Leah Gyarmati - a trainer to watch in 2014
![LLEN Jerkens, in poster size, laminated and autographed, is angled into a corner behind and to the side of Leah Gyarmati’s desk in her Belmont Park office in Elmont, New York. In their crate, Hillary and El, mother-and-daughter Jack Russell Terriers, bark. Gyarmati tosses them sausage treats. A fit woman of 49 with blonde hair and a New York accent, Gyarmati is one of few female trainers on this circuit, and she’s flourishing in a career she never anticipated having. “I’m very happy doing what I’m doing,” she says. “It just was never really a planned course. Or at least MY planned course – it might have been someone’s planned course.” fe WORDS: FRANCES J KARON PHOTOS: BARBARA LIVINGSTON, FRANCES J KARON A Gyarmati’s work riders are easy to spot: They wear hot pink. Her horses train in gray saddlecloths embroidered with a stick figure design of a woman in a skirt wearing a bow on her head. That logo wouldn’t be mistaken for a selfportrait of Leah Gyarmati. “I wanted them just plain,” she says, but when she ordered her equipment, “the woman kept pushing. ‘Don’t you want your initials or a square or this or that?’ No. Finally I just drew a stick figure with flip hair, and this is how it came on my saddle towels. I was like, ‘Oh my God.’” Gyarmati rolls her eyes and adds that when one of the guy jockeys comes for the first time to work a horse, “He sees me coming at him with a pink vest and he’s like, ‘Ohhh no.’” But no, Leah Gyarmati (pronounced Jar-MAti), ex-jockey and as of last year the conditioner of a Grade 1 stakes winner, is not what you would classify as a girly-girl. It would be difficult to thrive in this environment if she were. “If you can’t stand up for yourself, you’re not going to make it on the racetrack,” she says. “Really, you’re not going to make it anywhere. You have to have a little fight in you.” Gyarmati rode show horses from a young age into her teenage years with no aspiration to cross over to racing, but after she graduated from high school, her father sent her to work for Hall of Famer Allen Jerkens, who trained a horse owned in part by her godfather. The idea was that this was to be a gig for the summer and she would attend New York University in the fall. “I think my dad thought I wouldn’t be asking to go to horse shows all summer and that he was going to save money,” she says. “It backfired when I wanted to stay on the track. I don’t think that was his plan!” She was, initially, reluctant. “I kind of looked down my nose at the racetrack,” she says. “I didn’t really want to do it. And then what I immediately loved about it was that it didn’t matter where you came from, it didn’t matter how much money you had – nothing mattered. If you got on a horse and showed that you could do a better job than the person that got off of him, you were in good shape. It wasn’t like that with the show horses. The racetrack’s a place where you have to prove yourself.” Summer faded to autumn, when Gyarmati found herself skipping classes amd eventually leaving NYU altogether. The lure of backside life, although often a demanding one, had won her over. “When I came to the track, it didn’t bother me that Allen would yell. But the first time he yelled at me I started crying, and he never yelled at me again. I’ll never forget that. I was on a horse named Thirty Flags, a Bohemia horse,” she says, referring to Mrs. Richard C. duPont’s Bohemia Stable. “She was one of the first horses I got to gallop regularly. I think the reason was she had a skin disease that was so bad she lost all her hair. “None of the riders wanted to get on her. So I got on her every day and I loved her. She was getting to where she was breezing and I was just learning to breeze, and she was coming up to a race and he wanted to put somebody else on her. He put it on the board, that she was going to breeze and somebody else was going to get on her. And I jumped on her when I saw her come out of the stall, because I didn’t want anyone else to get on her. “So I’m walking around the shedrow and he sees me and he’s like, ‘I thought I told So-and-so to get on that filly!’ and I’m like ‘No, I can do it, I can do it! I’ve been breezing horses. I can breeze this filly!’ ‘THIS ISN’T A RIDING ACADEMY! WE’RE NOT HERE JUST SO YOU CAN LEARN TO RIDE RACEHORSES!’ And he’s screaming and standing still on the pony, and I go all the way around the shedrow and I come back around with tears coming down my face and he just throws his arms up in the air and says, ‘Come on, little girl, let’s go.’ He always called me ‘little girl.’ That was so funny.” fe Her first set has yet to go to the track. Gyarmati Gyarmati in discussion with top jockey Irad Ortiz swings a shavings fork around, sifting through bedding, maneuvering around a tall dark bay gelding. “Sorry, it’s a little messy here,” she says, apologizing again as she flings a small pile of manure out of the stall. “This particular stuff – the pellets – I love it. You save a lot of money and if the grooms do it right, it’s beautiful. But you have to stay on top of it, so sometimes I have to do this myself. They get mad at me every time I walk by and say, ‘There’s a pile in there.’ They’re like, ‘Do you want me to put diapers on these horses?’ I cringe when I see a horse in a nasty stall. I wouldn’t want to live like that.” On the other side of the barn are groom Pat’s horses. “Her stalls, you can see, are perfect,” says Gyarmati. “They’re white like sand.” Pat, who began working for Gyarmati three years ago as a hotwalker, says, “Well, you know how women are! When I started rubbing I said, ‘I’m going to ask you how you like your stalls.’ She told me how she does it and I try to keep it that way. I’ve got to take care of her,” and here Pat acknowledges the plain bay head of Sweet Reason, the barn’s resident Grade 1 winner. “She’s the big mama. She’s the big girl!” fe After high school, Gyarmati – from Forest Hills in Queens – enrolled in veterinary school in her father’s native Hungary, where her uncle Dezso, a national hero, was a three-time Olympic gold medalist in water polo and the father of Olympic silver and bronze medalist swimmer Andrea Gyarmati. The first six months of Gyarmati’s studies in Budapest were focused on language. It was during the second half of the school year that she felt lost, learning Hungarian words for technical terms it was assumed she already understood. She says, “It wasn’t the Hungarian I was having a hard time with; it was the science and the math. We are so far behind in science and math than the Eastern Bloc countries were. It was like nothing to them. They could do it in their sleep, the actual subject matter. It was really embarrassing. I was like, ‘Alright! Let’s pick something else to do for a living, because this isn’t going to happen.’” In Hungary, she had become involved with a seminary, and when vet school wasn’t panning “If you can’t stand up for yourself, you’re not going to make it on the racetrack. Really, you’re not going to make it anywhere. You have to have a little fight in you” LEAH NA ISSUE 31_Jerkins feature.qxd 10/02/2014 12:24 Page 4 out, she was persuaded to go home to the U.S. and study theology. Gyarmati had developed an interest in religion during her early days on the racetrack. Walter Guerra, who won Breeders’ Cup races on champions Outstandingly and Cozzene in the ’80s, had often spoken to her about God. “And I’d say, ‘Well I’m glad it works for you, Walter. That’s very nice, but it’s not my thing.’ And then one day, it was!” Although she says, “I never really knew what I wanted to do. I kind of just floated,” she settled long enough at Samford University in Alabama to earn an undergraduate degree in philosophy and religion and a Master’s in theological studies. Gyarmati initially pursued a PhD at New Jersey’s Drew University, but gravitated back toward the racetrack and Allen Jerkens. “I was just going to try to help pay bills by working in the morning and going to school in the afternoon and evening,” she says. “But I was married with a daughter who was about five years old, and the marriage wasn’t working so I found myself single with a child. Going to school to get your doctorate is expensive, and an opportunity came up to ride [as a jockey] with Allen.” And Leah Gyarmati floated into another phase of her life: race riding. fe Winter at New York racetracks is not for the faint of heart. Trainers, assistants, jockeys, and clockers take shelter from the cold in the two-storey stand overlooking Belmont’s training track. Top jock Rajiv Maragh is overheard talking about a favorite meal when Gyarmati surprises him: “I don’t eat meat.” Maragh can hardly believe it. “What about seafood?” he asks. “Ideally, no, but it’s what I cheat with. I love it,” she replies, “but I try not to eat any animals.” This is rooted, she says, in her own days as a jockey. “When I was riding, that’s how I got down to 108 pounds. I just stopped eating all meat. No fish, either.” Daughter Rachel, a senior at Fordham University, is a vegan, but Gyarmati is not a vegetarian in its purest sense. “I’m not superstrict about the vegetarian thing,” she says. “I just try to do that. We don’t need to eat animals to survive. We do it because we want to, and we overconsume. I don’t think that just because we’re smarter than them that we should be able to make a business out of them and eat them.” In a similar vein, when horses in her care reach the end of their racing careers, she uses several outlets, including a show horse friend and New Vocations Racehorse Adoption Program. “I feel very strongly about this,” Gyarmati says. “All owners that I have now are like this: They put all the time into getting a horse sound. We’ll either pay to keep it somewhere or I keep it here if I have room, until it’s ready to go ahead and do something else. I have no tolerance for people that just say to get rid of the horse, to drop it in and hope we can lose it.” Mid-morning, as she circles