From Synthetic prep race to the Kentucky Derby dirt

By Bill Heller

Street Sense’s dramatic, decisive victory in last year’s Kentucky Derby restructured a lot of perceptions about winning the Run for the Roses. Not only could a Breeders'Cup Juvenile winner return the following spring to capture the first leg of the Triple Crown, but he could make his final prep for Churchill Downs' dirt track on a synthetic one.

Street Sense wasn’t alone in switching from synthetic to dirt. Six Derby starters last year had their final preps on synthetic surfaces: the top five finishers in the Blue Grass Stakes on Keeneland’s Polytrack - Dominican, Street Sense, Zanjero, Teuflesberg and Great Hunter - as well as Hard Spun, who won the Lane’s End Stakes on Turfway Park’s Polytrack.

Trainer Carl Nafzger had no reservations about using Polytrack as Street Sense’s springboard to the Derby because he’d done exactly that the year before when Street Sense followed a third in the Lane’s End Breeders'Futurity at Keeneland with a resounding 10-length victory in the Breeders'Cup Juvenile at Churchill Downs.

Nafzger, however, said he would not have used the Blue Grass as Street Sense’s final Derby prep if Street Sense hadn’t already raced on dirt. "Even if he had worked on dirt, there’s a lot of difference between working and running,"Nafzger said. "I would definitely want to see my horse in a dirt race first. I don’t care if it was an allowance race; I’d want to see him in a race.”

Sedgefield did not have that luxury, finishing fifth last year as the first North American-based starter since at least 1955 to run in the Kentucky Derby without a previous dirt race.
He won’t be the last.

In mid-March, it appeared that at least three of California’s top Kentucky Derby prospects – Colonel John and El Gato Malo, the 1-2 finishers in the Sham Stakes, and San Vicente and San Felipe victor Georgie Boy – will also be making their first dirt start at Churchill Downs on the first Saturday of May.
"I don’t think it’s going to be a problem for the California horses,"said Darrin Miller, who trains both Sedgefield and Dominican. "I don’t think it’s a disadvantage at all.”

Obviously, the California trainers of those three Derby hopefuls – whose final race before the Derby figures to be the Santa Anita Derby – agree, as will other trainers who use the Blue Grass or the Lane’s End for their horses' final Derby prep.

"My concern is just getting to the race,"El Gato Malo’s trainer Craig Dollase said laughing. "That’s the objective of the synthetic track. The whole point is to keep your horse sound. We just want a healthy, sound horse going into the first Saturday of May. So be it if it’s on dirt.”

That’s the approach Miller took with Sedgefield. The 36-year-old native of Verona, Missouri, began training at Canterbury Park in Minnesota in 1995, and splits his year between Florida and Kentucky. He did an admirable job of getting both Sedgefield and Dominican to the Derby for Tommy and Bonnie Hamilton’s Silverton Hill Farm in Springfield, Kentucky.

Silverton Hill purchased Sedgefield, who is a full brother to 2007 Turf Champion English Channel, for $300,000 at Keeneland’s Two-Year-Olds-In-Training Sale in April, 2006. A month earlier, the Hamiltons purchased Dominican at the Ocala Two-Year-Olds-In-Training Sale for $150,000.

Sedgefield began his career late in his two-year-old season, finishing seventh on Polytrack at Keeneland on October 27, 2006. After running fifth on grass at Churchill Downs, he won a maiden race easily on Turfway Park’s Polytrack.

Miller asked a lot of Sedgefield in his next start, the Grade 3 Tropical Park Derby at Calder on grass, and Sedgefield fought it out on the lead the whole way, finishing second by three-quarters of a length to Soldier Dancer. "After the Tropical Park Derby, we decided that the Kentucky Derby was an option for him," Miller said. "The plan was this: we run in the Hallandale Beach (on grass) and the Lane’s End.”

First, though, Miller gave Sedgefield a confidence builder. Dropped to allowance company on grass at Gulfstream Park, Sedgefield won handily. Then, in the Hallandale Beach, Sedgefield again displayed his grittiness, finishing second by half a length to Twilight Meteor despite breaking from the 10 post. Sedgefield drew even worse in the Lane’s End: the outside post in a field of 12. Regardless, he finished second by 3 ½ lengths to Hard Spun.

Trainer Larry Jones chose not to give Hard Spun another race before the Kentucky Derby because Hard Spun’s graded stakes earnings were already enough to ensure he’d start in the Derby. Sedgefield’s weren’t.
So Miller, after considering the Blue Grass Stakes, sent Sedgefield back to turf instead in the Grade 3 Transylvania at Keeneland just 13 days after the Lane’s End. Sedgefield again battled on the lead, but this time he tired late to fourth as the 7-5 favorite. 

"I messed up,"Miller said. "I raced him back too quick. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time. We thought it was an easy spot and it would give him the earnings he needed. We were right on the cusp there.”
With the fourth-place finish, though, Sedgefield did have enough earnings to break into the Derby field of 20. And Miller wasn’t worried about the switch to dirt. "He’d been on dirt as a two-year-old,"Miller said. "We didn’t see dirt as a problem for him at all.”

To prepare him for his first dirt race, Miller, who was stabled at Keeneland, worked Sedgefield four furlongs twice at Churchill Downs. Sedgefield breezed in: 49 (15th fastest of 35) 13 days before the Derby and in :48 2/5 (11th of 52) four days before. "After the first week, we moved the two horses to Churchill Downs,"Miller said. "He trained really well when he went there. He really stepped up to the plate. He was doing everything right. Then we had a lot of rain that week. He relished it. He trained very well on it.”

Dominican, who had two thirds from four previous races on dirt, including a fourth in an allowance race and a third in a Grade 2 stakes at Churchill Downs, worked just once after his gutsy victory in the Blue Grass. Five days before the Derby, Dominican breezed a bullet five furlongs in :59 2/5, fastest of 26 that morning.
Miller had both Sedgefield and Dominican primed for top efforts, but their preparation was seriously compromised the morning the selection order for post positions was drawn for the 20 Derby starters. "Our picks were 17th and 19th,"Miller said. "It was a pretty bad go. It left us in a pretty tough spot."Miller chose the rail for Sedgefield and the 19 post for Dominican, who finished 11th after a rough trip. The lack of a previous dirt start didn’t impact Sedgefield, who was dispatched at 58-1 from the highly disadvantageous rail.

Forwardly placed from the outset under Julien Leparoux, Sedgefield worked his way up to second midway through the mile-and-a-quarter classic. "I was just hoping he’d keep coming,"said Miller, who had never started a horse in the Derby before. Sedgefield tired late to fifth, nine lengths behind Street Sense, but just a length off third-place finisher Curlin, who subsequently was Horse of the Year and Three-Year-Old Champion.
Miller was proud of Sedgefield’s effort: "He gave us everything that day. He put it all out there.”

Some 10 months later, Miller said of his first experience in the Kentucky Derby: "It’s life-changing, for sure. It’s certainly a special opportunity and I’m grateful for it. It makes you want to do it again, searching for the next one."

Colonel John’s trainer, Eoin Harty, knows the feeling – kind of. The 45-year-old native of Dublin, who began his career as an assistant trainer for John Russell, was an assistant to trainer Bob Baffert when he nearly won three consecutive Kentucky Derbies. Cavonnier lost the ’96 Derby by a nose to Grindstone, then Silver Charm and Real Quiet took back-to-back Derbies. "It’s going to be my name on the program this time,"Harty said. "I’m going to bear full responsibility for the action of myself and my horse.”

He is perfectly comfortable with his decision to not give Colonel John a dirt start prior to the Derby. "I won’t because I’m a firm believer in training on synthetic courses,"Harty said. "I just think they’re so much kinder to the horse. You avoid the constant pounding, the bone on bone. The carnage rate of horses [on dirt] is unacceptable.”

Harty has had success training his horses on synthetic surfaces and then racing them on dirt. "From my own experience, I had a very good year at Churchill Downs last year, and my horses had worked on synthetic,"he said. "I did it with quite a few. I brought horses over [from Keeneland] the morning of the race at Churchill Downs, and that was it. It’s better for your horse. They stay sounder. If they’re sounder, they’re around to race longer and it’s good for the sport.”

