Racing: Funny Cide beckoned by old glory in the Belmont Stakes

They were the days when the President of the United States could still emerge from a log cabin and did not necessarily have to be made out of one. In the Depression-hit era of the American 1930s, Seabiscuit became an equine symbol of the times, a former blue-collar horse who worked himself up to be the finest in the land. It was a story so unbelievable that it is soon to be told in film by Universal Pictures.

Seabiscuit ran 47 times without fanfare for a major stable, and was subsequently sold for $8,000 to a Californian car salesman, Charles Howard. He sent the horse to "Silent" Tom Smith, an eccentric mute with a penchant for resurrecting spent racehorses. Red Pollard, a failed boxer turned jockey who was blind in one eye, became the horse's jockey.

Seabiscuit matured into a horse who won 33 races and broke 13 track records. Most memorably, in 1938, he triumphed in the Pimlico Special, a match, in which he beat the Triple Crown winner War Admiral in record time in front of a 40,000 crowd. "Silent" Smith's main problem, it was said, was to find a place to spit without hitting a spectator. It was all too preposterous for words.

Yet here we are, 65 years on, with Pimlico, Triple Crowns and romance yet again figuring in another great American tale of the turf. If Funny Cide benefits from home track advantage in New York a week on Saturday and collects the Belmont Stakes he will become only the 12th horse to win the Triple Crown and the first since Affirmed in 1978. It sounds more monumental if you talk about a quarter of a century.

Funny Cide too is relatively from the poorhouse, a $22,000 yearling trained by a man thus far well removed from the loop of regular success.

Barclay Tagg is a 65-year-old former steeplechase rider, a trainer who first watched the Kentucky Derby on television in 1953 but had not actually been to the occasion until his horse upset the favourite Empire Maker earlier this month.

Tagg started training jumping thoroughbreds, or should that be thoroughbred, in 1971, when he had a single horse. "I never really had any good horses. It was a struggle," he says. "So I got out. I thought I'd struggle in something a little more lucrative."

Tagg was in Maryland for 30 years, working seven days a week, and went on three vacations in that time. Then he transferred first to Flat horses, then to New York, just over a year ago, and at the Big Apple be started to progress the big chestnut.

At Louisville, the journey was completed. Funny Cide won the 129th Kentucky Derby. He did it in his trainer's image, a man not used to rushing life. Funny Cide was the last horse on the grounds at Churchill Downs and became the first since Bold Forbes in 1976 to take the Derby without a rehearsal on the track.

In the aftermath, there was no great talk of rushing off to stud because there are no testicles. Funny Cide was the first gelding to win the Run For The Roses since Clyde Van Dusen in 1929.

There was, however, talk of skulduggery when a photograph in the Miami Herald seemed to suggest that Jose Santos, Funny Cide's jockey, might have been carrying an illegal electronic device, a "joint" with which to stimulate his mount. The case was dismissed but Santos remains an angry man and determined to fight to the Triple Crown. He has been fighting for a while.

From the jockey factory line of Latin America, from a background in which you were privileged to have a job on a factory line, Santos was a poor boy and that is poor by Chilean standards. He grew up with six brothers (three of whom were also jockeys) and a sister and was working with his riding father in the barns from the age of eight.

Santos rode in his first race at the Hipico when he was 14 and then began riding in Florida in 1984 before moving to New York in 1986. For the next four years he was leading jockey nationally in terms of prizemoney.

Now Santos, Barclay Tagg and Funny Cide, are homing in on the big one. You may get a garland of roses at Churchill Downs but there is no time to smell them. The three Classics which form the Triple Crown take place inside a month and no matter the demolition conducted by Funny Cide in the Preakness Stakes at Pimlico (his winning distance of nine and three-quarter lengths was the second greatest in the history of the race, beaten only by the inaugural running in 1873 when Survivor won 10 lengths) the final leg has proved agonisingly elusive in recent years. Funny Cide is the fifth horse in the last seven years to get a chance at the Triple Crown and the ninth since Affirmed.

It sounds like a terminus, but it could be just the first petrol stop for a horse who has no reason to rush away. "It will be fine with me," Barclay Tagg says, "if he races until he's nine."