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Saturday, April 07, 2001

By Pohla Smith, Post-Gazette Sports Writer

A year ago, Gary Stevens was a retired jockey with bum knees, trying to learn the ins and outs of training.

In the fall, thanks to the rest he got during his nearly one-year retirement and new medicine for his degenerative arthritis, he eased back into riding just in time to ride a big, precocious 2-year-old named Point Given in the Breeders' Cup Juvenile.

Today, he rides the Bob Baffert trainee as favorite in the $750,000 Santa Anita Derby, the colt's final prep race before the May 5 Kentucky Derby.

If they win, Stevens will tie a long-standing track record. He has already won the Santa Anita Derby seven times; an eighth will tie Bill Shoemaker for most in history.

"If someone would have told me at this time last year that I was going to be sitting in the position I'm sitting in right now, riding Point Given, I would have thought they were completely crazy," Stevens said.

He spoke earlier this week during a national teleconference previewing the four Derby preps today. Besides the Santa Anita, the others are the $500,000 Illinois Derby at Sportsman's Park in Chicago, the $500,000 Lone Star Derby at Lone Star Park in Grand Prairie, Texas, and the $250,000 Flamingo Stakes at Hialeah in greater Miami.

Dream Run, fourth in the Florida Derby, was the early favorite in the Illinois, and Outofthebox was favored at Hialeah. Virtual co-favorites at Lone Star were Hoovergetthekeys, winner of the El Camino Real Derby, and Louisiana Derby winner Fifty Stars.

The Santa Anita is the biggest draw, though. Point Given is the early Kentucky Derby pick, and Stevens would like to win for what would be his fourth time.

Point Given would also give Baffert three Kentucky Derby victories.

Going into Santa Anita, Stevens is giving neither the potential record nor the knees much thought.

Fast horses "make the knees feel very, very good," he said.

"I just want to stay focused on the race. We've got a couple of hurdles to get over yet with the Santa Anita Derby and the Kentucky Derby, and I want to focus on each race as it comes.

"I'll worry about the record books after the weekend. If it happens and my name is alongside Bill Shoemaker's, obviously it would be a great honor for me. But we've got to get there first."

Adding intrigue to the Santa Anita Derby was the way Baffert has prepared Point Given for Kentucky.

The most common method is to lay top 2-year-olds off for the winter, usually after the Breeders' Cup, and gradually stretch them out for the Derby's 11/4-mile distance in three, or sometimes four, prep races at age 3.

Point Given never really had a total layoff -- he followed the Breeders' Cup with a victory in the Hollywood Futurity. Baffert then kept him in light training until it was time to prepare him for his 2001 debut in the San Felipe.

Baffert has estimated that Point Given weighs about 1,300 pounds -- 1,000 is average -- and Stevens said the trainer was afraid the colt would put on even more weight if he had a real vacation. "And to get him back to the level of fitness that he was at that time, there's always the risk of injury.

"You could see with his victory in the San Felipe that he was very fit for that [time between races] and coming back at a mile and a sixteenth."