The field for the Kentucky Derby is coming into focus, and what's clear is that trainer Bob Baffert possesses a powerful one-two punch with Point Given and Congaree.

What remains, however, is whether usual Derby trainers D. Wayne Lukas and Nick Zito can produce 3-year-olds worthy of competing May 5 in the Derby.

Lukas, who has four Derby wins and at least one runner in each of the past 20 editions, might find his final chance in Turnberry Isle, who is scheduled to run Saturday in the Lexington Stakes. Zito, a two- time Derby winner, watched as his top contenders, A P Valentine and It's So Simple, failed to hit the board over the weekend in the Blue Grass Stakes and the Wood Memorial.

Congaree won the Wood Memorial in New York by 2 3/4 lengths over odds-on favorite Monarchos. Millennium Wind was the surprise winner of the Blue Grass in Lexington, Ky. Balto Star led from the start for a 4 1/2-length victory in the Arkansas Derby.

The three winners are headed to the Derby, with the lightly raced Congaree giving Baffert a second strong colt as he tries for his third Kentucky Derby win in five years. He won with Silver Charm in 1997 and Real Quiet in 1998.

Point Given won the Santa Anita Derby on April 7.

Pincay Poised for the Derby
New Jersey -- The Newark Star-Ledger carried a story on April 6, 2001 by Jerry Izenberg about the Derby prospects of Laffit Pincay:

In his mind's eye it is always Willie Shoemaker ... and Laffit Pincay Jr., never lets himself forget it. Shoemaker was the king, the measuring stick, the author of the series of benchmarks that dots the road map of Pincay's spectacular accomplishments.

Now the Kentucky Derby is just three weekends away and racing toward us. Now in the back roads of Pincay's mind there is the haunting memory of Churchill Downs' Twin Spires at dawn, the smell of bluegrass, the memory of more than 100,000 tone-deaf, julep-soaked throats belching out a traditional chorus of "My Old Kentucky Home" and a mile and a quarter of hell on hoofs between the starting gate and the roses.

He has raced for them 19 times and won them only once.

And now, for Pincay, there is also the image of Willie Shoemaker, beckoning toward him and seemingly saying, "Get this one and you reach another plateau with me ... get it because you deserve it ... get it because you have already nailed the others."

Laffit Pincay Jr. returns to "Weep No More City" again at age 54 with an outside shot aboard a colt named Millennium Wind. Only one man has ever won this cavalry charge at that age.

It wasn't George Armstrong Custer, baby.

It was Willie Shoemaker, and he put his autograph on the 1986 Kentucky Derby, a race that has come to be known as the Geriatric Derby, in large capital letters, using the flashing hoofbeats of a colt named Ferdinand with the help of a septuagenarian trainer named Charles Whittingham. It may have been Shoe's best ride in a classic race. His colt was banged hard coming out of the gate. Willie was forced to take him back, but then he seemed to thread a racetrack needle, weaving in and out of flashes of tight quarters of daylight that took him all the way to the roses.

Nobody that age figures to win the Derby again.

Well, almost nobody.

If this colt named Millennium Wind has anything at all legitimate within his heart and his bloodlines, you know who is going to try to push him beyond the expected.

It always seems to break that way when Shoemaker, either in body or simply off the memory of his legendary rides, hooks up with Pincay. This time Laffit races against the royal wake of Shoemaker's history rather than the man.

In a sense it is a rivalry that began the day after Christmas 1966, when Laffit was just 19 years old. Shoemaker was already 35 and the biggest name jockey on any track in North America. Nobody gave it much thought afterward. It wasn't the Derby and it wasn't the Breeders Cup. All it was, was just another $7,000, six-furlong allowance race at Santa Anita.

But not to Pincay, young and up from Panama and knowing that for the first time ever he understood the pressure that builds when your horse must look another horse in the eye and that other horse is ridden by a legend.

So what this was, was the Kid against the King, and they were lost in the middle of an eight-legged, 3,000-pound collage of sweat and sound and hammering heartbeats, both human and equine. They were straining for the wire and as always happens in such instants, the distance wasn't important. The money was not important. What was important was the test of wills when both jockeys lean into their mounts and cluck in that secret language that can transform a horse from fading futility to reborn tiger. Somehow, the Kid held a 5-1 shot named Rising Market together and beat the King by a nose.

That was the metaphorical start of a pursuit that lasted for 33 years. On Dec. 10, 1999, with Shoe long retired, Laffit Pincay Jr., rode a 3-year-old colt named Irish Nip into history, winning the race to make him the winningest rider ever. The record he broke was 8,833 victories. The man who set it was Willie Shoemaker.

And Pincay just kept on riding and riding. Today his record stands at 9,114 winners. On Saturday in the Blue Grass, he took a sore-footed colt who had survived a fungus and had him racing on air. Pincay raced a colt that had come back from blisters and sores and four bum heels exactly the way he wanted to race him - all the way to a shot at racing for the roses.

The last time Pincay rode in the Derby was in 1994, when he finished 13th with Valiant Nature. The only time he won the Derby was in 1984, on Swale. Meanwhile, the world's 3-year-old colts did not stand still.

A super flier named Point Given, trained by Bob Baffert, had already staked his claim a week earlier in the Santa Anita Derby. He figures to be the legitimate Derby favorite. But on Saturday, Baffert unleashed another contender called Congaree. The word "contender" is used advisedly. He blew away favored Monarchos in the Wood at Aqueduct. Monarchos will get his Derby shot, but Congaree certainly padded his own credentials.

And down at Oak Lawn in the Arkansas Derby yet another colt, Balto Star, staked his own claim to serious consideration on Derby Day. He did it dramatically, with a front-running trip that buried his 10 rivals. As he pounded toward the wire and a very big victory, Oaklawn track announcer Terry Wallace screamed, "Balto Star, the real thing, you bet he is!"

It looks very much as though we suddenly have a dandy Derby in the wings.