the barn scooping sweet feed into feed tubs, the horses whinny as if in agreement with her words: “Horses are pets. The majority of horses on Earth are here as pets. These happen to also make a living for us.” She’s about to say more, when Heberto “Herbie” Castillo Jr. cuts in to say, simply, “Spinaway’s in the barn.” Gyarmati’s long-time partner Castillo won stakes on some pretty good horses before he retired from race riding in 2006: Country Hideaway; Delta Princess, the dam of champion Royal Delta; Finder’s Fee; Furlough; Mecke; My Big Boy; Pistols and Roses, who won back-toback Donn Handicaps; Randaroo; Vision and Verse – they ran second by a head in the Belmont at odds of 55-1; and Yankee Victor among them. And Spinaway…is a squirrel. Gyarmati perks up at Castillo’s news and 20 TRAINERMAGAZINE.com ISSUE 31 P stops setting out the feed, grabbing a plastic bag filled with nuts. She raised Spinaway, who was found at Saratoga in 2013 and named after her first Grade 1 win, from birth. “I was sure that she wouldn’t make it through the night,” she says. “She still had the umbilical cord on.” She swipes through baby photos on her phone of Spinaway and other squirrels she’s rehabilitated and released. “I have more pictures of squirrels than of my daughter.” Castillo says: “Everybody takes a back seat to the squirrels.” “I love them. I know, I’m like a little obsessed. I’m the crazy squirrel lady on the block.” It began when she discovered one in her driveway that couldn’t move its back legs. “I took it to a vet and he helped me, but he didn’t want any part of keeping it. I couldn’t find a rehab person close by so I thought, ‘Well, I can do this.’” She’s continued to rehab squirrels, including Einstein, who lives with her and Castillo. The others she releases at her barn, where a favorite part of her routine is giving them nuts. “I spend a lot of money on my squirrels,” she says. “Only the best for them.” Gyarmati’s close friend Stefan Tufano says, “Anybody who takes squirrels into their home, that tells you all you need to know about her, right?!” Once an owner who had horses with Gyarmati, Tufano, whose grandfather Lou raced the high-class Market Wise in the ’40s, became involved in racing in the late 1990s after he noticed that a horse his father had bred was the granddam of Silver Charm. Tufano – from New York but living in Maine – came to visit Gyarmati for the holidays and stayed because he enjoys watching her horses do so well. “I’m so happy for her to be in this position, because she really deserves it,” he says. “She really cares about the horses and you can see that in the way she takes care of them. I’m so excited for her. I enjoy watching her have all this success. It’s exciting for me to see because I was with her at the beginning. I always knew she had the potential for it.” fe Jockey Gyarmati won her first race in 1997 at Belmont, piloting Hobeau Farm’s Jerkenstrained Forest Lover a month after her riding debut, also on Forest Lover, in April. They won by 9½ lengths and paid $24.20. “I thought, ‘Oh, this is easy!’” She laughs at her naïveté. “NOT! Aaahhhhh!” She rode in 222 races from 1997 to 1999, posting 15 wins, 17 seconds, and 34 thirds. Already in her mid-30s, Gyarmati knew she couldn’t make a career of riding, and with thoughts on a law degree, she had lunch with two ladies – one of whom, Jean Zorn, taught law, as Gyarmati thought she might like to do – to discuss her options. Instead, the conversation turned to Saratoga. The women decided to claim a horse and said, “Why don’t you train it?” Thus, Castle Village Partnership, managed by Steve Zorn, got Leah Gyarmati into the racehorse training business. They acquired a five-year-old $20,000 claimer, and on September 2, 1999, she saddled her first runner: Flippy Diane, who was second for $40,000 at Saratoga that day. Six weeks later, Flippy Diane won the $100,000 Maryland Million Distaff Handicap at Laurel Park. In six starts for Castle Village, jockey Diane Nelson, and Gyarmati, the mare was never worse than third, amassing over $115,000 in earnings. “That’s how it started,” Gyarmati says. “It wasn’t supposed to be a permanent job, but law school kind of went out the window and I never even took the LSATs.” With success immediately out of the gate, she could be forgiven if she had thought, “Oh, this is easy!” in her latest endeavor. But it would be more than a decade before Gyarmati won another stakes race, with 46-1 Roman Chestnut in the 2010 Busher Stakes at Aqueduct. Big Brownie contributed three stakes wins from 2010-2012, and Smooth Bert one in 2012. Nearly 15 years after saddling her first runner, Gyarmati maintains a moderate-sized stable of 20-odd horses based in New York year-round. And race riding? She doesn’t miss it. “It was fun to do,” she says, “but I’m over it.” Not that training has always been fun: “It’s nice now because I have some nice horses, and it’s been okay for a few years, but there were a bunch of times I wanted to quit, or where if