FILE – Sovereignty, ridden by Junior Alvarado, left, crosses the finish line to win the 151st running of the Kentucky Derby horse race followed by Journalism, ridden by Umberto Rispoli, Saturday, May 3, 2025, at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Ky. (AP Photo/Abbie Parr, File)
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Trainer William Mott, the medical team and Sovereignty’s owners were unanimous in their resolve on Monday, October 27, that if the fever that the 2025 Classic’s 6-5 top favorite had developed that day did not respond to treatment and re-spiked, they would scratch the horse from the $7-million nationally-longed-for feature race on November 1. The fever dutifully went down on Tuesday but, on cue, re-spiked the very next day, October 29.
After the scratch, the ever-cool Mott took great pains to explain to the clamoring press that the scratch had been held in mind by the team since the fever first appeared earlier in race week. The trainer said: “And it didn’t go away.”
Rather, he noted in his laconic North Dakota sheriff’s tones that the fever “…jumped back up. We re-treated him and, at that point, (a scratch) is not even a conversation. The horse made the decision; that incident made the decision. That’s what we said from the beginning, if he re-spiked, he would be out.”
The effect of the Wednesday announcement on the handicapping of the treasured race was immense, and global. The freshly-minted Classic top favorite Fierceness began a drop over the course of Wednesday night in Europe from 4-1 (in the Del Mar morning line) to a remarkable low of 5/2 among the London bookmakers. This drastically improves his implied probability of winning from a flat 20% to 28.6%, very nearly nine percentage points, an extraordinary leap within a matter of hours. We can still very much debate the choice of Fierceness as the top dog in the running both in California and in London, but there it is in a nutshell. He’s the man.
By Thursday morning in London, October 30, Sierra Leone was by far the most interesting case, just a few short hours after the scratch. In stark — repeat, stark — contrast to the Del Mar morning line oddsmaker’s thinking, in which the champion was inexplicably put at 8-1, in London, the bookmakers have consistently been quite positive about the 2024 Classic’s defending champion. The gentlemen in London have unanimously priced him neck-and-neck with Fierceness. In plain English, Sierra Leone is the co-favorite in the UK playing hivemind. Fractionally expressed, his London odds currently range from 5-2 and 11-4 on up to a flat 3-1, in absolute lockstep with those of Fierceness.
So, there. It took the take-no-prisoners London bookies to say it, but at least somebody finally did: It’s worth remembering the sheer number of races that Sierra Leone has won.
Journalism and Baeza — twinned forever by having finished in the money just behind Sovereignty in the Triple Crown’s bookend races — did not have their odds get kicked down that much (compared to the Del Mar morning line) by the post-scratch odds tsunami. In London, Journalism sits generally at 7-1 and Baeza slightly higher at 10-1. Again, we’ll remind the readers that the London bookies shave their odds with quite a fine razor so that, fractionally expressed, a half or a quarter of a point does actually mean something. That noted, Journalism and Baeza’s odds are flat.