From the backstretch to the big stage - Louisiana native Lonnie Briley with Triple Crown hopeful Coal Battle in profile
/
Each year, the Triple Crown season features at least one underdog story, a horse that seems to come out of nowhere to make a splash in the run-up to these three classic races. This little guy may be new to the broader public, but for those who live and breathe racing, theirs is a familiar name, someone known for their passion for the horses and for the sport. Their star horse may bring new attention to this familiar face, but really, the success of that Triple Crown horse is the by-product of decades of the trainer’s devotion to their craft.
For Lonnie Briley, the success of Coal Battle, his Triple Crown hopeful owned by Robbie Norman of Norman Stables, is the culmination of his years as the commiserate horseman. From roping horses to farm trainer to his new role as the man behind one of this year’s leading three-year-olds, Coal Battle is the result of a lifetime working with equine athletes and the end result of his training program, his emphasis on finding standout athletes at certain price points and then cultivating the individual to maximize their talents.
***************************************************
For this Louisiana native, being on the Triple Crown trail is definitely a new sensation. Derby dreaming has not really been on his radar during his nearly forty-year career. “I never thought I'd have one,” Briley shared. “I mean, that was out of the picture, to have that quality of a horse.”
This storybook season has focused more attention than ever on this easygoing conditioner who has mostly flown under the radar throughout his time on the racetrack. Though he has made horses and racing his life, Briley’s background did not make pursuing the sport an inevitability. Born in Opelousas, Louisiana, home of Evangeline Downs racetrack, his father Lionel worked in the oil fields and his mother Robbie was a nurse. Even though his uncle Ronald Bradley was a quarter-horse trainer, Briley got his exposure to horses in a different forum.
“I was into rodeoing when I was younger, and I liked to rope. So that’s, I guess, where the horses started,” he recalled. “My interest was always in horses. I liked to know what made them tick and how they thought and stuff like that. It’s been a self-taught experience throughout my life.”
Decades later, roping is still a part of Briley’s life. His son Lance and grandson Noah were competitive ropers, and Noah went to the National High School finals. His family has even participated in the World Series of Team Roping. “Yeah, it’s just something we like to do,” Briley laughed.
Like his father, he went to work in Louisiana’s oil fields after high school, working as a tool pusher while also breaking and training Thoroughbreds on the side. Briley’s reputation as a horseman caught the attention of John Franks, owner of Franks Petroleum in Shreveport, Louisiana. When the oil field he was working at shut down, the Louisiana native got a surprising offer. “Mr. Franks called me one night and asked me if I'd go [to work for him]. He asked me about the oil field, what I did. I said I was a tool pusher. He said, ‘Do you want to come work for me?’ I said, ‘Yes.’” Briley recalled. “Mr. Franks, he was a geologist by trade. And so, he was very familiar with the oil field. But he had, heck, 700 something mares at that time. Stallions and racehorses. He was the biggest owner in the country. So, I went. It was a good experience. It was fun.”
The oilman had entered racing in the late 1970s, buying Alta’s Lady, an unraced Louisiana-bred broodmare who went on to produce several stakes-winning foals. Franks then went all in on breeding and racing Thoroughbreds; when he passed away in 2003, he had more than 500 horses, including 120 horses with various trainers around the country. Four times he won the Eclipse Award for Outstanding Owner and led North America in wins six times and in earnings five times. In addition, Franks was a nine-time leading breeder by wins in the 1980s and 1990s. He owned farms in Ocala, Florida, and in Shreveport, where Briley went to work as farm trainer in 1991.
There, he did a little bit of everything, handling stallions, breeding and foaling out mares, breaking young horses, and more. Working day in and day out with Thoroughbreds prompted Briley to add a unique feature to his office: “I had actually put a skeleton together and glued it and wired it together from a horse. Mr. Frank said, ‘What's you doing with that?’ I said, ‘Well, if the horse got a problem, I can show you where it's at.’ He said, ‘Well, you got it in the office.’ I said, ‘Well, it don't eat anything.’” Briley laughed. That skeleton is indicative of the trainer’s philosophy on horses, his goal to learn everything about horses to catch issues before they become problems and to assess each horse as an individual, watching how they move and think so he can place them in the best spot possible.
