66-1 Longshot Emblem Road Brings Home The $10-Million Win

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 gas in the last 200 yards and passed 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 required in the ultimate furlong. Emblem Road’s winning time was 1:50.53.

Emblem Road was a classic underdog bomb, delighting the bettors who had obviously spent the time to box him. At the top of the stretch he was whiling away his time in the absolute 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 a 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 but for the last two decades 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. It was thought that the four top American horses, beginning with the second-favorite Mandaloun and including, in ascending order of odds, Midnight Bourbon and Art Collector, simply brought an overwhelming array of talents to the race that the horses from Japan, Brazil and the Gulf region could not match. While on paper that has a kind 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 wreck.