Harty says he’s frequently asked about the difference between training horses on dirt vs. synthetic surfaces. "These are my opinions; they’re not facts,"he said. "From my own experience and from watching other trainers training on synthetic tracks, I wouldn’t say that training on synthetic is an advantage, but it gives a horse a different level of fitness. Every horse I’ve worked on a synthetic track who had been training on a dirt track, the first work is terrible. The second and the third are better. When I was at Santa Anita before they put in the synthetic track, and took them to Hollywood on synthetic for the first time, the horses seemed to be at a major disadvantage. When you look at synthetic tracks, they don’t have to work as hard to cover ground.”
Colonel John has been covering ground just fine on synthetic tracks. His victory in the Sham Stakes was his third in five starts. He was second in the other two races, one of them a Grade 1 stakes.

If he goes into the starting gate at Churchill Downs on the first Saturday of May, it will be his first dirt race, but not be his first time on dirt. "I’ll probably work him and gallop him at Churchill Downs,"Harty said. "It probably won’t hurt.”

Like Harty, Dollase, whose El Gato Malo had won his first three starts, including the Grade 3 San Rafael Stakes, before finishing second in the Sham, will also work his horse on Churchill Downs'dirt track before he starts in the Derby. Dollase’s only previous Derby starter, Wilko, finished sixth in 2005.

"My routine is usually to get a work over the track,"said the 37-year-old Dollase. Unlike Harty, Dollase has a different opinion regarding training on synthetic vs. dirt tracks. "I think you get a lot more fitness out of the synthetic,"he said. "You have to work harder. I used to train at Hollywood Park when it was the only cushion track, then run on Santa Anita when it was dirt, and what an advantage I had. I had a good meet a year and a half ago. So did a lot of the guys who trained at Hollywood Park. We were the guinea pigs starting out. Our horses trained on it, and I trained them hard at Hollywood Park and they ran well on Santa Anita’s dirt track. It might be harder the other way. A lot of guys who trained at Santa Anita didn’t do that well at Hollywood Park.”
Will a horse who has never raced on dirt win this year’s Kentucky Derby? "I think ultimately it comes down to the best horse wins the Kentucky Derby,"Harty said. "Look over the past 133 Derbies; usually the best horse wins. I think if the horse is good enough, he’ll overcome not racing on dirt.”

And if Harty’s horse doesn’t overcome that? "It would be a convenient excuse,"he said. "Based on my own experiences and the feelings of my owners, this is the route I take.”

Undoubtedly, as synthetic tracks grow in popularity, more trainers will take that route. Ultimately, the question won’t be can horses who have raced exclusively on synthetic surfaces win the Derby, rather which synthetic surface - Polytrack, Cushion or Tapeta - is more conducive to making that transition. 

Derby Starters - where do they go from there?

By Bill Heller

Led by Kentucky Derby winner Street Sense, the three-year-old crop of 2007 rearranged a lot of people’s thinking on what it takes to succeed on the first Saturday of May and beyond.

Street Sense not only became the first colt to win the Breeders' Cup Juvenile and the Run for the Roses the following spring, but along with the Derby's second and third place finishers, Hard Spun and Curlin, thrived later in the year. So did Tiago and Any Given Saturday, who finished seventh and eighth in the Derby and joined the top three in the starting gate for the Breeders' Cup Classic.

"Maybe they did wind up in the Classic because they weren't burned out," said Hall of Fame trainer Nick Zito, whose undefeated 2007 Two-Year-Old Champion Colt War Pass will attempt to give him his third Kentucky Derby victory. "Last year was an exceptional crop."

The leader of the crop was Curlin, who didn't make his career debut until last February 3rd, showing that not racing at two doesn't preclude greatness at three. After winning the Preakness, Jockey Club Gold Cup and Breeders' Cup Classic, he was 2007 Three-Year-Old Champion and Horse of the Year.
So how do trainers of this year's top Kentucky Derby contenders plan their horses' schedules? Specifically, how much time off do they give their colts between their last start at two and first start at three? Has everything changed because of last year?

The 20 horses that entered the starting gate for last year's Kentucky Derby had layoffs ranging from 20 to 133 days before beginning their three-year-old campaign. Hard Spun's was just 26. Street Sense was 133.

Todd Pletcher, who led North American trainers in earnings for the fourth consecutive year, saddled four other starters in last year's Derby besides Any Given Saturday. "There's an obvious trend toward more time between races," Pletcher said last December. "The spacing of races is obviously critical. You want to peak on the first Saturday in May, but there are big stakes that you also want to do well with. There's a fine line between having a horse ready and fit to run in his first start at three and still be able to build on that. It's a delicate balance."

Pletcher's 2007 Derby quintet had layoffs ranging from 70 to 98 days. "If anything, I would lean toward making my first start even later, and maybe having only two or three starts before the Derby," he said. "If I had a horse with a real good foundation leading into winter, I'd consider going into the Derby with just two starts, one in March and one in April.

That's what Carl Nafzger did with Street Sense, the 2006 Two-Year-Old Champion Colt. Nafzger's work getting Street Sense to last year's Derby was nothing short of brilliant. "I think Carl Nafzger did a masterful job with only the two preps," Zito said.

As a two-year-old, Street Sense had five starts, culminating with his breathtaking 10-length romp in the Breeders' Cup Juvenile at Churchill Downs after finishing third by 1 ¾ lengths to Great Hunter in the Grade 1 Breeders' Futurity over Keeneland's Polytrack surface.

"I had five starts as a two-year-old, but it's not how many times he ran, it's how many times he played the New England Patriots vs. how many he played against a weaker team," Nafzger said. "We played against the best two starts in a row. My horse wasn't mature. He needed some time. He was still growing and developing."

Nafzger decided Street Sense would enter the Derby off two races at three. Then he delayed Street Sense's three-year-old debut an additional 2 ½ weeks until a showdown with Any Given Saturday in the Grade 3 Tampa Bay Derby last March 17th. "We had a three-week window," Nafzger said. "The horse got light on his feet. He was a little crabby traveling. We needed a couple more weeks. Actually, going into that race, I was scared Any Given Saturday would pull away and he (Street Sense) wasn't going to get enough out of it. I might not be as tight as I needed to be. I didn't want to win it as much as I needed a race I had to work hard in. He won anyway (by a nose)."

Street Sense then was nosed by Dominican in the Grade 1 Blue Grass Stakes at Keeneland before winning the Derby by 2 ¼ lengths, Nafzger's second Run for the Roses, following Unbridled's victory in 1990. "If he only had two races as a two-year-old, I wouldn't have given him only two preps," Nafzger said. "I would have run him maybe four times before the Derby. The horse had what he needed."

So did Hard Spun, who had three starts as a two-year-old neatly spaced out. In fact, entering the Derby, Hard Spun had made one start in October, November, December, January, February and, in his final Derby prep, the Grade 2 Breeders' Futurity, on March 24th. His first start at three was just 26 days after his final start at two, and he won both of them. Hard Spun's gutsy second in the Derby affirmed trainer Larry Jones' wisdom in spacing his races.

"We felt like it was the right schedule for him," Jones said. "He got his career started a little late (last October 22nd). We never felt we had the time to put him into the racing wars, then give him time off. We figured how many races it would take to peak without training him hard. We tried to pick spots where he could move forward and not overmatch him. We felt once a month would take him into the Derby and have him educated enough and be able to increase his distance to keep moving forward to the mile and a quarter (of the Derby). We could probably do that 20 more times, and it wouldn't work for 20 other horses."

What will work this year?

The man with the horse to beat is Zito, seeking his third Kentucky Derby following the triumphs of Strike the Gold in 1991 and Go for Gin in '94. Both had four preps at three.

Strike the Gold, who won one of three starts as a two-year-old, had two allowance races at three before finishing second by a length in the Grade 1 Florida Derby and winning the Blue Grass by three lengths leading up to his 1 ¾-length victory in the Kentucky Derby. "He was a throwback in many ways," Zito said.

Go for Gin, who won three of five starts at two, prepped for the Kentucky Derby by winning the un-graded Preview Stakes, finishing second by three-quarters of a length in the Grade 2 Fountain of Youth, finishing fourth in the Florida Derby and running second in the Grade 1 Wood Memorial preceding his two-length victory in the Kentucky Derby, his 10th career start. Last year, the Kentucky Derby was Street Sense's eighth lifetime start.

"At one time, you had to have four races before the Derby," Zito said. "But you're looking at 1991 and 1994," Zito said. "I don't think you can do that now. War Pass can't do that. Anak Nakal (who won the Grade 2 Kentucky Jockey Club Juvenile at Churchill Downs last November 24th), I don't know. He's not a big horse. Unfortunately, they don't make the horses like they used to anymore."

They also don't follow the same schedule. The inception of the Breeders' Cup in 1984 gave trainers of precocious two-year-olds a tangible reason to have their juveniles peak in late October or early November. "The Breeders' Cup had a lot to do with it," Zito said.