It was Briley’s eye for talent that led Franks to one of his most successful horses, Answer Lively. A colt by graded stakes winner Lively One, his dam Twosies Answer was also a stakes winner, but had not been a good producer to that point.
“They actually had that colt scheduled to go to the Arkansas sale. I don't want to say a cold sale, but not really a strong sale. But I looked at this little colt in the past, and I foaled him out and everything,” Briley recalled. “He was really a nice colt. He was a little high tail set horse and big blaze face, but he was really athletic and everything. I called Mr. Franks' office, and I said, ‘This horse, we're going to scratch him, and he don't need to go to that sale.’ He said, ‘Well, Lonnie, his mama hadn't produced anything.’ I said, ‘Well, she did this year,’ I said, ‘This is a nice colt.’”
Briley’s instincts were right. Answer Lively won the 1998 Breeders’ Cup Juvenile and then the Eclipse for Champion Two-Year-Old Colt. At three, he was second in the Grade 2 Louisiana Derby and then became Franks’s third and final Kentucky Derby starter, finishing 10th behind Charismatic in 1999.
With his long-time boss gone, Briley focused on training full-time, staying in Louisiana since he primarily had Louisiana breds and running in the state was more lucrative than going elsewhere. He had taken out his trainer’s license in his 20s, but did not focus on training full time until Franks’s death in 2003. In the two decades since, this former tool pusher has built a reputation on his eye for horses as well as his honesty, both of which have led him to newfound heights in the sport. Add in his loyal team of employees and a steadfast owner in his corner, and it becomes this newfound attention on this stalwart horseman is long overdue.
***************************************************
Since going out on his own, Briley has focused on racing in Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas with occasional incursions to Keeneland and Kentucky Downs. When he struck out on his own, “I had five, six, seven horses, and I get there early in the morning and walk my walkers, clean my stalls, fix my feet buckets, and sign up my horses, and wait on the exercise rider. And I was by myself. And then I think when I got up to 11, I said, ‘Man, I got to get some help.’ But I remember them days. That was tough.”
Currently, Briley has about 30 horses divided between his barns in Louisiana and at Oaklawn Park, where Coal Battle has spent the winter preparing for the Triple Crown season. In his home state, his horses stay at Copper Crowne in Opelousas, an equestrian center that offers lay-up and rehab facilities as well as a 6 ½-furlong training track and on-site veterinary clinic. There, his team breaks young horses and prepares them for the racetrack while also caring for any horses that need a break or are recovering from an injury.
The Briley barn has ten employees, including his assistant trainer and primary exercise rider, former jockey Bethany Taylor, daughter of the late Remi Gunn, who also rode competitively; his assistant at Evangeline Downs, Raymundo Marin; and his assistant at Copper Crowne, Daisy Cox. Each of his grooms works with about six horses, including Reyes Perez, the man in charge of stable star Coal Battle. At the heart of Briley’s program is the idea that horses are individuals; rather than using the same approach to feeding or training for each athlete, the trainer prefers to tailor routines to the specific horse.
As Taylor observes about her boss, “he's pretty good about treating each horse as an individual. There's some trainers that have success with putting all their horses on the same routine, like a cookie-cutter operation. And that works for people. But also, he takes into consideration each horse's needs and personalities and stuff like that.”
Each will get “a little breakfast in the morning, maybe half a scoop of feed, just put something in their stomach in case a horse has a little ulcerated stomach or something,” Briley shared. “Then after that, before 10:00, I like for them to eat. Because the morning of the race, you're trying to feed them early, and then you're changing their routine. So as soon as I can feed their groceries, I'm going to feed them. And they like that because they're going to eat their belly full, and they might have one or two bites left, and they're going to go in the corner, and we leave them alone.”
When it comes to their exercise routine, Briley assesses each horse’s temperament and then goes from there. “He watches them. And so, if a horse is lazy and not really getting on the muscle or anything, he might back off of them a little bit, jog them, and let them freshen up,” Taylor observed. “He does try to keep everybody pretty much on a work schedule in that sense. But as far as everyday training and stuff or prepping them for a race, it'll 100% depend on that horse at that time and where they're at.”
