Owner Fluor has Preakness contender in Collected

4:38 PM ET

Along with a few thousand others, Peter Fluor found himself soaked to the bone last year at Pimlico when the heavens unloaded on Baltimore and turned the Preakness into a regatta. He was there to cheer on American Pharoah and his trainer, Bob Baffert, who just that week had taken into the fold a 2-year-old colt by City Zip owned by Fluor and his partner, K.C. Weiner.

“It was my first Preakness and a great experience watching American Pharoah win,” Fluor said this week. “But I can promise you I’ll be rooting a lot harder for Baffert this year.”

That’s because the City Zip colt grew up to be Collected, who cost Fluor and Wiener $170,000 as a 2-year-old, and Collected owes nothing to anyone. After picking off some low-hanging fruit on the way to more than $400,000 in winnings, the nimble chestnut with the skinny blaze now will be taking on Kentucky Derby winner Nyquist and Derby runner-up Exaggerator on Saturday in the 141st running of the Preakness.

Collected tipped his mitt last fall at Del Mar with a solid second in the Cecil B. DeMille Stakes on the grass, then disabused any notion that he was a turf horse with a win in the Sham Stakes in January. At that point, he had worked his way up the Baffert depth chart to No. 3, behind Mor Spirit and Cupid, but any serious Derby dreams went awry after his uninspiring fourth in the Southwest Stakes at Oaklawn.

Baffert knows how to cheer up a horse, though. A month after the Southwest, Collected was allowed to tap his inner American Pharoah in the Sunland Park Festival of Racing Stakes, the scaled-back version of the Sunland Derby, with a front-running win at 1-1/8 miles. That put Collected on course for the Lexington Stakes, which he won by four lengths.

Collected skipped the Derby, which made sense since Lexington winners rarely win the Derby. Lexington winners do, however, win the Preakness, …

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