Boutin Goes for Big Victory : Horse racing: French trainer, who has mounts in two Breeders’ Cup races, is trying to win the battle against lung cancer.

I have not won the tough race, but I have not quit running it yet.

--Francois Boutin

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As the horses galloped past, Francois Boutin squatted on his shooting stick on the tile apron in front of the track at Santa Anita. The legendary trainer, having arrived from France the day before, was out on a sunny fall morning to watch his two horses prepare for Saturday’s Breeders’ Cup.

Boutin was wearing a plaid touring cap, covering a head that no longer has that flowing, matinee-idol shock of gray hair. Boutin now looks older than his 56 years. Biweekly chemotherapy will do that to a man, as it has done to Boutin since he learned in February that he had lung cancer.

Trainers walk past at Santa Anita, some not immediately recognizing him. When he was running horses last year in the Breeders’ Cup, at Gulfstream Park in Florida, Boutin was seemingly healthy, aging slowly, smoking a lot of cigars and ordering the best French grape that the wine steward could offer.

“I was suspicious about my health in January,” Boutin said through an interpreter. “My suspicions were confirmed about a month later.”

Taking the quarter-mile walk with his wife, Lucy, from the quarantine barn to the grandstand apron, Boutin seems as tough as some of the horses he has campaigned, and none was tougher than Miesque, the filly who became the first multiple winner of a Breeders’ Cup race when she won the Mile Stakes in 1987-88.

Kingmambo, Miesque’s first foal, had been scheduled to run in Saturday’s Mile, but he has stayed home because of a slight case of the sniffles. If Boutin is to add to his Breeders’ Cup collection of three victories, it will have to be with Hernando, the French Derby winner who is running in the Turf, Coup De Genie, who will try dirt for the first time in the Juvenile Fillies, or both.

Boutin, who will resume his cancer treatments when he returns to France, may look gaunt to those who have not seen him since last year, but for Santa Anita trainer Ron McAnally, the Frenchman’s appearance has improved dramatically in recent months.

“When I saw him over there this winter, he was having trouble just getting in and out of his car,” McAnally said.

Boutin said that he never considered quitting a game that consists of slow rhythms and long hours. He has made the concession of cutting back his Chantilly operation about 25%, but even at that will be caring for more than 150 horses, an operation that still dwarfs 99.9% of the American outfits.

“My owners have been very understanding,” Boutin said. “I am not the only trainer in the world.”

Boutin has frequently transferred his success at home to American tracks.

Besides winning major races in Maryland and New York, he has become an important figure in Breeders’ Cup history, with Miesque and then Arazi. Arazi scored probably the most electrifying Cup victory in the Juvenile at Churchill Downs in 1991.

That was the start of a roller-coaster ride for the colt who flopped in the Kentucky Derby the next spring.

Arazi underwent surgery on both knees shortly after his tour de force in the Breeders’ Cup, then was sent back to Boutin for his 3-year-old campaign. Co-owner Allen Paulson thirsted for a return to Churchill for the Derby, and Boutin reluctantly played the game, running him 1 1/4 miles and to an eighth-place finish off only one prep race.

Even before Arazi had left for Louisville and the Derby, the crusade was wearing thin for Boutin. One morning a few months before the Derby, McAnally was in France, talking with Boutin.

“How’s Arazi doing?” McAnally said, mainly attempting small talk.

“Very well,” said Boutin, who sometimes will speak in English.

“Are you going to run him in the Derby?” McAnally asked.

Boutin turned and looked at the other trainer quizzically.

“You sound like these newspaper reporters,” he finally said.

This week, both Boutin and Paulson brought additional perspective to Arazi’s misguided adventure.

“He had a bad experience in those operations just after the Breeders’ Cup,” Boutin said. “Then when he returned to Kentucky, I think that it brought back that experience. He was crazy when we got him there to get ready for the Derby.”

As a 4-year-old in 1992, Arazi was back in the United States again, running 11th as the favorite in the Breeders’ Cup Mile.

“I still think he was a fantastic horse,” Boutin said.

Paulson has since second-guessed his choice of logistics, but not the goal of running Arazi in the Derby.

“If I could do it again, I would not send him back to France,” he said. “I would have kept him in the U.S. to train.”

Paulson has cut back on the number of young horses he is racing in Europe, but his confidence in Boutin has not waned.

“He’s a great guy and a great trainer,” Paulson said. “He’s very dedicated. I think that he spends more time with riders than many trainers do. He gets to know everything that the rider knows about the horse.”

Murray Friedlander of Arcadia, an international bloodstock agent, has known Boutin for about 20 years.

“He worked for the grand master, Etienne Pollet, and absorbed everything,” Friedlander said. “He has an innate sense about horses. He understands them completely.”

Paulson bought Miesque’s brother--by Nureyev out of Pasadoble--for $600,000 at Keeneland this summer and is sending the colt to Boutin.

Both of Boutin’s Breeders’ Cup horses are owned by Stavros Niarchos, who also raced Miesque. Hernando and Coup De Genie are 8-1 on the morning line in their respective races and will be ridden by Cash Asmussen.

Hernando had a sparkling record, five victories and two seconds in seven starts, before his 16th-place finish in the Arc de Triomphe on Oct. 3.

“I have to X off the Arc,” Asmussen said. “The ground that day was a foot deep.”

Hernando is that rare European runner who may like firm ground rather than soft, and the 3-year-old colt isn’t expected to suffer from running over Santa Anita’s unyielding grass course Saturday.

“Coup De Genie bled in her last race (while running fourth) and will race with the (Lasix) medication Saturday,” Boutin said. “If Saturday’s race had been in New York (where Lasix is prohibited), we would not have run.”