I would have had the right job offer I’d have walked away.” Many of her fellow trainers are down south, away from the brutal temperatures. “It’s great to spend the winter in Florida,” Gyarmati says, “but I think it’s a luxury. It’s a vacation. At least, it would be for me. The money’s not as good, the competition’s tougher, and you have to have the right horses for it. I have New York-breds. Racing here is good. You have to play with the weather, time things and stay on top of them, so you get your breezes in before the weather comes.” Allen and son Jimmy Jerkens – who trained a pair of Breeders’ Cup winners in Artie Schiller and Corinthian – are in Florida, but Jimmy’s confidence in Gyarmati sees him leave some of his stock, primarily New York-breds, with her for the season. Gyarmati employs many of the training philosophies she learned from the senior Jerkens. “Allen treats horses individually,” she says. “I think it’s really important. You can get more out of a lot of the horses that way, to make them want to do it. It’s not just about making them do it, but making them want to do it. And also realizing when a horse just isn’t cut out do to it, stopping before it’s too late so they can do something else – that’s really important.” In a trademark Jerkens move, Gyarmati had Sweet Reason breeze eight furlongs at Santa Anita in her final pre-Breeders’ Cup tune-up and got “all kinds of flak.” “I’ve always done it but nobody paid attention, and then for the Breeders’ Cup, all of a sudden, every little thing you do is a big deal,” she says. “So when I worked a mile, I got all kinds of criticism for that. But all those people that work five-eighths, they gallop all the way back around, so really they do almost a mile. If you’re going to work a mile, work the last part faster than the first part.” fe With a major snowstorm in the forecast, Gyarmati sends many of her horses out to breeze this morning. She will ride a pony – she was often seen on Castle Village Farm’s stakes-placed Diligent Gambler until he passed away of a suspected heart attack in January of 2013 – or one of her active racehorses during the philosophies she learned from the senior Jerkens. “Allen treats horses individually,” she says. “I think it’s really important. You can get more out of a lot of the horses that way, to make them want to do it. It’s not just about making them do it, but making them want to do it. And also realizing when a horse just isn’t cut out do to it, stopping before it’s too late so they can do something else – that’s really important.” In a trademark Jerkens move, Gyarmati had Sweet Reason breeze eight furlongs at Santa Anita in her final pre-Breeders’ Cup tune-up and got “all kinds of flak.” “I’ve always done it but nobody paid attention, and then for the Breeders’ Cup, all of a sudden, every little thing you do is a big deal,” she says. “So when I worked a mile, I got all kinds of criticism for that. But all those people that work five-eighths, they gallop all the way back around, so really they do almost a mile. If you’re going to work a mile, work the last part faster than the first part.” fe With a major snowstorm in the forecast, Gyarmati sends many of her horses out to breeze this morning. She will ride a pony – she was often seen on Castle Village Farm’s stakes-placed Diligent Gambler until he passed away of a suspected heart attack in January of 2013 – or one of her active racehorses during the temperate months, but not in the wintertime. Instead, jocks Irad Ortiz Jr., Maragh, and hot apprentice Taylor Rice breeze mounts on which they’ll be named in the coming weeks. A fast move on the strapping three-year-old Deceived, a half-brother to local hero Naughty New Yorker, earns Maragh the nickname “Mario Andretti” from Gyarmati. Gyarmati, too, gets called the occasional name – “babe,” “honey,” or similar – from generally well-intended acquaintances. “I usually notice things like that, because it ticks me off. If you’re over a certain age you’re allowed to do it. Yeah, that bugs me, but it doesn’t bother me nearly as much as someone thinking that I can’t do as good a job as a man. “That doesn’t happen so much anymore,” she says. “I feel like I’ve got a very good camaraderie with all the other trainers and the jockeys, and the owners I have, I don’t think they feel like they’re settling for less. I’m sure there are some that don’t think that women are capable, but I think we’ve kind of moved from that era.” On the backside in the 2000s, women are more prevalent – and willing to stick it out. “It’s tough if you’re a little on the wimpier side, if you couldn’t take shit.” Gyarmati says that racing “was a man’s thing through history. It’s been maybe the last half century that women started showing interest in the racetrack. Women are more comfortable jumping into a rough crowd now than they were 50, 60 years ago, so things have changed with the women, not as much with the environment. The environment hasn’t softened any. Women have