Hansel Is Brilliant Afterthought : Preakness: Beaten Derby favorite redeems himself after his trainer initially didn’t think he should run at Pimlico.

BALTIMORE — Two weeks after the Kentucky Derby, the lightweight of Louisville became the pride of Pimlico by storming to a seven-length victory in Saturday’s Preakness, the biggest winning margin in the Triple Crown’s middle race in 17 years.

After running 10th, beaten by 10 3/4 lengths, as the Derby favorite, Hansel easily disposed of four rivals from Churchill Downs and three others. It was the biggest turn-around since Snow Chief ran 11th as the favorite in the 1986 Derby and rebounded to win the Preakness.

Hansel’s victory was more unexpected in that owner Joe Allbritton and trainer Frank Brothers didn’t decide to run him in the Preakness until after a sharp three-furlong workout in 34 3/5 seconds Tuesday at Arlington International Racecourse. With no plane available, Hansel was loaded on a van and shipped the 710 miles from Chicago to Baltimore, the 14-hour ride ending near noon Wednesday. Jerry Bailey, Hansel’s jockey, learned that he would be riding in the Preakness while he was mowing the lawn at his Long Island, N.Y., home Tuesday afternoon.

A string of disappointments finished behind Hansel on Saturday, starting with Strike The Gold, the Kentucky Derby winner who was last through most of the Preakness and wound up sixth, beaten by 9 1/2 lengths. Strike The Gold might have paid the penalty for running his third tough race in five weeks.

In weather that turned cool after being marked by 90-degree temperatures for a week, Strike The Gold went off as the 9-5 favorite before 87,245, the second largest crowd in Preakness history. Olympio, the 12-5 second choice who won the Arkansas Derby, skipped the Kentucky Derby and came into the Preakness off a month’s rest. He finished fourth, throwing his left hind shoe sometime during the race.

Best Pal, the second-place finisher in the Derby and third betting choice Saturday, ran fifth, beating Strike The Gold by a half-length. His jockey, Gary Stevens, said that he struggled over the Pimlico surface, which had turned to fast after being hit by heavy rain late Friday afternoon. “Ten jumps out of the gate, I knew we were in trouble,” Stevens said.

Corporate Report, who finished ninth in the Derby, two lengths ahead of Hansel, set the early pace for six furlongs in the Preakness and held on to finish second, three-quarters of a length better than Mane Minister, who repeated his third-place Derby finish. After Olympio, Best Pal and Strike The Gold came Whadjathink and Honor Grades.

In winning five of 10 previous starts, Hansel had never gone off at longer than 6-1 odds, but based on his Derby disaster he went off the fourth choice Saturday and paid $20.20, $10.80 and $8. Corporate Report, at 11-1, paid $11 and $6.40 and Mane Minister, who was 18-1, returned $5.80. Hansel ran 1 3/16 miles in 1:54, 1 3/5 seconds slower than Farma Way ran in setting the track record in the Pimlico Special the week before. The victory in the $665,800 race was worth $432,770.

Brothers, the 44-year-old former assistant to Jack Van Berg, a Hall of Fame trainer, shipped Hansel back to his Arlington headquarters the morning after the Kentucky Derby, unable to explain why his horse ran so poorly. There were suggestions by others that Hansel wasn’t tough enough to compete in the Derby. He had won his two previous starts, the Jim Beam at Turfway Park and the Lexington Stakes at Keeneland, but had beaten no horses of consequence in either race.

In the week after the Derby, Brothers considered whether Hansel should get another chance. “I lost a lot of sleep,” he said after the Preakness. “A hundred times we were coming, and another hundred times we weren’t coming.”

Last Tuesday, before the workout at Arlington, Brothers called Allbritton, a Houston businessman. Brothers said that he was still interested in the Preakness and would call Allbritton back in 10 minutes, after the workout.

“Actually, it was only eight minutes before Frank called me back,” Allbritton said. “But it seemed like an hour and a half.”

Frank Shipp, who manages Allbritton’s 1,700-acre Lazy Lane Farm in Upperville, Va., reminded Hansel’s owner of Snow Chief’s Derby-Preakness ricochet five years ago. The decision made, Hansel was the last Preakness horse to arrive at Pimlico and the only starter who didn’t have a workout over the track.

A $150,000 Woodman-Count on Bonnie yearling, Hansel won the Tremont at Belmont Park and the Arlington-Washington Futurity as a 2-year-old, running five times over tracks in Illinois, New York and New Jersey. In Florida this winter, he twice was unable to beat Fly So Free, then the future-book Derby favorite, and after that Brothers said, “We’ve had enough of that red horse.”

Hansel bled from the lungs in the Fountain of Youth at Gulfstream Park Feb. 23 and has run ever since on Lasix, a diuretic that helps bleeders. Fly So Free, fifth in the Derby, had been beaten by Strike The Gold in the Blue Grass three weeks before, the reason Hansel was able to go off the 5-2 favorite at Churchill Downs.

In the Preakness, Corporate Report and his jockey, Pat Day, went to the front as expected, running the first half-mile in 46 1/5 seconds as Olympio stalked the pace and Hansel loomed in third.

“I was confident, the way he was tugging at the bridle,” Bailey said of Hansel.

Olympio started dropping back early and Hansel began to ease past Corporate Report going into the far turn. The time for three-quarters of a mile was 1:10 1/5.

“My horse put away Corporate Report with ease,” Bailey said. “He was so good today that it was hard to feel that it was true.”

At the head of the stretch, Hansel had opened a five-length lead, and Bailey looked back to see if anyone was challenging. Best Pal, who wasn’t as close to the lead as Stevens had hoped, had moved up from fifth to third by then, but he had no punch left.

Stevens was tapping Best Pal with his whip as early as the backstretch, trying to get him to pick up the pace. “He was fighting the track,” Stevens said. “He was bobbling all over the place.”

Chris Antley, who rode Strike The Gold, was pinned in along the rail by Honor Grades going down the backstretch and said that was a factor. But there were no horses directly in front of Strike The Gold, and still he was unable to move up.

“There was room to go forward, if my horse had been more aggressive,” Antley said. “He was watching the other horse all the way and never got his mind to running. Being down on the inside, maybe he didn’t like that today.”

Horse Racing Notes

An automobile company sponsors the Triple Crown, and the winning jockey in the Preakness receives a new car, but after the race Jerry Bailey announced that he was donating his prize to the Jockeys Guild’s fund for disabled riders. “We have about 35 riders who are quadriplegics or paraplegics,” Bailey said. “This will help in a small way toward easing some of their burdens.”

Belmont Stakes probables from the Preakness include Hansel, Corporate Report, Mane Minister and Strike the Gold, and they could be joined by Green Alligator, Lost Mountain, Quintana, Scan, Subordinated Debt, Paulrus and Lite Light, the filly. . . . In another stake on the Preakness card, Jeweler’s Choice, ridden by Chris McCarron, was a three-quarter-length winner in the $154,350 Budweiser Breeders’ Cup. Shuttleman, the favorite, ran second and Hadif was third.