In last year's Breeders' Cup Juvenile, War Pass completed his perfect two-year-old season at four-for-four with a 4 ¾-length romp that left no doubt as to who the winter-book favorite for the Derby would be. Interestingly, Zito didn't follow War Pass's debut victory at Saratoga with a step up to stakes, but rather in an allowance race. War Pass then won the Grade 1 Champagne and Breeders' Cup. "He's a tremendous horse, an exceptional two-year-old," Zito said. "I don't know what he'll be at three, but boy what a heck of a two-year-old."

Zito's initial intention is to give both War Pass and Anak Nakal two or three separate Derby preps. "The thing you love to do is keep them separated until the big show," he said.

Whether War Pass will be the star of that show won't be revealed for months. "It's exciting, but I'm worried," Zito said. "Let's face it. It brings a lot of pressure. I wouldn't say bad pressure, but we'll see. I know one thing. He's talented, that's for sure."

Resistance Training - can it be applied to racehorses?

By Caton Bredar

The termalone, "resistance training," invites at the very least skepticism, and in some cases, even a trace of joviality. As Hall of Fame conditioner Dick Mandella remarked when asked about it, "I'm very familiar with resistance training. For many years, I've had owners who resisted my training. I've had a few horses who resisted, too."

As he is known to do, Mandella was joking.  But as he, and most in the Thoroughbred industry would attest, finding safer ways to train and develop racehorses is no joking matter.

While lacking in research and data, at a basic level resistance training is a tool some equine conditioners - including Mandella - are incorporating at least on a small scale into their training systems.  At a very sophisticated level, a few horsemen are taking the idea of resistance training very seriously. 
It's a type of exercise not without misunderstandings.  Even in the training of human athletes, where resistance training arguably originated, there's some confusion.

Wikipedia defines resistance training as having "two different, sometimes confused meanings." 
The broadest definition, according to the on-line encyclopedia, is any technique that "uses a resistance to the force of muscular contraction (better termed strength training)".  In this sense, weight lifting is a basic form of resistance training with the weights offering resistance in direct opposition to the contraction of the muscle or muscles.

The second, more specific, definition refers to elastic or hydraulic resistance, or any type of training in which external devices -- such as resistance bands or exercise machines, are used to create the opposing force.  In the case of horses, think underwater treadmill.

The American Sports Medicine Institute elaborates on the goal of resistance training, again in human terms, as:  "gradually and progressively overload(ing) the muscular-skeletal system so it gets stronger."
A stronger muscle and skeletal system may well be the goal for any type of athlete.  But when the athlete is four-legged, and already loading hundreds of pounds of pressure on a relatively smaller and decidedly more fragile bone structure, the problem gets increasingly complex.  Take sports injuries in human athletes and multiply them four-fold.

That type of paradox - developing bigger, stronger, more durable racehorses while not breaking them down in the process - has already led some of the biggest names in harness racing to resistance training.
 
Joe Geiser, CEO of a company called Racehorse Conditioning Systems, is a proponent of resistance training and specifically, resistance carts.  According to Geiser, resistance carts have been used for decades in Europe, with "thousands" of the carts in use there today.  Perhaps even more noteworthy, in the United States, more than a third of the winners over the past 20 years of the Hambletonian and Hambletonian Oaks - harness racing's version of the Kentucky Derby and Oaks - have been trained using a particular type of resistance cart that Geiser markets and sells.
 
The theory is admittedly complex.  On his website, Geiser points to several types of muscle fibers, including slow twitch, or aerobic muscle fibers, and fast twitch, or anaerobic fibers.  The aerobic fibers are fueled by oxygen, the anaerobic fibers by glycogen.  Anything needing a short burst of explosive energy, Geiser writes, requires fast twitch, or anaerobic muscle fiber.  Resistance training works to target the anaerobic muscle fiber, but when combined with variations in speed and resistance, can also serve to impact the aerobic muscle fiber.  When done properly, so that the glycogen supplies are depleted and then built back up again, the muscle learns how to produce and store more, which ultimately builds endurance.

Essentially, using a resistance cart is "basically like training a horse on a hill," says Geiser, "and you determine the length and steepness of the hill."

Geiser describes the resistance carts as slightly heavier jog carts equipped with two hydraulic pumps, one on each wheel of the cart, that in theory allow a trainer to increase the horse's workload and/or heart rate, while decreasing the amount of speed involved.  When the trainer depresses a pedal, pressure on the wheel is released, so the horse has to pull - or work - more, even if he's actually slowing down or traveling at a walk.
"The horse doesn't feel the heavier cart, because it's balanced," Geiser says.  "You control the amount of resistance and for how long you apply the resistance.  The resistance itself is against the wheels," rather than directly against a horse's joints.  Muscle groups, in essence, get a workout, without any unnecessary or added wear and tear on the skeletal system.

The majority if not all of the work on resistance carts is done at a walk, also reducing the potential for injury, according to Geiser.  It's done in conjunction with a heart monitor, a key component of the entire program. "The key to the warehouse is the heart monitor."

A Pennsylvania resident, Geiser has trained andowned Standardbred horses on and off for the past six years.  He advocates a system of training that also includes a very specific feeding program, ample recovery time between workouts, meticulous record-keeping, and a knowledge of the horse's maximum heart rate.  He also stresses the importance of a positive attitude, and claims for the horses he has worked directly with, resistance training has almost always led to a healthier horse with a more willing spirit during workouts.

That positive attitude extends to Allentown, a 6-year-old gelded pacer Geiser has been working with, primarily using a resistance cart. 
 
"Allentown has bad knees.  Conventional wisdom told me to get rid of the horse," he offers.  "I laid him up for five months, did a lot of walking with him.  He went out every four days."
With ample recovery time in between resistance cart sessions and a minimum of traditional training - never at an all-out or extreme speed, Allentown returned to the races to record a fifth, a third, two seconds and two wins in six starts, including a win in January of this year.
 
"Fundamentally, the system is pretty easy to use," he adds.  "But it's also easy to over-use and a trainer has to have a lot of patience."

Besides developing a better racehorse over-all, Geiser believes "this is about taking the cheaper horse and getting him to be productive," a principle he thinks could well be adapted to the Thoroughbred racing world.
"I know it's sacrilegious to consider a Thoroughbred pulling a cart," he says.  "But there is some value holistically to teaching a horse to pull a cart."

The famed Thoroughbred conditioner Preston Burch might agree.  First published in 1953, his "Training Thoroughbred Horses" is still considered among horsemen a reliable overview of the fundamentals of training.  Burch writes, "Some trainers have their yearlings broken to harness before they are broken to ride.  This is an excellent idea because it accustoms the yearling to bridle and teaches him to handle himself before weight is put on his back."

In principle, Leonie Seesing, owner and founder of the company Equi-Gym, also agrees.  Now based in Kentucky, Seesing may be one of the first licensed Thoroughbred trainers in America, by Geiser's estimate, to purchase a resistance cart.  A member of the Association of Equine Sports Medicine, Seesing started in Wyoming working as a jockey, owner and trainer before devoting herself to developing an alternative method of training.

"I saw these wonderful, beautiful horses going by the wayside," she claims.  "I believed there had to be a better way."
With very little research to turn to, Seesing looked to human conditioning for inspiration, and says she also was influenced by progressive training "guru" Tom Ivers.

"Thinking out of the box, I tried to stop thinking about what we know about racehorses," and turned to what she could learn about humans, who, according to Seesing, adapt and respond to exercise in much the same way equines do.

"When I started looking at humans," she says, "I started becoming much more innovative, and I found it worked.  The end result was that they race a whole lot better."

Since 1983, Seesing has been a practitioner of progressive training, a form of training she describes as a combination of interval and resistance training, with the goal of increasing heart-rate while lowering impact.
"By going into the anaerobic system and progressively loading your exercise program," she says, "you build the body stronger."

"There's a benefit" to resistance training alone, she says, "but it's not as great.  And for the amount of effort involved, it's kind of foolish…you're missing the most powerful part of training.  With interval training, [the horses] become tough."

Similar to Geiser, Seesing believes in the need to "get inside a horse's head," along with thorough record-keeping, heart-rate monitoring, and a greater understanding of equine physiology.

"Resistance training can be a pretty good-sized tool, used throughout and done with high intensity at the end of a training program.  It teaches the anaerobic system to become more fuel efficient."
 