maybe gotten a little tougher. If someone says something nasty, I’m not going to run home and cry. I’ll say something right back at them.” fe Treadway Racing Stable’s Sweet Reason has backed up Gyarmati’s assertion that female trainers can produce the goods. Sweet Reason is, as groom Pat lovingly calls her, “the big girl” in Barn 53. Under Alex Solis in four starts at two, the daughter of Street Sense broke her maiden at Saratoga by 6¼ lengths; gave Gyarmati a first graded stakes win, in Saratoga’s Grade 1 Spinaway Stakes by 5¾; was second in the Grade 1 Frizette; and was fourth, beaten two lengths, in the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Fillies-G1. Heading into her sophomore campaign in 2014, the $185,000 purchase has earned $457,600. Another Treadway horse – the Malibu Moon colt Noble Moon – won the Grade 2 Jerome Stakes under Ortiz at Aqueduct in January, in only his third career start. A minor setback interrupted his training for the Withers, in which the owner-trainer powerhouse substituted impressive maiden winner Street Gent, who failed to make an impact in that early Kentucky Derby prep. Gyarmati has just these two graded wins to her name, but her horses have been in the top three nine times in 22 graded stakes starts, and increasingly so. Through Jeff Treadway and Bona Venture Stables, for whom she trains Smooth Bert – who competed in last season’s New Yorkbred Triple Crown – she’s “slowly and slowly gotten nicer-bred horses.” Sweet Reason, Noble Moon ($200,000), and Street Gent ($80,000) were plucked out of the 2012 Keeneland September yearling sale by Treadway and Gyarmati. Deceived was a $180,000 OBS March sale graduate. But for a long time, Gyarmati focused on claiming horses. “I had a few owners wanting me to go to the sales but I didn’t feel comfortable,” she says. “You have to know what you’re doing and who you’re dealing with, because it’s a bit tricky. I kept trying to deflect. ‘Oh, let’s just claim horses,’ or ‘Let’s buy privately.’ And then I had one owner that had some money and I couldn’t say no. I had to bite the bullet and just do it.” Looking at dipping her toe in with a buyback, she called consignor and agent J.J. Crupi, instantly hitting it off with him. She credits him for her success at the sales, saying, “He took me under his wing and took me around the sales showing me what to look for, what to stay away from – that kind of thing. He set me up the first year with some really nice babies. He’s like my go-to guy all the time.” “She may be a little modest,” says Tufano, “but to buy these horses – she and Jeff, they’ve hit some homeruns. They did a nice job.” fe In Barn 53, as at any barn at Belmont, a couple of cats wander around, leaving chickens undisturbed outside in the courtyard. Red, empty bags of Omolean feed are methodically stuffed under the soffits to keep pigeons from roosting inside, but the birds gather in here anyway, their cooing a regular part of the acoustics. Nesting boxes for squirrels are placed high on the walls. The roof, which is new, leaks – but only when it’s not raining. Dogs Hillary and El bark at strangers and keep the night watchman company. And since last summer, security cameras are located throughout Gyarmati’s barn. These come with the territory of having a horse the caliber of Sweet Reason, the added edge of training one that’s so talented you’d worry constantly if you couldn’t monitor the goings-on at the barn from home, your phone, or iPad 24/7. “Paranoid,” Gyarmati calls it. And now not only does she have Sweet Reason, but also Noble Moon and a handful of other promising three-year-old colts, including stakes-placed Deceived, who won under Maragh by 8¼ at Aqueduct in January. Stefan Tufano hopes that at least some of these promising horses pan out for his pal. “It’s a long way away, but it would be so exciting to see Leah have a Derby and an Oaks hopeful,” he says. “It’d be quite a big deal, you know.” fe For her own part, Gyarmati reflects, “It’s a tough place to make a living. But really there are a lot of great people on the racetrack. There really are. There are so many people who have your back. As tough of a place as it is – everybody talks a tough game – but there are a lot of people to help you when you’re struggling. A lot of trainers, when you’re not doing well, they’re there to help you out and throw something your way. I consider myself very, very fortunate. And blessed.” Leah Gyarmati is a glimmer of hope in New York’s racing scene. “The other day my friend Stefan was just about to say, ‘Oh wow, a white pigeon, that’s rare!’ And then all of a sudden three more flew down. “Maybe,” she concludes, “it’s a sign.” ](https://static1.squarespace.com/static/517636f8e4b0cb4f8c8697ba/t/5721dd092b8ddeafecab08f6/1461837634774/)
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THIS ARTICLE FIRST APPEARED IN - NORTH AMERICAN TRAINER - ISSUE 31
CLICK ON IMAGE TO READ ARTICLE
THIS ARTICLE FIRST APPEARED IN - NORTH AMERICAN TRAINER - ISSUE 31