and Citation.

Transcendence

The transcendent horse chisels moments deep in memory, in history, legend and what generations from now will mellow into lore. The transcendent horse towers over those of his time, like Babe Ruth, Muhammad Ali or Michael Jordan; provides a standard against which other champions of the era are measured. The transcendent horse makes hearts race, sets ablaze the imagination; defies gravity and physics as he treads ground over which only his like are capable of reaching. At the most-rare of moments he sores to places unexplored even by the greatest of champions past.

Cigar, author of the longest winning streak racing has seen in 48 years, the most-acclaimed thoroughbred since Secretariat held the nation spellbound in 1973, was on this November morning traveling ground over which no thoroughbred champion had gone before-- not Citation, not Man o' War, not any of those in the Hall of Fame. Not Pegasus himself. Cigar was playing the biggest room in all of sport. Cigar was playing the Garden.

The outbound Midtown Tunnel was closed to facilitate an unencumbered passage beneath the East River. In the end, Cigar was able even to defeat the commute to Manhattan on his way to Madison Square Garden and stop traffic in New York City.

Cigar's fans had lined the elegant terraces that drape Arlington Park on a cloudless July afternoon on which he racing world came to a standstill to watch a breathless run at history, his sixteenth consecutive victory. In a span of two years he became the closest thing to an international rock star racing has ever seen; police escorts, legions of photographers and reporters; television lights everywhere. When he arrived at a racetrack, the backstretch workers, trainers and owners awaited his entrance at the stable gate. When he ran, his legion of fans showed up in early morning to secure a vantage point with a view. They crammed ten-deep around saddling enclosures from Miami to Del Mar, from the shores of the Persian Gulf to the Boston suburbs. They gathered in the mist by the thousands to watch him gallop at first light in Saratoga Springs. They stood in the gathering gloom of dank autumn afternoons at Belmont Park and cheered as only New Yorkers are able to cheer.

Now, a week after he ran for the last time in the Breeders' Cup Classic in Canada and two days after the official announcement of his retirement, Cigar was on his way to Manhattan, his van escorted by police as it rolled down urban canyons. A mounted escort and a Budweiser wagon drawn by a team of Clydesdales, a group of bagpipers and the New York Knickerbockers cheerleaders met the van down Seventh Avenue and accompanied Cigar to the Garden.

His fans cheered as he passed. The van's side door was opened, so they could get one last look at the elegant, regal horse they had so often cheered one on those autumn afternoons at Belmont Park when he left the impression that he may have been unbeatable. New York cab drivers got out of their cars to watch him pass. People spilled from the buildings and into the street. Bill Mott, architect of this masterpiece, and Jerry Bailey, Cigar's jockey, waived to the fans. When the van arrived at Madison Square Garden, it was immediately surrounded. Girl Scouts chanted, "We want Cigar! We want Cigar."

Inside the historic Garden, the 113th National Horse Show's final day of competition was underway and the crowd of 16,000 was a unique gathering of racetrack folk, fans and those involved in the world of horse shows, disparate groups joined in the world's best-known arena by an appreciation for the world's best equine athlete. Unprecedented. As Cigar was led into the show ring, Bailey astride in owner Allen Paulson's red, white and blue silks, they rose in unison.

Bailey jogged Cigar around the ring several times, finally guiding the horse who was so furious in motion on the racetrack to a group of small children in the front row. Cigar stood quietly, lowered his head so they could reach out and pet his nose; as kind with children as he was fierce in battle.

Little more than 24 hours earlier, Mott had taken Cigar to the track at Belmont Park for what would be his final gallop over the course where his legend took shape and gained momentum, where he stamped his name in the rock of history alongside the established legends American racing. It was a melancholy morning, the morning on which all those connected to Cigar and all those who had savored the rare opportunity to witness the unfolding of 22 months of sustained invincibility came to grips with the stark reality that comes to the life of every horse -- it was over.

A solemn, ceremonious unsaddling followed Cigar's triumphant entrance. Gifts were presented: wagons full of "big apples" pulled into the show by children, a solid-gold horseshoe from Anheuser-Busch on behalf of the famous Clydesdales, a floral blanket. Then, the lights dimmed, save for a spotlight trained on the champion, who was led around the ring by Tim Jones, Mott's assistant, and groom Juan Campuzano, two young men who had been at Cigar's side throughout the soaring journey to immortality. A lone trumpeter played a slow, mournful rendition of "Auld Land Syne." The crowd lapsed into a reverent silence.

Jones passed the reins to Mott, an orchestra joined the trumpet and the crowd again came alive. The man who had lived and died with every stride of Cigar's journey into history looked up from the floor of Madison Square garden and in every direction saw people crying and applauding, cheering through tears.

Allen Paulson stood and watched. So did Bailey. "There's going to be a big void in a lot of our lives," Paulson would say later. As Cigar was led out of the ring, the realization came that there would be a huge void in all of racing.