Seesing finds uphill treadmills and resistance carts to be the most effective means of anaerobic, or resistance, conditioning, and, also similarly to Geiser, believes the greatest benefit may be for the lesser horses.
"Junk horses," she says in describing the majority of the horses she has owned or trained, but points as well to her success rate at getting horses to the races over a five year period - 94 percent, according to her calculations, well above the national average and an indicator that her program is working.

"The majority of trainers have horses like mine," she concludes.  "When you use unconventional methods, you make more money, and you do better."
"Learning good physiology skills…how to manipulate the body.  It takes work to learn," she adds.  "There is so much more to it.  It is overwhelming.  But there are a lot of people who are tired of trashing their horses."
Noted Veterinary Surgeon and Director of Orthopedic Research at Colorado State University, Dr. Wayne McIlwraith stops short of endorsing interval training or putting a cart behind a Thoroughbred, but he does see some potential in resistance training.

"How a horse lands in his stride is innate.  It can't be changed much.  But a lot could be mitigated potentially, with resistance training."

McIlwraith agrees about the importance of muscle fiber.  "Muscle tone is certainly critical," he continues.  "The more fit they are, the more stable the joint, the less disease.  It does come back to muscle."
"There's a lot of logic to it," he concludes, while admitting the research is limited.   "If you can stimulate muscle without wear and tear…if you could train slowly and without impact on the joints…it would absolutely be safer. There's always potential, but I haven't seen any data."

McIlwraith is credited on the website of a relatively new equine resistance training concept called "Cyclone Theory."  Patterned after a new human training concept called "parachute technique" - in which wind resistance is created by a parachute attached to an athlete's waist as he or she sprints - the theory as described on their website  is that wind resistance is transferred to the legs and applied to all the muscles directly involved in moving the body forward, so higher power at high speeds is ultimately achieved.  In the case of Thoroughbreds, the resistance is created by a band stretched consistently and horizontally from the horse, and controlled by the pace with which the horse travels.

"The two things that hurt horses," says McIlwraith, "are weight and speed."  Anything that reduces those two factors, he says, is worth exploring.

Which brings us back to Mandella.  Known, in particular, for his success with older horses like top turf performer Sandpit or, more recently, The Tin Man, Mandella says over the years he's used an underwater treadmill for horses returning from injuries and/or long lay-offs, as an intermediate step prior to returning to the racetrack.
That time period, the time between walking and jogging or galloping, according to McIlwraith, is critical.
"Resuming training is a big transition," he says.  "It's always a difficult transition going from walking to galloping, when rehabbing from an injury.  Anything that can make it not as big a shock is beneficial."
  
About a year ago, with the advice of his veterinarians, Mandella added a device called the Astride to his program, as a way of transitioning some horses between minor injuries and their return to the racetrack.

"We've been kind of experimenting," he says of the device, which allows varying amounts of weight to be deposited in saddlebags on either side of the horse.  The weights are secured to a surcingle or belt girthed around the horse's barrel, then attached via reins to a headstall and bit.

"We use it for horses you can't really train - maybe they've grabbed a quarter," Mandella elaborates.  "You vary or increase the weight.  It keeps you from going backwards."

Mandella uses the device on horses standing in the stall or walking around the barn and cautions that it's not a replacement for regular training, but rather an effective stop-gap measure. "We're finding it just works better with weight," he concludes, something other trainers, by McIlwraith's estimation, are discovering as well.
"Anything that's putting on increased muscle…without increasing risk.  Bottom line, there are a number of ways to try and accomplish that. It's a tradition-laden sport," McIlwraith admits, "and there's going to be a certain amount of skepticism about many things.  But things are changing.  We surely have to find a better way than we do it now."

"People are looking at different ways," McIlwraith proclaims.  "Of course that doesn't mean there are better ways.  But people are trying to find a better way."

And as to whether resistance training is that better way, "there are many subjective feelings…now we have to work on proving them."

Breaking In - laying the groundwork with the racehorses of the future

By Frances Karon

While the Thoroughbred racehorse has evolved through methods of breeding, raising, feeding, vaccinating and training, one thing that has remained fairly constant is that they must be broken in with great care and patience if they stand any chance of doing what they were born to do."

We can breed for speed or distance, to race or sell commercially, or to zero in on superior ancestors, but whatever the sire’s covering fee is, it’s like that down-to-earth reminder that our shoes, be they Armani or knockoffs – go on the same way. All horses must be taught to carry a rider on their back and to respond to a bit in their mouth. Someone figured out a long time ago that Thoroughbreds do not react positively to the American cowboy way of “breaking” a horse – literally, breaking its spirit – leading the way for a gentler, more personalized breaking in process. There are subtle differences in the approach but the desired ending is to produce a horse who accepts a rider with the confidence that only good early experiences will give it.

 
In Camden, South Carolina, Mickey Preger Jr. has been breaking young racehorses-to-be for 15 years, though his education began long before. The son of the trainer of 1983 Eclipse Award-winning older mare Ambassador of Luck, Preger grew up on the backstretch of Belmont Park, where his father shared a barn with Northern Dancer’s trainer Horatio Luro for 20 years. Preger later spent years working for Ruffian and Forego’s trainer Frank Whiteley Jr. During Preger’s tenure, Whiteley broke Rhythm, Seeking the Gold and Preach.
 
Preger is based at the Camden Training Center, which used to be the place of choice for many trainers to winter their racehorses. Now, it caters more towards young horses learning the ropes but it has what Preger calls a “racetrack atmosphere in the country. There are enough horses here that they’re acclimated to everything when they leave here – the traffic of the track, horses jogging the wrong way.”
 
Preger circles October 1 on his calendar every year as his target date to begin the breaking in his new stock. The process itself is rudimentary and painstaking. He says, “I would say the way we break them is still very old school.” It is a matter of tackling one idea at a time and giving them three or four days to acclimate to it. Slowly, in this way his horses get used to a bit, lunging, lunging with a surcingle, with a saddle and with stirrups, each as an individual step. At this point they are well into their lessons and Preger will line drive them “until we put a good mouth on them, probably around four or five days. We take our time, and if a horse needs a couple more days we just give them a couple more days of whatever they need.”
 
The horses have already been introduced to a rider jumping on and off both sides, first in the stalls before graduating to the shedrow, jogging figure eights in small paddocks and learning directional changes in larger paddocks. Preger drills the same thing into their heads repetitively, stepping it up a level every few days as they become mentally prepared. In this fashion, the horses reach the stage where they begin jogging over a gallop in the woods before cantering on a polo field to try out lead changes.
 
The babies move on to gallop over a half-mile track, where they will generally remain until just after January 1, after which it is on to the more serious business conducted on the mile training track. When the horses ship out to racetracks around the country, most will be advanced enough to where their new trainers can breeze them three-eighths out of the gate at the end of their first week.
 
The majority of Preger’s clientele sends him homebred horses they intend to race, such as Grade 1 winner Mossflower and multiple graded winner Distorted Humor, but he does occasionally prep one that is earmarked for a late two-year-olds in training sale. His attitude toward the end use of both types is the same. “We don’t really do learning stages any differently, though we might have to speed up the process over the open gallops. You just probably have to kick on a little earlier to make the sales.” The season at the training center ends in mid-May, so the average horse in his care receives seven months of pre-track schooling.
 
An expansive ocean away, near Marlborough, England, ex-jockey Malcolm Bastard performs the same basic service as Preger with some slight distinctions. Bastard deals in a greater number of sales horses than his American counterpart, but also has plenty of horses going directly to trainers. Many of his influx have come out of yearling sales and he begins work as each comes into him and sends them out when they are properly broken, meaning he deals in cycles and can handle a greater volume than Preger’s 20.
 
“They’re pretty easy to break these days, especially if they’re sales prepped, then they’re half done.” Half done perhaps, but far from ready for the racecourse. In the case of a homebred, who will not have been handled to the same extent as a sales horse, Bastard commences at square one. “It goes in the horsewalker and we get it used to that for a few days, and then we put a rug on it.” These stages take a few days each, and once the horse is compliant with the rug Bastard introduces it to breaking tack, consisting of a bit, side reins, a bib martingale and a saddle, in one session. “We are looking after two things. The side rein stops them getting their head too far down and makes them carry it in the right place, and the martingale stops them getting their head up too far.” The ultimate goal, he says, is for the horses “to carry themselves in a nice position.”
 