His preferred time between starts also takes the individual into account. “I think four weeks, five weeks is plenty of time, almost on the crunch of being too much, really,” Briley shared. “So around four weeks, I think, because when they're fresh and they try hard and the horses that want to win, they'll give you everything they got. If you start crushing on them too much, running them too close too many times, well, sooner or later, they're going to take a race for themselves and say, ‘Hey, this is too much.’ Because I think horses got minds and feelings, and they think, too.”
Coal Battle, for example, has had four to five weeks between starts since his debut at Evangeline in late July. To prepare the colt for each start, he will go for “those little short works, [which] you can do them closer and more often. You're opening the lungs, and that's what you want. A lot of circulation in the lungs, a lot of blood flow, a lot of air. You want room. And I usually will work mine a half mile, five-eighths. Very seldom, I'll work a horse three-quarters. Before their races, four or five days, I'll blow them three-eighths.”
Briley’s focus for Coal Battle, as for all of his horses, is to “keep them happy, keep them fit. And he works regular, believe me. I mean, he works on a regular schedule, and all my horses do. And I tell the riders, ‘Don't be scared to use them.’ They’re fit. But that's the thing, watching your horses, because they'll more or less tell you everything if you are paying attention.”
His program has room for all horses, whether they run short or long, though he does tend to lean more toward routers. "To each his own, but I like route horses, but they have to have speed,” Briley observed. “A route horse, just a plodder, they'll just gallop all day long and don't go nowhere. I think fast horses can go far. I love to give a horse a chance to run on a turf. I love to give a horse a chance to run far. Now, if he's bred to run four and a half, five furlongs, and after that, he spits a bit, well, he ain't going nowhere. But if a horse, he works :35, going three-eighths, and gallops out in :47, a lot of them will just keep going.”
He also does not discriminate when it comes to the surface. The veteran trainer likes to put his horses “wherever they fit. I love to run turf horses, but I love the dirt, too. And I mean, I got horses like Coal Battle and Go Captain and a few others. They'll run on the gravel road. But it doesn't matter to me. It's where they're comfortable and where they like to run.”
Then, when problems arise, Briley will “address the problem pretty aggressively, whatever it is, if it's bowed tendons or ankles or knees. And then time. Horses need time to recuperate and stuff. There's different methods we use for each individual problem.” Since he is on the road quite a bit, the horses will then go to Daisy Cox at Copper Crowne to recuperate.
Mark Norman, one of the two brothers that make up Norman Stables, Briley’s sole owner shared that the veteran trainer is “very cautious on injuries and always wants to do right by the horse by giving them the time off they need or backing off on their training. He's never going to rush one through an injury or anything. He wants to be extra cautious and make sure they heal and everything's right on the horse.”
Assistant trainer Bethany Taylor echoes that, adding “it's always disappointing when you have something go wrong in the barn. But he really does try to handle everything with patience, and he knows so much. He just knows so much. And if we ever have one that's just maybe not necessarily injured, but just done racing, they just have lost their desire to be racehorses anymore, he's got a couple of people that he'll give them to so that they can be rode and rehomed as jumpers or barrel racers or just anything to give them another home.”
Not only is he patient with his horses, but also with his employees, preferring to teach when the opportunity arises. “He is particular about how he wants things done. But, if you mess up and you don't quite understand what he's wanting from you, he'll explain it to you. He's not a very aggressive type of person. He'll sit you down and explain it to you. So, you can learn a lot from him,” Taylor shared.
His patience also extends to preparing young horses for their jobs as racehorses, especially the yearlings they pick up at sales. “He'll bring them home and give them 30, 45 days if they need it. And then they'll start back easy jogging and stuff, and we won't even get them at the track. We won't get them in from the training center until they're ready to really start back training again. They'll get legged up at the training center before we even get them.”
Then, as Briley shared, “in September, we'll break them and start jogging them and stuff. And I'll usually jog them the first 30 days. We'll go through the gates with them as soon as we can, just walk them in and then out, so it's just another thing for them. Then we'll start galloping and usually, depending on the horse, after close to 90 days and so we'll start giving them little clips, and I'll clip them probably twice a week, like a sixteenth, and then I'll build it up to an eighth and then a quarter. And then after that, I'll go once a week and then just build them up to three eighths and a half.”
