Arcadia, CA - December 26: Jockey Flavien Prat riding Flightline wins the Malibu Stakes Grade 1 ... [+] race during Opening day of the winter-spring meet at Santa Anita Park in Arcadia on Sunday, December 26, 2021. (Photo by Keith Birmingham/MediaNews Group/Pasadena Star-News via Getty Images)

Flightline has raced and won a total of three times in his three years on the planet, although his copious athletic gifts and his polished running style seem to indicate that he’s really an old champion reincarnated — Whirlaway, Man o’ War, Slew, you name it, but at any rate bearing those levels of raw talent. Flightline’s most recent win at Santa Anita’s winter/spring opening day on December 26, Boxing Day, in the Malibu Stakes is the case in point.

He commanded the race in his apparently standard young-Secretariat fashion, pulling away in the last couple of furlongs to win by 11 1/2 lengths. It brought the combined total distance he has won by in his three races to an impressive thirty-seven-and-a-half lengths. The strapping dark brown colt just can’t be brought to believe that there is such a thing as a close race. The Malibu was his debut in a Grade 1 stakes, an extreme rarity for a three-year-old.

But the range and depth of Flightline’s gifts has been so clear and forceful that — out in the world among his close coterie of two-legged supporters, namely, trainer John Sadler and jockey Flavien Prat — there is an equally rare through-line in what they say.

“It’s like limitless,” Prat said after the hand-ridden victory on Sunday. “It’s like you’re driving a car and you’re not at full speed. It’s quite amazing.”

By his own admission, Sadler has been carefully — very carefully, as can be seen in what is by any standard a very light racing schedule for a three-year-old — aiming Flightline at the Malibu for some forty-to-fifty weeks, or put another way, for the better part of a year. “If I do right by him, put him first, the rest will fall into place,” Sadler said on Sunday. “It’s like a stewardship.” He added: “You just don’t want to screw it up.”

He hasn’t. Sadler knew what a jewel he had been given and, partly as a result of Flightline’s slashing his hindquarters open on a fence, opted to skip 2021’s spring, summer and fall meetings in order to bring his athlete along more slowly, allowing him to fill out and unfold his talent. A good part of the credit for this sort of mature racing patience is also due to Flightline’s consortium of veteran owners, who include Flightline’s storied Kentucky breeder, Jane Lyon of Summer Wind Farm, as well as Hronis Racing, Siena Farm, West Point Thoroughbreds and Woodford Racing.

At this point after the Boxing Day win, Sadler and Flightline’s connections will have their athlete back at Sadler’s Arcadia, California, barn, but the sky’s the limit for Flightline, which is why no less an equine authority than the Daily Racing Form described him in the Malibu Stakes as the “most exciting horse in racing” now. There’s a tinge of regret that he missed competing in his class of 2021’s Triple Crown runs, but that only fuels the question on everybody’s mind now: What’s next for the phenom?

Asked that in the winner’s circle at Santa Anita on Sunday by a television reporter, Sadler had a quick retort in keeping with the team’s just-don’t-mess-with-it philosophy.

“Flightline will have a vote in that,” the trainer replied. About the only thing Sadler could say for sure on camera was that Flightline’s next race would be two turns. Because: Fine as he is, he’s not yet run a two-turn race, another extreme rarity in his class. Given his works and the extraordinary performances to date, all of Thoroughbred racing will be keen to watch him blaze on through that challenge.