ARCADIA — Frankie Dettori rode Newgate into the winner’s circle after the Santa Anita Handicap on Sunday, turned to people he knew, pumped his fists and shouted: “I won the Big ‘Cap! I won the Big ‘Cap!”
The jockey was saying a mouthful about a classic horse race that is widely thought to be in decline thanks to increasing competition from other winter events for heavyweight thoroughbred talent.
Dettori, the 53-year-old Italian, has won most of the great races on Earth, races that pay seven-figure purses and crown champions.
But winning the $500,000, Grade I Santa Anita Handicap for the first time meant the world to him.
Rallying from fifth in a field of seven, Newgate and Dettori got up to win by a head over 22-1 front-runner Subsanador and pay $8.40.
Newgate completed a natural hat trick of graded stakes on the day for trainer Bob Baffert, who earlier won the $300,000, Grade II San Felipe Stakes with Imagination ($3.80) and Dettori, and the Grade I, $300,000 Frank E. Kilroe Mile on turf with Du Jour ($8:40) and Flavien Prat.
Baffert-trained Reincarnate ran third in the Big ‘Cap. Phil D’Amato’s Newgrange, 3-1 favorite, faded to sixth in the seven-horse field after chasing Subsanador from the outside early.
The afternoon’s final stakes, the Grade II Buena Vista for fillies and mares going one mile on grass, was won by front-running Ruby Nell ($3.60) and Edwin Maldonado for trainer Richard Mandella.
Big ‘Cap day drew an on-site crowd of 16,581 and total wagering of $16.4 million after the card was postponed a day because of Saturday’s heavy rain.
The Big ‘Cap triumph was the sixth for Baffert, who has won most of America’s great races.
“It is such a historical race,” Baffert said of the race, the nation’s first to carry a $100,000 purse when it debuted in 1935, with a roster of superstar winners starting with Seabiscuit in 1940, “and just to win it, for our team and with Frankie Dettori, it really makes it that much more special.”
Four-year-old Newgate, who, like San Vicente winner Imagination is by Into Mischief, won his first stakes since the 2023 Robert Lewis Stakes. Back from an 11-month layoff, he ran second in an optional-claiming sprint and the San Pasqual Stakes to set him up for his first Grade I win.
Newgate is the seventh consecutive Big ‘Cap winner who went into the starting gate without a Grade I on his resume.
But statistics like that don’t diminish the race in the eyes of winners like Dettori.
“When I was a kid here in the late ’80s,” said Dettori, who rode at Santa Anita as an apprentice before spending the heart of his career in Europe, “there were 60,000 here to see Ferdinand and Alysheba, and you couldn’t move.”
He was talking about a 1988 duel of Kentucky Derby winners in which Alysheba and Chris McCarron beat Ferdinand and Bill Shoemaker by a half-length in front of, the records show, 70,432 at Santa Anita.
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“To win it, I couldn’t ask for anything more,” Dettori said. “It is a big feather in my cap.”
On a track listed as fast but still drying out from Friday’s and Saturday’s storm, the 1 1/4 miles took 2:03.49, the slowest Big ‘Cap in nearly 50 years.
It looked as if Subsanador, John Sadler’s Argentine import, would hang on under Hector Berrios — until the final strides.
“I followed Victor (Espinoza, on Newgrange) and I sat pretty low until the quarter pole,” Dettori said. “I took my horse to the outside. I thought I would get to the line OK, and in fairness Subsanador gave me a good fight.
“The last 20 yards we got in front, and I couldn’t believe it. I could not believe that I had done it.”