Fully tacked, the yearlings spend 25 minutes on the horsewalker followed by a short spell of four or five minutes being lunged, with an additional 10 to 15 minutes of line driving in the indoor school adjacent to the lunge area. The duration of this phase “depends on the character of the horse.” This is the key to any good horsebreaker’s program, the point which Bastard is continually stressing, that no step is complete until the horse is fully accepting of what he is being asked to do. “As long as you know what you are doing with them, you gain their confidence while being firm but kind. They’ve got to trust you and you’ve got to trust them, and if you get a good relationship then they come a lot quicker.” Two current three-year-olds Bastard broke in for George Strawbridge as yearlings that attest to Bastard’s ability to establish that trust between man and animal are Group 1 winners Lucarno (by Dynaformer) and Mrs Lindsay (Theatrical), each by sires whose progeny are known to be difficult. Yet Bastard modestly brushes off his skills as “just very straightforward, basic common horse sense. I think everybody finds it straightforward, just hard work.”
 
Their “hard work” sees Bastard and his crew go from line-driving to riding their horses in the pen for 10 or so days, with a second person stationed at the horse’s head for its comfort and the safety of everyone involved. Having already proven themselves agreeable to someone jumping on and off them in the stable, once emotionally stable over a matter of days the horses move out to the indoor arena. As with Preger, regardless of where the horses are supposed to go after they leave Bastard’s stables, “they all get treated the same. With the breeze-up horses we don’t do anything different with them but start to sharpen them up a little bit more.”
 
Bastard retired from race riding in 1990, having ridden primarily for his boss of 14 years, Fred Winter, and began to pinhook his own horses, which eventually spiraled into breaking in other people’s horses. As a young boy, Bastard worked for showjumper Ted Williams, who Bastard credits as “an absolute genius of a horseman” from whom he learned to do things what he calls “the uncomplicated way. A lot of people try to make things complicated but that’s not the way we do it.” The main focus for Bastard is to “try to make things very simple, and the horses get into a routine and they enjoy that routine.”
 
One man who has been innovative in dealing with unbroken or even wild animals is Buck Wheeler. He uses his patented Stableizer to facilitate the breaking process. On a beautiful morning in Kentucky, Wheeler demonstrates on an unbroken yearling at Ramsey Farm. Wheeler joins the colt in the round pen with his gear, consisting in part of a long whip with a plastic bag fastened to the tip and a lasso that elicits a raised brow from the observer, not to mention the nervous colt eyeing him apprehensively. Wheeler secures the Stableizer under the colt’s lip and tightens it above his ears, hitting acupressure points that quickly begin to relax the horse. Wheeler inserts a chifney bit in the mouth because with a chifney, as opposed to a more traditional bit, “it all falls into place, all right in line” where the horse turns with his entire body as one instead of turning with his head with the rest to follow. He begins to lunge the yearling.
 
With every step, the colt is allowed to sniff the new equipment, and Wheeler reassures him with a rub on the forehead and by blowing in his nose that everything is okay. The two become fast friends, the colt recognizing Wheeler as the alpha leader, and whenever the colt is turned loose he trails as Wheeler zigzags around the pen with his back to the animal.
 
Wheeler, a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation through his mother, was raised on 8,000 acres of Indian territory, with some 80 horses at his disposal. “I learned from the Indians – they weren’t called trainers then, they were just horsemen.” His father put him on a horse and said, “You’re going to learn to ride like the Indians before I buy you a saddle.” Wheeler laughs and fills in his adult interpretation of his father’s philosophy: “I think he was just too tight to buy the saddle. But one thing I realized later on in life was that he was absolutely correct because it learns you to be part of that animal. You are literally part of the horse. You can feel things that happen before they ever happen. You learn to watch their eyes, you learn to watch their ears, because those are their telegraphs.”
 
Perhaps most spectacular is what Wheeler does to close out the training period. To show how relaxed and desensitized the yearling is, Wheeler stands in the middle of the pen with the horse turned loose against the fence, and he twirls the lasso over his head and ropes the colt around his neck. The colt shies backward at first and Wheeler flicks it around his neck a second, third and fourth time. After the second, the colt stops flinching and simply watches with interest as Wheeler reverses the steps and untangles the rope from some 15 feet away.
 
“Because of the euphoria that’s induced by the endorphins he’s remembering this as a pleasurable experience instead of something that he’s being forced into, or having a bad attitude.”
 
The premise is elementary. The endorphins released by the pressure points on which the Stableizer rests enable Wheeler to handle the horse from all sides, getting him comfortable with having a rope tangled around his back legs or the plastic bag on the whip blowing in his face and over his body. When it is time for the saddle, Wheeler encourages the gray colt to satisfy his curiosity before he puts it on his back and cinches the girth by himself and with little effort. The stirrups dangle well below the horses belly; Wheeler threads his lines through them and drives the horse around in a circle. The yearling is frightened by the strange sensations and noises for the first two or three turns around the pen before he puts his head down and trots calmly and with a straight head as Wheeler steers him from behind with his fingertips.
 
The Stableizer is a shortcut to dealing with horses of all ages and in any capacity but is best described as an aid to promote good experiences for the animals. “You don’t have to go out there and jerk and holler and scream and fuss around. It’s the physiological aspect of what it does” with the endorphins. “If you hurt a horse in their training process – and it doesn’t matter if they’re little or big – they remember that, and sometimes it’s ten times tougher to go back in and try to break that fear.”
 
Trainers of the caliber of Clive Brittain and Carl Nafzger have observed Wheeler in action and are proponents of his Stableizer. Street Sense is Wheeler’s current poster boy, though Nafzger’s Unbridled and Lady Joanne and Wayne Lukas’ classic winners Grindstone and Editor’s Note have modeled the Stableizer as well. This is a successful tool that honors Wheeler’s Native American teachers by inventing a new way to emulate their old approach. His method is not necessarily different than the ways in which other people break horses, but assisted by the Stableizer he is able to accomplish the successful introduction of a rider within an hour of working with an unschooled horse. Or mule, zebra, llama – all of which on whom Wheeler has used the Stableizer.
 
Preger sums up his opinion of the breaker’s role in the racehorse’s career: “If a horse is going to perform well he’s got to be happy and healthy, right? I like to give credit to the people that train horses at the track. We work as a team, put it that way. It all has to work together.”
 
Although there are variants among people who break horses on global and even local levels, the certainty on which all will agree is that the horse’s emotional wellbeing during the learning stages is tantamount to its ability to perform to the best of its capacity.

Long Layoffs - training a horse to win after months of not running

By Bill Heller

With Thoroughbreds racing fresher and less frequently these days, traininga horse to win off a month layoff is commonplace. But when a trainerstretches his Thoroughbred’s layoff to six months or longer, and he winsthat first start back, that’s special. Doing it consistently stamps a trainer as one of the best in the business.

Different trainers take different approaches with workouts trying to reachthe same destination: the winner’s circle, even if the return race is a prepfor an upcoming stakes.

 “The training theories are a lot different now,” Hall of Famer Allen Jerkens said. “The horses are not quite as strong as they used to be. They’re bred a lot more for speed. It’s a different game now.”

It’s a game Jerkens, at the age of 78, continues to win. In the space of 10days at the end of May at Belmont Park, Jerkens won the Grade 2 ShuveeHandicap with Teammate and the Grade 3 Jaipur Stakes with 24-to-1 longshot Ecclesiastic and finished second with longshot Political Force in the Grade 1 Metropolitan Handicap. All three horses are home-breds owned by Joseph Allen.

 First up was Teammate, the four-year-old gray filly who was coming off afine three-year-old season, one win and four second in 10 starts in 2006 and earnings of $350,890. She won the Grade 2 Bonnie Miss by six lengths; finished second in back-to-back Grade 1 stakes, the Alabama and the Gazelle, both to Pine Island - Shug McGaughey’s outstanding filly who suffered a fatal breakdown during last year’s Breeders’ Cup Distaff - and concluded her three-year-old season last November 4th, finishing a front-running fourth at 2-5 in the Grade 3 Turnback the Alarm Handicap. “She was running against the best,” Jerkens said. “She looked like she was home in the Alabama.”

Teammate’s first goal this year would be the Grade 2 Shuvee Handicap at one mile at Belmont May 19th. To get her there, Jerkens penciled in herfour-year-old debut in an allowance/optional $75,000 claimer at sevenfurlongs at Belmont, May 3rd.

Teammate’s first published work was April 10th at Belmont Park, when she breezed five furlongs on the Belmont Park training track in a leisurely1:04, only the 21st fastest of 27 working that day at that distance (21/27).Four days later, she worked a bullet five furlongs on the training track in1:00, best of 59 at that distance (1/59). On April 24th, she worked sevenfurlongs in 1:24 3/5, a brilliant move which wasn’t ranked because no other horse worked that distance that morning. Teammate’s final prep came on April 30th when she returned to the training track and again recorded a bullet, covering four furlongs in :46 4/5, best of 28 that day (1/28).
 
