King Filly

With Foolish Pleasure winning the Kentucky Derby, and Master Derby running away with the Preakness, chalk players are already arguing over which colt is Horse of the Year. They could be wasting their time. The top three-year-old thoroughbred may not even have been in the starting gate at Churchill Downs or Pimlico. Nor is it likely to be at Belmont on June 7 for the Belmont Stakes, the third jewel in racing's Triple Crown. The superhorse of 1975 could very well be a lady: Ruffian, the fastest filly in memory. Before the summer is out, she may get a chance to prove her supremacy in a clash with the colts.

Such a showdown could be the race of the year. Since she started her career in 1974, Ruffian has been undefeated in eight starts, including the Acorn at New York's Aqueduct track earlier this month, first leg of the filly triple crown. The Acorn was a typical Ruffian race--no contest. She won by 8 1/4 lengths and set a new stakes record (the sixth time she has broken a race mark). This Saturday she will go for the second installment of the filly triple crown, the Mother Goose at Aqueduct. Should she win that, as well as the final race (the Coaching Club American Oaks at Belmont on June 21), the handicappers will have to start comparing her to 1973 Triple Crown Winner Secretariat. One expert already has. After watching Ruffian run away with the vaunted Spinaway stakes at Saratoga last summer, Secretariat's trainer Lucien Laurin declared, "As God is my judgment, this filly may be better than Secretariat!"

Front Runner. At any rate, she is bigger. More than 16 hands tall, coffee-colored, Ruffian has enormous dimensions, particularly for a filly. At age two her girth already measured 75 1/2 in. (1 1/2 in. more than Secretariat's at that age). Her hindquarters are huge, and she puts them to good use. Ruffian runs with a smooth, gliding stride, and no sign of strain. "She fools you because she runs so smooth and easy," says Panamanian Jockey Jacinto Vasquez, who also rides Foolish Pleasure. Says Trainer Frank Whiteley Jr., "Her speed scares the hell out of me."

She is as competitive as she is quick.

The product of Shenanigans, a first-rate daughter of Native Dancer, and Reviewer, who won nine of 13 starts in 1968-70, Ruffian likes to run in front from start to finish. "She's got a look in her eye," says Whiteley. "It's the same look that comes from an eye of an eagle and it won't let any of the others get beyond her. A really good horse has that look. It breaks their hearts to get beaten." In fact, Ruffian can be too competitive for her own good. "We can't even exercise her with another horse," says Whiteley. "It gets her gumption up and she races it."

Whiteley, 60, is an authority on class. The sinewy, white-haired track veteran trained Damascus, Tom Rolfe and Chieftain, three brilliant performers. Mounted on a pony, he escorts Ruffian to and from Belmont's barn No. 34 every morning at dawn for her daily workouts. Afterward, he soaks her front legs in a tub of ice water, then he and Groom Daniel Williams pack all four legs in damp clay to keep them cool. When he is not busy with Ruffian, Whiteley can usually be found working with another of his 19 horses.

Whiteley, who was born on Maryland's Eastern Shore and started working horses when he was six, is the perfect match for Ruffian's owner, Stuart Janney Jr., a 67-year-old retired Baltimore attorney and Brahmin. The son of a longtime Maryland Governor, Janney still rides with the skill of a man who has won the rugged Maryland Hunt Cup four times. With his wife Barbara, sister of New York Horseman Ogden Phipps, Janney keeps 15 thoroughbreds at Locust Hill Farm, his 400-acre estate in Glyndon, Md. So far, Ruffian, whose unladylike name had originally been intended for a colt, has earned $196,000. But unlike her male counterparts, who can be bred frequently, Ruffian will not command a huge syndication deal when she retires.

The big question for Ruffian is whether--and when--she can beat the boys. Whiteley did not run Ruffian in the Kentucky Derby or Preakness because she was recovering from an ankle injury. Now he says the first shot against the colts will probably be at Saratoga in August. Jockey Vasquez is not worried. "She's special, whatever the division," he says. "She's king--I mean queen."

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