A WEIGHT IS LIFTED

BALTIMORE — Last Saturday wasn’t as good as the previous Saturday for jockey Chris Antley, but it was close.

The Saturday before--May 1--Antley had ridden longshot Charismatic to an improbable win in the Kentucky Derby. An encore on May 8? What could that possibly be? Winning the lottery? An audience with the pope?

No, nothing that exciting. Last Saturday, Antley showed up to ride at Hollywood Park, stepped on the scale and proudly said to Charlie McCaul, the clerk of scales, that he would be able to ride at 116 pounds.

“This is another big day for me,” Antley said a little later, during an interview between races in the jockeys’ room.

Since he was sitting at the snack bar, it was suggested to Antley that maybe the interview should be conducted somewhere else, such as five miles from the grill.

“No, this is all right,” said the confident Antley, who will ride Charismatic again Saturday in the Preakness at Pimlico.

The 116-pound milestone was important to him, because less than a year ago he weighed 147 pounds, or more, when considering a comeback. And as recently as the winter meeting at Santa Anita, he couldn’t get under 121 pounds.

Except in the Triple Crown races, for which all male horses are assigned 126 pounds, and handicap races for the best horses, horses ordinarily carry 120 pounds or less. Hiring a heavy jockey means that a trainer must make his horse carry more weight than he’s supposed to, and an advantage is lost.

The excess weight was one of the reasons Antley rode sparingly at Santa Anita, getting only 138 mounts--of which he won on 23.

“When I made 121, at least that got me in the door,” he said. “But they were also cautious about me because I hadn’t ridden anywhere in so long. Everybody wanted to see where I was at.”

When the Santa Anita season began in late December, Antley hadn’t won a race since Oct. 31, 1997. Among the trainers who gave him a chance over the winter were Wayne Lukas--the trainer of Charismatic--Bob Baffert and Randy Bradshaw, before he gave up his stable to return to Lukas as an assistant.

Another was Vladimir Cerin, who remembered a conversation at his Santa Anita barn on April 30, the day before the Kentucky Derby.

“Chris was scheduled to work a horse for me on the Sunday, the day after the Derby,” Cerin said. “He was saying that he might not make it. He was saying that he was going to win the Derby, and he’d be held up in Louisville doing all the interviews. He had a whole lot of confidence in that horse.”

Few others did. Charismatic had won only three of 14 starts; twice in California he could have been claimed out of races for $62,500, most recently at Santa Anita only 11 weeks before the Derby; and he had finished a distant fourth in the Santa Anita Derby. Two weeks later--and two weeks before the Kentucky Derby--Charismatic ended a losing streak of seven races by winning the Lexington Stakes at Keeneland. But the Lexington is hardly a major prep for the Derby.

Still, Lukas talked up Charismatic’s chances, to the virtual exclusion of Cat Thief, all during Derby week. But Lukas always talks up his horses, and Charismatic, still overlooked by the public, went off at 31-1. Bob and Beverly Lewis, who own the colt, noticed the Charismatic crescendo coming from the Lukas barn, and at one point Bob Lewis apologized to Bill Young, the owner of Cat Thief, for all the attention Lukas was drawing to his horse.

The day before the Lexington Stakes, Antley rode a winner for Lukas at Santa Anita. Jerry Bailey was riding Charismatic in the Lexington, but his Kentucky Derby horse was Worldly Manner for Sheik Mohammed’s Godolphin Stable.

As Antley and Lukas walked off the track at Santa Anita, Lukas told the jockey to pay attention to the Lexington the next day.

“I can’t get Bailey, and you might wind up riding that horse in the Derby,” Lukas said.

The day after Charismatic’s strong-finishing, 2 1/2-length win in the Lexington, Lukas and Antley talked.

“It wasn’t definite that Antley was going to get the mount,” Lukas said. “If he had talked about the horse like he only thought he was a 30-1 shot, then it would have been case closed and I would have moved on to somebody else.”

But Antley, who hadn’t done much with four Derby mounts after winning the race with Strike The Gold in 1991, was dreaming big dreams. Around Christmas, back home with Les Antley, his father, in Columbia, S.C., he had said, “The Derby is coming soon. Wouldn’t it be neat if I could ride in it?”

Charismatic stalked the pace in the Lexington, then pulled away in the stretch.