Generally, the veteran trainer will start his two-year-olds around September. He will try them on the turf as he did with Coal Battle. After breaking his maiden on dirt, Briley sent the colt to Kentucky Downs, where he made a strong showing in the Kentucky Juvenile Mile Stakes. “He was way out of it. He'd come flying. And he run forth. When he crossed the line, two jumps, he was in front, and galloped out five, six lengths in front of the winners,” Briley remembered. “Right there, I knew there was more to the horse than what I expected from day one.”
Coal Battle is a long way from the horses that the veteran started his career with, a sign that the integrity and devotion he has been known for in his native Louisiana have brought him to a new level in the sport he loves.
***************************************************
After his tenure with John Franks ended, Briley got his start with “cheaper claiming horses, $5,000 claimers, and things like that, $10,000 claimers. Then some of the breeders, they'd raise babies, and then they'd hope they'd be for charity babies to run in a little five furlong [race] for charities and things like that.”
Not quite a decade later, the veteran horseman met brothers Mark and Robbie Norman of Norman Stables. The pair were new to racing and looking for a trainer. They chose Copper Crowne for its proximity to their homes in southern Alabama and went through the center’s seven barns talking to different trainers, their goal to find the right person to start their fledgling stable with. Briley, in his characteristic joking manner, said, “They made a mistake and came back to my barn.”
“They asked me if I would buy them a few horses, and I said, ‘Yeah.’ And we started from there. Started with two or three horses and ended up with 30.”
Their entry into racing came during a tough time for Robbie. “I [had] recently went through a divorce. I will say me and my ex-wife, we get along wonderfully now. She's the biggest fan of Coal Battle, so all that works out good in the end also. But you're searching for something because you really didn't want the divorce, and you're asking yourself, ‘How did I end up in this spot?’” Norman remembered. “I was actually at an apartment in downtown Thomasville trying to figure out where I was going to move next and looking for a new home. I was just flipping through the channels one night, and I think the race is wrong, so I watched a race or two. Then that documentary [on 2012 Belmont Stakes winner Union Rags] come up, and so I watched the full documentary, and it hit me right there that I'm going to buy me a racehorse. I'm going to go and do something fun and, like I say, do a little traveling and do something that you can win a victory in.”
The brothers own a series of grocery stores in Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, and Georgia, fulfilling a dream that their father, a Southern Baptist minister, had as a young man. Major brain surgery in his 20s left the patriarch disabled, but Robbie followed in his footsteps after graduating with an accounting degree from Troy University. His first job in a grocery warehouse gave Norman the experience and connections that allowed the pair to start their company. Their success has enabled Robbie to pursue owning a stable with Mark, who has had an interest in horses since childhood and currently works with barrel racers. Both of his daughters are competitive barrel riders themselves while Robbie’s two sons, Drew and Nathan, root for their dad’s horses. Drew also accompanies his dad and Briley when they travel to sales around the region.
Sales are Norman Stables’ preferred method of acquiring horses, though Robbie has bred a couple of his former mares to sires like Dr. Schivel and star Coal Battle’s sire Coal Front. “I prefer to buy. The breeding is a long-term process, and then they can have conformation issues. I truly will never be a major breeder. I really like to go and buy an athlete.”
Briley and Norman both go for sales over breeding. The experience the veteran horseman gained working for John Franks allowed him to develop an eye for the right physique. Finding that horse, though, is where the work comes in. “I love going to a sale, but I'm glad to leave. Because if you work a sale, it's a lot of work. You might look at 200 horses and then try to cut it down at three or four. It's a lot,” Briley shared.
“I look in a book, and I love new sires, and I love first foals,” he continued. “A mare, if she ran fine, and if she didn't run, she has to have pedigree. But I love the first or second foal. First foal is my favorite. But the first five foals in a mare, if she hadn't produced a runner, her chances are slim and none. She can throw a minor stakes horse in the first five foals, and she can be 20 years old and throw a millionaire. It's just statistics. I look for genetic crosses, and then a stallion that went the route of ground but had a ton of speed. I love Grade 1 horses and stuff, but they don't have to be.”
