ESPN Horse Racing

LOUISVILLE, Ky. -- There were no drum rolls. No hallelujahs. The thick clouds hanging over Churchill Downs did not part.

The arrival of Dunkirk, at 12:10 on Tuesday afternoon, was about as low-key as it gets for a horse who has been touted as a legitimate Kentucky Derby candidate and the second coming of Pegasus. This, despite the fact he has started just three times and never won a stakes event.

Todd Pletcher, a man who has something to do every minute of every day, found himself pacing, checking the clock and staring off down the backstretch road in the minutes before the Brook Ledge horse van carrying Dunkirk and six stablemates pulled up alongside the barn. It was Pletcher, shank in hand, who moved quickly to the open side door of the van, and Pletcher who stood at the head of the horse in the first stall as the ramp was dropped into place. The white tip of a gray nose could be scene, just inside.

I love these scenes -- the backstage nuts and bolts of moving large animals into place, to perform for our pleasure. Dunkirk awoke this morning at the nearly deserted Palm Meadows training center in south Florida. The Tex Sutton horse transport flight from Palm Beach to Louisville took about 2 1/2 hours. He was returning to the land of his birth.

Pletcher clipped the shank to Dunkirk's sheepskin padded halter, pulled him out straight, pivoted right and led the colt down a thatch mat covering the ramp, past a bank of cameras and into the shedrow. Dunkirk is not a big colt -- Pletcher estimates him to be a bit more than 16 hands -- but he is long and sports a dappled gray coat with pink skin glowing just beneath the surface of the flanks. Pletcher gave Dunkirk a few turns of the shedrow, letting the colt stop at each breezeway to sniff his new surroundings. A groom removed the colt's thick polo bandages. A few minutes later, he was bedded down in stall No. 5.

And so the cast for the 135th Kentucky Derby was complete, and on the scene. Pletcher let himself take a breath.

"You're always concerned until they're here safely," he said. "But I really saw no reason he had to be here any sooner than this. It worked for Funny Cide, for Giacomo and for Big Brown. And it's not a matter of getting used to the track. With this rain, they'll keep a seal on it, and it will be changing between now and Saturday."

The constant chatter about racing surfaces is beginning to overwhelm this Derby. Those who lay awake nights worrying that a thoroughbred's form on synthetic tracks at Santa Anita, Golden Gate, Keeneland and Turfway Park will not translate to the Churchill Downs dirt are forgetting a lesson that should have been learned long ago. Churchill Downs on Derby day is unlike any track a colt will ever encounter anyway.

Jockey Mike Smith, the subject of my column in the Wednesday edition of Daily Racing Form, agrees, and he should know. He's ridden in 15 Derbies. This time around, he's aboard Chocolate Candy, a colt who won races over three of the four different synthetic surfaces in California.

"Churchill's got that clay base, and it gives a lot," Smith said. "If a horse hits a part of the track that doesn't take them somewhere, they lose confidence. Some horses just can't run over it."

And he's not just talking about horses that have good form on synthetic surfaces.

My all-time favorite line about the Churchill surface came from Mike Whittingham, who brought Santa Anita Derby winner Skywalker here three weeks before the 1985 Kentucky Derby. In those days, the track could be very tight, almost hard, and unforgiving. Spend A Buck took advantage of the track to skip wire to wire, while Skywalker finished sixth and went home to with a fractured shin.

"I could have accomplished the same thing keeping him in California and hitting him on the leg every day with a hammer," Whittingham said.

So get ready. Among the 19 or so excuses for losing the Kentucky Derby on Saturday will be "He couldn't handle the surface" or "He was just spinning his wheels" or "He was extremely slow and this was not a good idea." OK, we might not hear that last one, even if it's true.

Jay Hovdey is the award-winning executive columnist for Daily Racing Form. He has written about thoroughbred racing since the 1970s from his base in Southern California, including articles published in the Reader's Digest, Los Angeles Times and New York Times, as well as several books. Hovdey is married to retired Hall of Fame jockey Julie Krone.