“He set the track record [for 1 1/16 miles],” Antley said. “But not only that, he won in the right fashion. He was running away from the field in the last eighth of a mile. So you had to like his chances at a mile and a quarter [the Derby distance].”

Charismatic broke from the outside--post No. 16 in the 19-horse Derby field--and was seventh after three-quarters of a mile, but in this case his wide trip was a blessing. Many of the horses on the inside were knocked around on both turns, in one of the roughest-run Derbies.

With a quarter-mile left, Charismatic had moved into third place. At the eighth pole, he had only Cat Thief, Lukas’ other horse, to beat. Charismatic made the lead just inside the sixteenth pole, and it didn’t look as if anyone could catch him, although Menifee was relentlessly gobbling up ground.

Six strides from the wire, Antley raised his left index finger and kept wagging it all the way to the finish line. At the end, Menifee was only a neck short (Cat Thief finished third), and not lost on Lukas was the possibility that Antley’s gesture could have been one of the biggest goofs in Derby history.

“I looked over and didn’t see anybody else,” Antley said. “I didn’t know Pat [Day, riding Menifee] was coming.”

Lukas could laugh about the incident at his Churchill Downs barn the next morning.

“If Menifee had caught us,” he said, “you’d be seeing that finger in a glass jar of formaldehyde today.”

Antley, who has never won a Preakness--Strike The Gold finished sixth the year of his Derby win--will ride Charismatic on Saturday in the second leg of the Triple Crown. Pimlico is where Antley, then barely 17, rode in his first race at a recognized track on June 1, 1983. Ten days later, at Pimlico, he rode his first winner.

In 1985, riding mostly in Maryland and New Jersey, Antley won 469 races and led the country. Moving to New York, he continued to thrive. On Oct. 31, 1987, he become the only jockey to win nine races in a single day. He won four at Aqueduct in the afternoon, then five at the Meadowlands at night. During the Aqueduct season in 1989, he won at least one race a day for 64 consecutive days, believed to be a record.

The year before, however, he’d smoked marijuana and moved on to use of cocaine, twice testing positive for drugs and drawing suspensions by the New York stewards.

By 1993, much of Antley’s business in New York had dried up, and he moved to California. He was modestly successful but injuries and suspensions for riding infractions kept him from building any momentum on the West Coast, and by late 1996 his career had hit the wall again.

At the end of 1997, his weight was out of control. In September, he had ridden Geri in the Woodbine Mile in Canada. They won, but Antley had to sweat off nine pounds to make 117.

Depressed, he went back to California, took the advice of the Winners Foundation, a group that helps people in horse racing with alcohol- and drug-related problems, and checked himself into a Pasadena hospital for six months.

At Del Mar last summer, when his weight reached 147 pounds, he lost the courage to step on a scale anymore.

He went home to South Carolina, discovered a no-carbohydrate, fat-free diet and began running. And running. He got up to 25 miles a day, and became known as the Forrest Gump of Columbia, S.C..

“It never left my mind that I’d get back riding again,” he said. “But at the start, I was still way too heavy and my father suggested I find something else to do. He was supportive, but realistic. By October of last year, I’d peek in at the television set if there was a race on. But my left knee caved in bad, and I couldn’t run anymore between Thanksgiving and Christmas.”

His friend, jockey Mike Smith, had broken his back in a spill at Saratoga in the summer of 1998. Smith was in rehabilitation, and phoned to tell Antley about his progress.

Said Antley: “ . . . I said to myself that I was going to be back riding before Mikey was. It gave me sort of a goal to shoot for.”

He scored his first comeback win Feb. 6 at Turf Paradise in Phoenix, on a day he had gone over from Santa Anita to ride in a $150,000 stakes race. The Derby win with Charismatic was Antley’s first Grade I victory since 1996 at Del Mar.

“I know I was in the right place at the right time,” he said. “All of this has been a role reversal for me, because I haven’t been able to come back nonchalant, like I might have before. This time, I had to find the depths of myself to get back.”

Preakness Stakes

WHEN: Saturday

WHERE: Pimlico Race Course, Baltimore

TIME: 2:30 p.m. PDT

TV: Channel 7

COVERAGE: Chris McCarron won’t ride Stephen Got Even in Preakness because of a foot injury suffered in a Monday workout. Page 10