The Life Of Riley

Day is breaking over New York 's Belmont Park , and Shelley Riley is bustling around the barn. She's tending to every need of her 3-year-old colt, Casual Lies: over there for a bucket of grain...back for hay...outside for water...back to bandage his legs...time to muck out his stall...outside to wash him...back to feed him a carrot. She pauses briefly and says, "I put the lie to fat people being lazy, don't I?" Indeed, everything that fancy, big-time racing is, Shelley Riley is not.

Hey, middle-class America , Shelley Riley is Our New Hero! Strike up the band and pass the Doritos . She's one of us. "I can't believe all this," says Riley, 42, the owner and trainer of the horse that could turn out to be the top 3-year-old of the year. This is the stuff of dreams. Riley bought the colt at the Keeneland (Ky.) sales in 1990 for $7,500. To put this in perspective, Santa Anita Derby winner A.P. Indy, one of the colt's chief rivals in the Belmont Stakes this Saturday, cost $2.9 million.

Casual Lies was so undistinguished that when Shelley called her husband, Jim, back home in Pleasanton , near San Francisco , and told him about the yearling she had just bought, she fumbled around for words and finally said, "Well, he's brown."

Well, it turns out he's a lot more than that. Should Casual Lies win Saturday's 1�-mile Belmont , the third of the Triple Crown races, he would jump from being merely a respected colt to being a superior one with a big future as a stallion.

Riley has a nickname for Casual Lies. It's Stanley. She hung that on him for no other reason than that she had decided against either Bruce or Maurice and because "you can't say, 'How are you, Casual?' It doesn't sound right." As a 30-1 shot, Casual Lies helped put away the much-ballyhooed Arazi with a strong stretch run and missed winning the Derby by just a length. "Sure, I was surprised at the Derby," says Riley. "I thought we'd win." Two weeks later Stanley was third in the Preakness . On Saturday he should go off as the second choice in the Belmont to A.P. Indy. The fact is, Casual Lies has been the most consistent of this year's Triple Crown horses, and if form holds and he finishes third or better in the Belmont and ahead of Preakness winner Pine Bluff , Riley's colt will earn the $1 million Chrysler bonus that goes to the horse with the best Triple Crown record.

A woman on the backstretch calls out, "Shelley, how are you?"

"Good, good. You?"

"Great."

"You look great," says Shelley.

Let's analyze this exchange. Did the passerby truly care how Shelley was? No. Is Shelley good? No. In fact, she has a headache from being up too late the night before, when she went to see Guys and Dolls on Broadway. Did the passerby feel great? Almost certainly not. Did she look great? No, she looked more like the runner-up in a shovel fight. Riley laughs and says, "Casual lies. What did they hurt? Nothing." Riley came up with the name one day in 1990 when she saw a horse obviously too sore to go to the races and heard the trainer tell a vet that the horse was "fine, just fine." Shelley muttered to Jim, "How casually we lie." And so one of the alltime great names in racing was born.