Asked about bringing her back, Jerkens said, “You jog a little bit, gallopand start breezing slow. Some horses get more out of their gallops. Shedoesn’t like to gallop too slow. She’ll gallop along in the morning. Thisyear, she’s been easier to train than last year. She seems to be morewilling. I have a good man get on her.”
 
The blazing works, especially the seven furlong move, may have been a tad faster than Jerkens preferred, but it didn’t faze him. “Some real goodhorses will work as fast as you want them to,” he said. “When you’re running with good horses, it’s a whole lot different. If you’re running $20,000 claimers, they won’t do it, and they can’t do it. I was looking for 1:26. If she had been racing every three weeks, you wouldn’t want to her to work that fast. Everything is relative to how close the race is. You don’t want to go too fast on top of a race.
 
“Years ago, I remember watching Eddie Neloy when I was younger. He would take his stakes horses and work them five furlongs in :59 three days out, then walk the next day, then gallop a mile and a half, and then do it again on the morning of the race. I watched him a lot. Ben Jones had a filly named Bewitch. She was a big fat mare. He worked her five-eighths in :59 or in a minute the day before the race.
 
“I remember Beau Purple (who upset Kelso four times). He worked 1:48 3/5 for a mile and an eighth a week before the (1962) Hawthorne Gold Cup. He was a little fat horse. He shipped to Chicago, then, three days before the race, he went three-quarters in 1:11 3/5. And it was muddy. He beat good horses.”
 
Surprisingly, in a field of just five in her 2007 debut, Teammate faced good horses, too: Todd Pletcher-trained Yachats, making her return off an even longer layoff, and Her Royal Nibs and Endless Virtue, who’d each wonmore than $150,000 in the last year and a half. Longshot Solarana completed the field.
 
Yachats, a four-year-old filly owned by Aaron and Marie Jones, hadcompleted her three-year-old season last August 19th, when she finished atiring fifth in the Ms. Woodford Stakes at Monmouth Park, April 19th. For2006, she had two wins and a second from six starts and earnings over $61,000.
Pletcher, who has won the last three Eclipse Awards for trainer and againleads all trainers in earnings this year, wanted to bring Yachats, named fora town in Oregon, sooner. “It was basically frustration,” Pletcher said. “Wehad entered the horse several times at Gulfstream Park. The races didn’tfill. So we entered her here, and we look up and see Teammate was in there.”
 
Yachats showed six works before her return, all at Palm Meadows, thetraining center in south Florida:
 
      March 4th - five furlongs in 1:01 1/5 handily, third fastest of 19 (3/19)
      March 12th - five furlongs in 1:01 3/5 handily (6/21)
      March 18th - five furlongs in 1:02 3/5 breezing (16/26)
      March 24th - five furlongs in 1:02 3/5 breezing (13/29)
      April 8th - a bullet five furlongs in 1:00 handily (1/12)
      April 15th - five furlongs in 1:01 4/5 handily (8/9).
Both Teammate and Yachats raced well in their 2007 debuts, Teammate beating Yachats by a neck. In her next start, Teammate won the Shuvee by half a length over heavily favored Sugar Shake. “We were flattered when Teammate came back (and won the Shuvee),” Pletcher said. “Sometimes, you run well and you just get outrun.”
Sometimes you don’t. Eugene Melnyk Racing Stables’ Harlington had suggested greatness early in his career for Pletcher. A son of Unbridled out of the 1992 Eclipse Champion Three-Year-Old Filly Serena’s Song, Harlington made it to the races late in his two-year-old season, winning a one-mile maiden race on a sloppy track at Aqueduct by a neck, November 28th, 2004.
Freshened over the winter by Pletcher, he returned at Gulfstream Park onJanuary 15th, 2005. Racing again on a sloppy track, he won a bottom-levelallowance race by three lengths. Harlington finally caught a fast track inhis third start, the Grade 3 Risen Star Stakes at Fair Grounds. Sent off the6-5 favorite in a field of 11, he raced extremely wide from the 10 post andchecked in sixth, three lengths behind the winner, Scipion.
 
“We were disappointed right after the race,” Pletcher said. “But he cameout of the race with a filling in his left front ankle.”
 
Given ample time to heal and recover, Harlington returned to the track,December 4th, 2005, at Aqueduct, and he won an allowance race by fivelengths. Pletcher again freshened him and Harlington moved up the allowance ladder, winning a non-winners of three-other-than by a length andthree-quarters over a future star, Premium Tap, at odds of 3-5, February8th, 2006.
Pletcher upped the ante, and Harlington responded by capturing the Grade 2 Gulfstream Park Breeders’ Cup Handicap by a neck, March 4th, 2006.
 
Harlington moved up to Grade 1 company in the Pimlico Special, May 19th, where he finished a dull sixth to a horse making his first North American start: Invasor. Who knew? Invasor, last year’s Horse of the Year, hasn’t lost a race since.
Again, Harlington came out of the Pimlico Special with a filling in thatsame ankle. “We sent him to Eugene’s farm,” Pletcher said. “They gave him time off. Phil Hronec is there and runs the farm. He knows what level we want. Had several half-mile breezes before he came back to us.”
 
Pletcher began shopping for a spot for Harlington’s five-year-old debut,eventually selecting a mile-and-a-sixteenth allowance/optional $100,000claimer at Belmont Park, May 24th, a year and five days after his last race.

 “A horse like that is going to have to run at least a mile,” Pletcher said.“You have to have a starting point. We were thumbing through the condition book. We circled this race at Belmont. There was a back-up plan for an allowance race at Churchill Downs a couple days later. We were happy the race filled at Belmont.”
Pletcher’s workout pattern is one he has honed. “There’s really not a wholelot of variation you can do,” he said. “I’m not a breeze-him-back in fivedays. I’m a six or seven-day guy. Generally, we’re on a six or seven-dayschedule.”

Harlington had six workouts leading up to his race, the first three on theBelmont Park training track and the next three on the main track:
 
      April 8th - five furlongs breezing in 1:03 3/5 (7/12)
      April 22nd - five furlongs breezing in 1:02 (7/20)
      April 29th - five furlongs breezing in 1:02 2/5 (10/15)
      May 6th - a bullet five furlongs handily in 1:00 3/5 (1/12)
      May 14th - five furlongs breezing in 1:00 (6/46)
      May 21st - five furlongs breezing in 1:01 4/5 (41/54)
 
The gap from April 8th to the 22nd was because of a lot of rain on LongIsland. And Harlington’s final work was supposed to be on May 20th, fourdays before his race. “We got rained out again, so I had to make his workout three days back,” Pletcher said. “Because he is a large horse and carries a lot of weight, I wasn’t worried about it. We pulled him up fairly quickly after the wire. Usually, we let them go on for a quarter or three-eighths.”
 
Harlington won his return easily by 3 ¼ lengths. “I was very pleased,”Pletcher said. “I thought he raced very well. He’s a horse we’ve always feltvery good about. He put us in a position to move into a stakes. He is aGrade 1 stakes horse, and we have to prove it.”
 
Hall of Fame trainer Nick Zito’s Commentator has already proven himself at the highest level of competition. His neck victory over subsequent Horse of the Year Saint Liam in the 2005 Grade 1 Whitney Handicap was one of the greatest victories in Zito’s career. He had successfully stretched out Tracy Farmer’s New York-bred speed machine to a mile-and-an-eighth. That victory was Commentator’s seventh in eight career starts as he battled an assortment of physical problems.
 
In his next start, the Grade 1 Woodward Stakes, then at Belmont Park,Commentator was cooked by two rabbits entered by Saint Liam’s trainer, Rick Dutrow, and faded to be a distant third to Saint Liam.
 
Commentator made just two starts in 2006, winning the Mugatea Stakes for New York-breds easily at 1-9 and then having terrible luck in the Grade 1 Forego, September 2nd, 2006, at Saratoga. Sent off the .90-to-1 favorite in a deeply talented field of 11, Commentator leapt up at the start, gettingaway dead last. He was rushed into contention by Eibar Coa, then faded to10th.
 