Whether he is at the sales with his trainer or watching from home, Robbie Norman goes for the physique over pedigree. “I'm more physical at times, and I like to see how they move, their smoothness and their moving,” he shared. “Now, Lonnie, he adds he knows more about the pedigree, and he sees things in the pedigree, and he's just got a ton of knowledge. I allow him to really take the lead. Deal with the pedigree part. I'm more of just looking for the athlete and everything.”
Additionally, Norman focuses on acquiring regional-bred horses over Kentucky breds. The reason is simple: money. “Any time we go to a sale, I'm looking for the Arkansas bred, the Oklahoma bred, that's the first thing in the book that I'm looking at, because I really want to identify and try to get the best regional bread horse that I can. Financially, that is where you can make the most money on a budget like we have,” he observed.”
“If you're in Louisiana, you can race just against Louisiana breds. In Texas, you can race just against Texas breds. And that way, it really gives you a better shot at winning a stakes race,” the owner shared. When Briley went to the Texas Thoroughbred Association Yearling Sale in 2023, he and Norman’s other trainer Jayde Gelner went looking for regional breds. Gelner came away with Secret Faith, a stakes-winning Louisiana-bred filly by Aurelius Maximus; Briley went against type and came away with a Kentucky-bred by Coal Front.
The trainer liked the colt right away and kept coming back to him throughout the lead-up to the sale. “I liked his confirmation. He had a good walk, good shoulder, good hip, long neck on him, and really a good head on him. He was the first foal out of a mare, a Midshipman mare, which I like a lot,” Briley remembered. “I like the bloodline. And then, genetically, if you look close, in the fifth, sixth generation, he goes back to Seattle Slew six times.” Though he had three horses on his short list, the trainer shared his interest in the Coal Front colt, hip 263.
Unable to travel with Briley, Norman bid online, knowing that “there's no other horse that Lonnie likes. I'm just clicking away thinking, $35,000, I'm going to get him. And then at 40, around $40,000, it came down, you could tell, to the Internet, which was me, and somebody else. They were pointing just at one person. And so, I just kept bidding. I said, ‘Eventually, I'm going to get Lonnie this horse.” He likes him.’”
“Next thing you know, I done bid up to $70,000, which was way over our budget, and he was not a Louisiana-bred. But at the end of the day, I guess sometimes, it's not what you plan to happen at that sale, but it's all turned out wonderful.”
Wonderful is an understatement. Coal Battle has taken the Normans and Briley’s team to places they never expected.
***************************************************
Now on the precipice of a Triple Crown campaign for the first time, Briley and Norman find themselves in an unexpected place. After decades of racing under the radar, they are preparing Coal Battle for a stage that neither has experienced before. With the first Saturday in May right around the corner, the pair have been thinking about their approach to the five-week gauntlet that is the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness Stakes, and the Belmont Stakes.
After breaking his maiden in his debut at Evangeline Downs in late July, Coal Battle has since racked up four more victories in seven starts, including a win in the Springboard Mile at Remington Park, the Jean Laffite at Delta Downs, and the Smarty Jones and the Grade 2 Rebel at Oaklawn Park. His Rebel victory also gave Briley his first graded stakes victory – which felt “good, like going to a good rope” according to the 72-year-old trainer – and put the colt square in the conversation for the Kentucky Derby. Not only has Norman fielded offers for the colt, which he has turned down, preferring to keep things simple and leaving their current team intact, but also Briley, assistant Bethany Taylor, and the Norman brothers have had racing media knocking on their doors, a new sensation for team Coal Battle.
“I have people come up to me and say, ‘Hey, Lonnie, congratulations on all this.’ And I just shake hands and say, ‘Thank you.’ But I couldn't name them,” Briley laughed. “It's so many people more or less rooting for the little man, and you hate to let them down. It feels good.”
Taylor, who is not only Coal Battle’s primary exercise rider but also one of the people who knows the colt best, echoed her boss’s sentiments: “We appreciate everybody's support. Everybody's excited for them, and they're rooting so much for us. And we love it, and we're just like, ‘Man, we hope he lives up to everybody's expectations.’”
