In the hard-fought 2022 Saudi Cup, its third running but its first running as a Grade 1 stakes, the hardy longshot Emblem Road turned on the afterburners in the last 200 yards, passing the lumbering leaders as if they were standing still, to ring up his lifetime earnings with the handy $10 million chunk of the $20 million purse for the race. Kentucky Derby veteran Mandaloun and London favorite Mishriff, who had been hotly touted, were factors in the race, but could not muster the speed or the force required in the ultimate furlong. The not-quite-as-long longshot Country Grammer, trained by the embattled Bob Baffert, placed a surprising second ahead of the two odds favorites but found himself commandingly passed in the final seconds by a storming Emblem Road, who beat him by a half-length. Midnight Bourbon hung on to show closely behind Country Grammer. Emblem Road’s winning time was 1:50.53.
Emblem Road was a classic underdog bomb in the proceedings, absolutely delighting the bettors who had obviously spent the time to box him in exotics. At the top of the stretch he was whiling away his time in the middle of the pack and looked, almost, as if he would fulfill his lack of promise and deliver a lackluster, journeyman’s finish. Instead, with veteran Panamanian jockey Wigberto “Wiggy” Ramos up, Emblem Road awoke and became a completely different horse than we had seen in the previous seven furlongs, emerging unheralded to begin the blazing run that led him straight to first at the wire.
For his part, the 53-year-old Ramos was one delighted jockey en route to the winner’s circle aboard his mount, seemingly as surprised as the crowd and the rest of the racing world that he was there. Ramos had made a name for himself in the States early in his career, but for the last two decades he has been a champion jockey in Saudi Arabia and thus presented for the Riyadh crowd the figure of a beloved home-town hero.
The race drew an eclectic international field from all corners of the globe, resulting in a very patchwork level of talents in the field of fourteen runners. Before the race it was a widely held thesis that that the three top American horses, beginning with the second-favorite Mandaloun and including, in ascending order of odds, Midnight Bourbon and Art Collector, formed a “big-boys-come-to-town” unit that simply brought an overwhelming array of talents to the race unmatched by the horses from Japan, Brazil and the Gulf region. That shortlist also did not include Baffert’s Country Grammer. While on paper the thinking had a sort of handicapping logic, it turned out to be a delightfully wrong assumption that local talents Emblem Road and Wiggy Ramos were only too happy to destroy.
Emblem Road’s and Mr. Ramos’ skillful last-furlong upset, especially with global horse racing’s richest purse in play, did something else important: It made the Saudi Cup far less of an exercise in attempting to establish the race as a purely money-churning event on the calendar. Rather, Emblem Road gave the Saudi Jockey Club and the organizers an event that, try as one might, nobody can wholly plan, stage, or buy, namely, a real horse race.
