Napoleon Solo charged past Taj Mahal in the upper stretch and held on through the wire to win the 151st Preakness Stakes on Saturday at Laurel Park, delivering one of the most surprising results in the race's modern era and the first Triple Crown race victories of three notable careers in one swoop.
Sent off at 7-1 in a 14-horse field - the biggest assembled for the Preakness since 2011 - Napoleon Solo did not steal the race on a slow pace. Jockey Paco Lopez had him pressing the leaders from the early stages, sitting just off Taj Mahal's flank as the pack rounded the far turn and then attacking with three furlongs to run. By the eighth pole the issue was decided. Iron Honor closed for second, Chip Honcho ran third, Oselli fourth and Incredible rounded out the top five.
The victory was the first in a Triple Crown race for Lopez, the veteran Panamanian rider whose career has been spent racking up stakes wins on the East Coast circuit without ever quite breaking through at the sport's biggest events. It was also the first Triple Crown win for trainer Chad Summers and for owner Al Gold, whose connections had pointed Napoleon Solo at Pimlico - or, as it turned out, Laurel Park - rather than the Kentucky Derby earlier this month.
That decision now looks inspired. Napoleon Solo did not run in the Derby, where Cherie DeVaux's Golden Tempo had charged from the back of the pack to edge Renegade at 23-1 and rewrite the headlines around the Run for the Roses. With Golden Tempo and Renegade both skipping Baltimore and instead pointing at the Belmont, the door was wide open for a new contender to emerge in the second leg, and Napoleon Solo walked through it.
The trip was tougher than the slow final time suggested. Napoleon Solo wasn't sitting back and picking up the pieces - he was involved from the start, pressing a legitimate early pace, staying engaged through the run down the backstretch and still holding enough late to finish the job. That kind of effort is what separates a deserving Classic winner from a beneficiary, and it is the line the Summers team will emphasise heading toward the next decision.
For Paco Lopez, the victory was a long-awaited acknowledgement of two decades of hard work. The jockey has won riding titles at Monmouth Park and Gulfstream over the years without ever drawing the high-profile mounts that translate into Triple Crown opportunities. On Saturday he made one count.
The win also represented a major moment for Chad Summers, the Florida-based trainer whose stable has been on a steady upward trajectory. Summers has built a reputation for placing horses carefully and timing his peaks well - a profile Napoleon Solo's preparation embodied perfectly. Owner Al Gold's syndicate now finds itself with a horse genuinely in the mix for a Classic double if connections decide to point him at the Belmont in three weeks.
For Taj Mahal, the runner-up favoured by several analysts pre-race, the result was a frustrating second. The bigger question for the Preakness as a contest is what the slow final time and large field actually tell us about the strength of this division - a question the Belmont may soon answer.