As they count down to the Run for the Roses, Briley’s plan for the three classics is simple. “I'd like to go early enough where I could get a couple of works of Churchill on that track before the Derby,” the trainer shared. “If he runs good, even if he doesn't win it, he runs, let's say, in the top three or something like that, he will probably still go to the Preakness and see what happens there. It's a little short, and it's usually a smaller field, about half. And then we'll see.”
Norman, for his part, trusts his trainer’s judgement for Coal Battle’s path through the Triple Crown. “I'm never going to push for it. If Lonnie says he went through a long campaign and he gets third in the Derby and Lonnie makes that decision that he needs rest, he will rest,” Norman said. “If Lonnie makes that decision that he thinks that he can move forward from, say, a good placing in the Derby, and do good in the Preakness, we will go. And that's a relief on me, going back to Lonnie. All those decisions are one hundred percent his, and we're going to back him all the way.”
That trust that Robbie Norman has in his trainer, one built out of a dozen years of working together as well as the friendship that Briley has built with the brothers as well as their families, comes not only from the expertise of a man who has spent his life with horses but also from the honesty that underpins every move that the trainer makes. It is his honesty and enthusiasm for the equine athletes that make Lonnie Briley easy to root for as he faces his biggest challenge yet.
***************************************************
Throughout this storybook season with Coal Battle, Lonnie Briley, Robbie Norman, and the teams behind them have been thrust into the spotlight, a new sensation for all involved. Any discussion about the veteran trainer comes back to his deep knowledge of the equine athlete and his honesty as well as his good-natured approach to life.
“Lonnie is very thorough, old-school. He doesn't let much get past him, and he'll always comment on how many bones are in the body of a horse. He knows a horse very, very well,” Mark Norman shared. “He shares a lot of information and goes over everything really good with you. Just very honest and upfront.”
After working with him for 15 years, Bethany Taylor knows her boss pretty well and will sing his praises when given the opportunity. “He's probably forgotten more stuff than most people know as far as when it comes to just knowing a horse. And you can always count on him being completely honest with you,” she observed. “If the horse isn't what you thought it was or something happens with the horse because they're just so delicate, he's not ever going to not tell you something because you might not like what's happened.”
At the same time, while he does run a tight ship, “the energy is really light and happy, and we joke a lot,” the long-time assistant shared. “I gallop in jock boots, but I wear Western boots to the barn in the morning to work in in the shed row, and I'll go to put my jock boots on to gallop in the morning, and there'll be candy wrappers in them. He's super playful, just the same that you guys get when you're interviewing him.”
For Robbie Norman, who had enough faith and trust in Lonnie Briley to exceed his usual budget to buy what has become a springtime sensation, the trainer is more than someone he works with: he is a friend. “Number one, Lonnie's just a good person. Everybody in my family likes Lonnie. He's so nice to us. I'm his only owner at the present time. I think he likes that. That forms a good relationship,” Norman shared. “We talk every day, whether it's about $5,000 claimers or whether it's about going to the Kentucky Derby, he does let me be involved. We discuss it. Usually, we come up with the best plan possible. Ultimately, he's the decision maker.”
Briley’s devotion to his equine athletes shows in how he conducts himself day in and day out, his focus always on the individuals in his stalls. “He's just 100% dedicated. And when Lonnie makes the comment that it's an eight-day-a-week job, 60 hours or 40 hours a day, he's not joking,” Norman shared. “At 72 years old, he's there at 4:00 in the morning, he's there at 8:00 at night. The dedication of what he's put into his craft is something very few people ever achieve in their life.”
The white-haired, soft-spoken Briley remains the same ardent horseman he was as a young man breaking babies and as a farm trainer building a horse skeleton and memorizing the 216 bones that form the foundation of these athletes. The Louisiana native almost seems ageless, his good nature and ability to crack a result of the eternal hope at the heart of horse racing. “Sometimes I say, ‘One of these days, you're going to have to retire,’” the trainer laughed. “Retire and do what? I've been on the road so long and so much, and I don't know if I can. But I guess I could rustle up a rope horse. He'd probably turn and look at me and say, ‘You're not serious.’”
In Lonnie Briley’s case, a horse like Coal Battle is all the fuel he needs to stick at it even in his eighth decade: “A good horse keeps you going. You know what I mean?”