Given ample time to recover, Commentator was pointed to a new campaign this year by Zito. “We’re always talking about having a good bottom,” Zito said.
“A horse needs to have a good bottom before you can even breeze him. I’ve been doing this for a good time. Every single day, you have people come to the barn and say the horse worked great. But they don’t know how much went into it before they work. We had to gallop him for two months because he needed it. We didn’t like the way he came back from the farm.”
Zito takes pride in his ability to win with long layoff horses. “We’ve donepretty well with layoffs,” he said. “The more talented the horse, the betteryou look.”
Wanderin Boy made Zito look like a genius when he overcame a six-monthlayoff to take the Grade 3 Alysheba Stakes at Churchill Downs on May 4th by 4 ¼ lengths.
Could Commentator do the same? Zito chose a softer spot for his return, the Richmond Runner Stakes for New York-breds at 6 ½ furlongs at Belmont Park on May 28th. Only four other horses were entered, all of them considerably overmatched.
 
Commentator showed six different works before his return, the first at Palm Meadows, the next four at Churchill Downs and the final one on the deep Oklahoma Training Track at Saratoga:
       March 31st - three furlongs handily in :36 2/5 (1/3)
      April 10th - four furlongs breezing in :48 (9/49)
      April 19th - four furlongs breezing in :48 2/5 (11/34)
      April 27th - four furlongs breezing in :47 4/5 (2/22)
      May 7th - a bullet five furlongs breezing in :58 4/5 (1/27)
      May 22nd - a bullet four furlongs breezing in :47 3/5 (1/43)
Commentator ran true to his works, springing out of the starting gate as ifhe’d been shot out of a cannon, then dusting his rivals wire-to-wire by 11 ¼lengths in a sparkling 1:15 3/5 under Corey Nakatani, who barely moved his hands during the race. Commentator was back and ready for harder battles.

Getting back to the winner’s circle in his return could do nothing but help.

Jockey School - we spend a day at the North American Racing Academy

​By Frances Karon

Standing in the classroom of the North American Racing Academy (NARA) at the Kentucky Horse Park in Lexington, Kentucky is a sensory thrill. The smell of leather, the sharp crack of reins slapping against outstretched necks as seven jockeys scrub hard on their mounts. If you close your eyes and listen to the strained breathing of the riders you can almost hear the cadence of the hooves. The only thing that isn’t real are the horses, but with names like John Henry, Alysheba and Sunday Silence, they are all but real.

Chris McCarron’s voice rises above the din, all at once coaxing, encouraging, taunting and unrelenting. Looking at the red-faced students you can pick out the ones who want it the most, their attention focused forward between their horses ears with intensity. Stopwatch in hand, McCarron counts down from ten and gets stuck on four amid a chorus of pained protests. “Four…four…four…three…two…one. To the victor go the spoils!” The riders nearly collapse from the exertion. “Yeaaah, look at the grimace in her face!” He’s given them quite a workout.
Welcome to a typical day at NARA, the first program of its kind in the United States and Canada, where McCarron, retired from the jockey colony but far from retired, is whittling his inaugural class of 11 aspiring students into the jockeys of tomorrow. After this particular drill, McCarron explains to them that they’ve just ridden their mechanical Equicizer horses for a minute and nine seconds, the equivalent of a six-furlong sprint. They can hardly believe it. They might have guessed they were competing in the 1½-mile Belmont Stakes.
NARA only opened its doors in 2006 but the concept is older than many of its students, dating back to the time McCarron spoke to young jockeys at a racing school in Japan in 1988. “I was very impressed with the program. That’s actually what planted the seed in my head about establishing a program here in this country.” He has since been to almost every riding school on offer and has put together a curriculum that borrows from his research. The end result is a combination of what he calls “the way I was taught to ride and the sort of European style, whereby the students have to take care of the horses as well as getting on them.” This way, he says, “they’re learning a respect for the animal, respect for the people who actually get the horses prepared for them to ride. It gives them a much greater appreciation of all the hard work that goes into getting a horse to the races.”

Prior to earning multiple Eclipse Awards and a Hall of Fame induction, McCarron was fortunate enough to find a mentor in trainer Odie Clelland, who had helped launch a fledgling Eddie Arcaro into his successful career. He recalls his first time on a Thoroughbred, working as a 16-year-old hotwalker for Clelland. “I was scared to death. I’d just been riding the pony around, so knowing what a Thoroughbred is capable of doing I was terrified. When he saw the fear in my face he told me to jump off and I just froze. He reached up and pulled me off. It was a good while before I was back on a Thoroughbred.” But eventually he conquered his “fear of the unknown” and tried again. One of his goals at NARA is to take away that fear and give his students all the tools they need to be confident, conscientious riders with an ingrained understanding of horsemanship.
McCarron says the jockey system in place in this country is like putting “somebody behind the wheel of a NASCAR automobile without having been formally trained. It’s crazy, considering the amount of investment that is in this thing called the Thoroughbred horse. You’ve got the breeders, the owners, the trainers, all the stable help, the farm help, and then when you involve the betting public, you have thousands of people that have an interest in this horse. And, a jockey walks into a paddock having received no formal training whatsoever, gets a leg up from a trainer and is expected to go out there and perform like a professional. It’s wacko, it’s wacko.”

The picture he paints of the uneducated young jockey in the driver’s seat for the Indy 500 brings the lack of training many of today’s riders receive into frightening perspective. It is almost inconceivable that NARA is the first of its kind in these parts, where the Thoroughbred industry is a lucrative business. Steve Cauthen, like fellow retired Hall of Famers Laffit Pincay Jr. and Eddie Delahoussaye, is on the academy’s board. “It’s a great thing,” says Cauthen, “something that has been needed here for a long time. It’s amazing that there’s never been a jockey school in America.” Everyone seems to agree that the racing school is long overdue and that McCarron is the perfect fit at the helm. He is patient, intelligent, articulate, and totally committed to the endeavor. Spend some time with Chris McCarron and you quickly understand that he does not accept failure lightly.

NARA is intertwined with the Kentucky Community and Technical College System (KCTCS), meaning that the students, all of whom have obtained either a high school diploma or a GED equivalent and who pay a tuition to the college based on the number of credit hours they take, can opt to take additional courses in English, math and science to graduate with an Associate’s Degree in Equine Science. NARA’s organizational framework under the KCTCS banner reveals a futuristic blueprint extending beyond the Professional Jockey Certificate. Soon, individuals who are interested in other careers in the horse industry will be able to go after a Professional Horsemen’s Certificate or a Racing Office Professional’s Certificate.

NARA has some other exciting plans, including a top-notch facility with its own track and dorm at the Horse Park. Besides what it has attracted from donors, the program received sizeable state funding in 2006 but has a long way to go before it raises the $15-million required to convert an artist’s rendering into their actual campus. In the meantime, students and instructors split time between their headquarters at the Horse Park and The Thoroughbred Center. McCarron hopes to go before the General Assembly to request financial assistance for NARA, and, if all else fails, “get on my knees and beg.”

NARA is providing a win-win situation for its students and consequently, in a few years’ time, for racing. McCarron cites the specialized coaching and instruction other professional athletes receive. “What that demonstrates is there’s a greater need for that teaching, that tutoring, in order to help a person reach his or her full potential as an athlete.” With jockeys, “not only do we not have someone formally teaching us ahead of time, after we begin our careers we have to learn our trade from our competitors. How much is someone going to help me when I go out there and beat him three times in an afternoon? When you first start out, it’s easy to go to a veteran and say, can you teach me how to switch my sticks faster, can you teach me how to make a horse change leads better, how to break out of the gate more quickly, how to talk to a trainer about his horse being sore – those kinds of things. And the veterans will help you only to a degree, and then when you go out there and start winning races on a daily basis, those good lessons start slowing down and so it creates a pretty steep learning curve. I just think it really stunts someone’s growth when they don’t have someone mentoring them, telling them when they’ve done something right and when they’ve done something wrong.” McCarron does not hesitate on either count.

Recruiting last year was a bit rushed and applicants chiefly found their way to the racing academy through word of mouth. Before accepting students for classes beginning in the fall of 2007, NARA “will be sending a letter along with a flyer to all the jocks rooms around the country, every racecourse around the country and have it posted in the jocks room and try to do something that way. But eventually, long term, what I plan to do is use the resources at KCTCS and be able to get into the high schools and get word to them and start actively recruiting potential students that way,” McCarron says. He anticipates having more applicants to the program this year and refers to the initial interest from freshmen, sophomores and juniors in high school who requested information packets last year.

