Curlin's arrivals at the wire, almost always in front of a pack of other well-bred, expensive thoroughbreds, have been well documented. His arrival to the ownership of Jess Jackson, and to the stable of Steve Asmussen, less so.
The story began the day before the 2007 Super Bowl in Miami, the one where Peyton Manning beat the Bears and finally won the big one.
One of the early races at nearby Gulfstream Park was a race with a $38,000 purse and a field of non-winning 3-year-olds, each of whom had trained well, had cost a lot and were about to show the value of their investment.
A good five-hour drive away in Ocala, Fla., a bloodstock agent named John Moynihan, then 42, was at a horse sale, hanging around and watching races from around the country on TV monitors.
What he saw that day from Gulfstream left him wide-eyed in disbelief.
"I saw this horse start to draw away going into the turn," he said. "That almost never happens. Then, when he turned for home, he kind of drifted out and was gawking around and he was still drawing away from the field."
Curlin broke his maiden by 12 3/4 lengths that day, and Moynihan had fallen in love.
Moynihan was no newcomer to the business, but he may be the most fortunate bloodstock agent in the last two decades. He started with Bob Lewis as his main client and helped Lewis and his wife, Beverly, find numerous stakes winners and Triple Crown race-winners in the late 1990s.
Then, a year or so before Lewis died in 2006, he alerted Moynihan that a man named Jess Jackson might be getting into racing in a big way and might be calling him. Jackson, the billionaire founder of Kendall-Jackson Winery in Santa Rosa, eventually did just that.
And so, that day in Ocala, Moynihan was looking for horses for Jackson's Stonestreet Stables and for his main trainer, Asmussen.
"Steve was at Gulfstream and I called him right away," Moynihan said. "I asked him if he had seen the horse, and he said he had, and had also seen him cool down and look as if he had hardly even run. I told him, we got to buy him. He agreed."
Moynihan's next call was to Jackson, in California. He was on board too.
Then the fun began.
"It wasn't luck that we found the horse," Moynihan said. "Even a novice who saw that race knew there was something special there. Our luck was that we were able to buy him."
There were several things working in favor of the Moynihan/Jackson/Asmussen team.