During the screening process, the students have to demonstrate that they are “serious about pursuing a career as a rider.” They must have the natural physique to keep light without putting their bodies at risk. In addition, NARA is “looking for someone who is at least going to express some passion about being a jockey. Not someone that is like, well, you know, maybe I’ll try this, and if it works, fine, if not…”
Chris McCarron is all about the passion. When he says that the apprentices “can expect a lot of hard work from me, a lot of dedication from me to help them become the best riders they can be under my watch,” he means it. He also means it when he says, “what they can expect is to be involved in a very tough program. It’s a lot of hard work, takes a lot of discipline. I’m a taskmaster. Very fair, but by the same token, if you’re not carrying your load you’re not going to go as far in this program as you would compared to someone who goes even further than carrying their load.” Passion, it seems, is a prerequisite for his pupils. This is a seven-day-a-week labor of love for the jockey-turned-mentor and it goes beyond the horse-and-rider relationships he’s nurturing.
There have been some surprises along the way for McCarron. “What I didn’t know was that I was going to have to be somewhat of a psychologist, psychiatrist and have to deal with different types of personalities and different work ethics and so forth. I’ve always been a hard worker and I try to instill that same type of work ethic in those that I’m surrounded by. Especially with the students. I’m going to try to work hard at developing an interview process that will expose the ones that have THE best work ethics and the most dedication.”

Ideally, McCarron is looking for people “with a certain degree of talent to communicate with horses. Also, a certain amount of athletic talent. You have to be born with those two things first, and then I think you can certainly hone those skills. I think that there are some that have to work harder at becoming a better athlete.” McCarron himself has had to “really work hard at honing my style and figuring out exactly what was going to make me less of a hindrance on a horse. You hear the term, oh yeah, that rider moved that horse up. Well, we don’t move horses up so to speak, we slow them down less. The best riders have the greatest ability to stay out of a horse’s way.” Not to say that a good rider doesn’t help his horse, which is what “separates the better riders from the rest of them, figuring out exactly what that little quality is, what that talent is. Not all the riders ever figure out exactly what theirs is. The best riders are the ones that first of all have the skill, have the talent and then figure out what buttons to push, how to use that talent.” McCarron is here to help them find and fine-tune both types of talent.

Back on the Equicizers – the horse simulators developed by jockey Frank Lovato Jr. – McCarron notices that some of the riders ease up as he takes a phone call. He interrupts his conversation. “Hold on one second, my students are cheating on me. Come on, pump, let’s go! Pump! Quick!” He has an extraordinary ability to focus on everyone at the same time as though there are just the two of them in the room; he is fully aware of what they’re all doing, at all times. It’s not difficult to image how natural it must have been for him to weave his way through a tight throng of galloping horses, anticipating all the right openings before they happened. He could probably have done it while reciting the alphabet – backwards.

One of the boys gets a leg cramp during the grueling calf raises they are required to do in the stirrups before they get into riding stance. “We’ve got a Charley horse going on over here.” McCarron continues to call out directions, barely breaking his rhythm with the other six as the rider gets down from the horse. “Push up…somebody call an ambulance…down…up…down.”

As they settle down to race ride again, two of them stage an impromptu recreation of the 1933 Kentucky Derby, taking on the roles of Don Meade on Brokers Tip and Herb Fisher on Head Play, playfully grabbing at each other’s legs. The girl on Flawlessly manages to pull Alysheba’s rider out of his saddle. McCarron: “Another one bites the dust! What chance do they have of riding a real horse if they can’t stay on an Equicizer?” He is only partially teasing.

There is a lot of good-natured ribbing, but underneath it all you sense McCarron’s frustration that some of them aren’t a little more serious, that they don’t have a keener awareness of the opportunity they’re getting. “I’ve got a few students that kind of just go through the motions. I don’t want to do that with them, because that’s not what I’m paid to do. I’m paid to give them my best, which I continue to do. There are times when I say to myself, ah, he’s just going through the motions, so maybe I’ll go through the motions. You know, with everybody else, I’ll give them their due. But that’s not fair. I can’t slight anybody even though they’re slighting themselves.”

Jessica Oldham, whose parents are retired jockeys – Robbie Davis’ daughter Jackie is also enrolled in the program – is the veteran of the group, with roughly ten years of riding time. Still, she says, “this is different because learning how to ride is actually structured here, whereas when I went to gallop on the track for the first time I just kind of got thrown up on a horse and basically hung on.” As a high school student, she got some tips mock-exercising the pony sandwiched between two exercise riders. Outside of that, she picked up “bits and pieces” of advice along the way.

The majority of the students – seven of them – had little or no horse experience before enrolling at NARA. Jason Truett is so small in stature that “everybody used to always tell me I should be a jock.” He informs McCarron that he has “hit triple digits today,” meaning that he now weighs 100 pounds. Before being allowed on the Thoroughbreds, all of whom are retired racehorses that have been donated, Truett and the other novices had to get their balance on mustangs, or “Thoroughbred simulators,” until the instructors felt they could handle the more hot-blooded racehorses. This is one of many steps to prepare students for safe learning in a comfortable, controlled environment.

They have a rigorous daily routine, meeting up for 7.30am classes. Students spend three hours a day in class; one hour riding the horses and three hours taking care of them; and one hour on the Equicizer. They look after their horses six or seven days a week, depending on the rotation for their on-duty Sunday. Before they complete the two-year, six-semester program, of which the last two semesters will be spent as interns for trainers, the NARA trainees will have had extensive and invaluable hands-on studies on racehorse care, equine physiology, commercial breeding, the racing industry, lameness, racing stable operations, riding principles, finance and life skills. A nutritionist has been teaching them how to eat so that they can be healthy and still maintain their weight and a proper diet. In this environment, they’re not only learning the basics of riding; they’re learning the fundamentals of how to live.

Although McCarron’s name is the one most publicly associated with NARA, the academy draws on the support of a strong team. Jennifer Voss-Franco, who is the project facilitator, shares an office with McCarron. Dr. Reid “Doc” McLellan is the instructional specialist who, among other things, oversees their racehorse care lessons. Barn manager Aimee Knarr, the Horse Park’s director of education Margi Stickney and even McCarron’s daughter Stephanie – they have all, says one of the students, “pitched in to help everyone excel really quickly.”

As of January, the students are up to galloping at The Thoroughbred Center. Of the program’s 12 horses, Oldham says, “they’re all working out great and it’s nice because there’s one for every level of rider, and you do have to get used to galloping the tough horses as well as the easy horses.” It doesn’t take much for these ex-racehorses to remember their racing days. They get out on the track after training hours, and the outriders stick close to round up the horses when they run off with or throw the jocks. “They’ve caught a few of them,” says Oldham. “Us,” she corrects herself. McCarron has come off Toots, whose reputation for running off while he was in active training remains has followed him to his second career. In May, they will be ready to learn how to breeze their horses. It remains to be seen who will be on Toots that first day.

McCarron is no stranger to accidents of varying severity, and because racing is by nature tinged with danger he does not envision that having suitably educated jockeys will provide a needed boost to the insurance issues. “I would love to be able to sit here and tell you, oh yeah, my students are going to be so knowledgeable, so skilled and such great athletes when they leave my program it’s really going to make racing a lot safer. I think that’s a pipe dream. I think that’s a bit of a reach.” In 1986 he was involved in a five-horse pileup, eight lengths behind Encolure when that horse fell at Santa Anita. At first he was “livid” with himself, until he worked out that he had had merely one and three-fifths seconds to react and steer a 1,000 pound cannonball running at 40 miles per hour out of harm’s way. Still, he says, “I blame myself to the point where I try to figure out a way I could do it better next time.” His students are the beneficiaries of the mental edge that greater knowledge can give them. Every memory, good and bad, from 28 years in the saddle has its purpose.

This afternoon they are working their Equicizers alongside gate-to-wire replays of some of John Henry’s famed duels. As McCarron presses “play” on the VCR to start a third race, one of the girls grumbles, “oh no, not another one!” Though she may not think so at the moment, it is her good luck that McCarron was a regular rider of the great gelding who won 39 times, leaving them with plenty more to watch. And when those run out, McCarron has an abundance of wins – 7,141 of them, in fact – to refer to in guiding his students along.
“This,” says Truett, “is my dream, by far. Even riding right now, if I have a good day it’s so emotionally rewarding.” Oldham is quick to point out that “when you have a bad day it’s so emotionally toiling.” Truett smiles and says simply, “but, if it wasn’t for those days, the good days wouldn’t be as good.” Listening to them, you have no doubt that what McCarron is doing is a very, very good thing, even more so with the realization that for so many jockeys, this opportunity never existed.

Chris McCarron is hopeful that NARA will be a life-changing event for the industry, as it is proving to be for him. “It’s like the old saying. You get out of it what you put into it. I’m putting a lot into it as far as I’m concerned and consequently I’m getting a lot out of it. It’s been a great learning experience for me.”