Listenupshance - Adam Kluger (Run Fast Racing) and Craig Dado (Great Friends Stables)
Listenupshance
Music executive Adam Kluger has come a long way from sneaking into the dog track in Tampa Bay to bet on simulcasting from Tampa Bay Downs. Less than two months after hooking up with Craig Dado’s Great Friends Stable, he was in the winner’s circle at Del Mar after their Listenupshance captured the Gr.1 Bing Crosby Stakes July 25th. Two months later, he was back after Listenupshance added the Gr.2 Santa Anita Sprint Championship.
That wouldn’t have happened had a $10,000 claimer at Del Mar a year earlier been full, denying Listenupshance, a horse Kluger bought for $30,000 after he won a maiden $20,000 claimer, a spot. Instead, trainer Doug O’Neil put Listenupshance in an $80,000 grass allowance, one he won by a nose in his turf debut. Switched back to dirt, he became a star.
Why would Kluger have put his $30,000 horse in a $10,000 claimer? That’s a pretty good story.
Kluger’s story began in north Tampa
Hymn - Dr. Naveed Chowhan (Fleur De Lis Stables), William Sparks, Bret Jones
So a horse-loving oncologist from Pakistan teams up with two horsemen from Arkansas and Kentucky and wins a Grade 1 stakes with a home-bred without ever meeting his partners. “How about that?” said William Sparks, who grew up attending races at Oaklawn Park with his grandfather. “Crazy game that brings us together.”
The much-accomplished oncologist, Dr. Naveed Chowhan, agrees: “It’s kind of funny. Actually, I’ve never met them.”
The third person in the partnership is Bret Jones, the son of former Kentucky Governor Brereton and Libby Jones who oversees Airdrie Stud in Midway, Kentucky. His parents founded the farm in 1972 with a leased parcel of land from Libby’s father which has grown to more than 2,500 acres.
Summer Starlet - Wattswood Stables (David Watts and James Sherwood), BC Stables (John Bellinger and Brian Coelho), David Baggett, Bob Albritton & Jay Graham
There’s a whole lot of Texas A & M in the ownership group of Gr.1 Spinaway Stakes winner Summer Starlet.
“We’re a little in-bred on our ownership,” Bellinger said.
Bellinger, like Dave Baggett, Bob Albritton and Jay Graham, are members of the Texas A & M Board of Regents. Only Bellinger, who partners with Brian Coelho in BC Stables, and Albritton, who had a bad experience as an owner decades earlier, had ever owned a horse before last September.
Watts is relatively new to the game, but his partner Sherwood, a long-time, close friend and former assistant of Summer Starlet’s trainer Steve Asmussen, has deep racing roots. “I’ve been around horses since I was born,” Sherwood, the son of a trainer, said. “Always loved it. They’re just such a beautiful animal, a majestic animal.”
His life around them was demanding. “It was a lot of work as a kid. I got up at 5 a.m. in the morning to feed horses; went to school, came back and took care of them. I did the whole gamut of being in the horse business. I broke them. That’s what I did as a kid.”
Scott Mawaka - Mo Speed Racing - West End Kid
Maybe it was chance, or fate. Call it karma or destiny or happenstance. All Ohio businessman Scott Mawaka knows is that it changed his life: “As a young man, my first customer that I signed for my business, I offered to take him golfing or go out for lunch. He said, "That's not what I like. I like to handicap the ponies.’”
Off they went to Thistledown in Cleveland. Mawaka remembers seeing “a stereotypical bunch of guys with their papers and cigars. Probably 30 years ago.”
Not long after, Mawaka claimed his first horse, Fame and Gold, for $5,000 at Thistledown on October 10th, 2001. Fame and Gold won a $3,500 claimer in his third start for Mawaka and was ultimately claimed. “That got the bug in me,” Mawaka said. “Our first couple of claimers, I bought with my dad.”
John P. Fort - Peachtree Stable - Tawny Port
Wise enough to learn from great trainers; humble enough to take a job as a hotwalker at the age of 35 to learn more and smart enough to take his Peachtree Stable to the highest level of competition is how 83-year-old John P. Fort continues to make his mark in Thoroughbred racing.
Along the way he became a talented polo player and finally got Allen Jerkens to train his horses more than 20 years after a rocky first encounter. His latest stakes winner, Tawny Port, ended a two-year losing streak, taking the two-mile Gr.2 Belmont Park Gold Cup at Saratoga June 4th in track-record time, earning a free ‘Golden Ticket’ to the Melbourne Cup, the race that stops a nation, in Australia. Miguel Clement trains Tawny Port. Fort met him when he was five-years-old at the Saratoga Dog Show. Fort and his dog Flexi were dressed up like a lion tamer and his lion: “Thirty years later, we’re winning stakes races. The river runs deep.”
Connie and Jerry Baker – Om N Joy
“Connie and I have a problem,” Jerry Baker said. “We fall in love with our horses.”
So when their first horse together, Margie’s Minute, a $20,000 claimer they purchased in 2016, was done racing a year later, they didn’t want to lose her. So they bred her.
Good decision. Her third foal, the five-year-old gelding Vodka Vodka, finished second in the Gr.1 Santa Anita Handicap March 7th and has earned $569,750. Less than three months later, his four-year-old half-sister Om N Joy, racing just seven days after finishing seventh in a California-bred turf stakes, dominated her competition on dirt, taking the Gr.2 Santa Margarita Stakes by 3 ¾ lengths under Kent Desormeaux. She’s now over $600,000 in earnings. Not bad for a filly who lost her first eight starts before winning five straight.
Jerry, a career real estate man, said, “We’re lucky.” Connie said, “Very lucky.”
THE PUMA - OGMA Investments, High Step Racing & JR Ranch
THE PUMA
OGMA Investments (led by Gustavo Delgado Jr.), High Step Racing (Randall Guy, Joe Noble, Kevin Avera, Jim Ferreira and Todd Perry) and JR Ranch (Ramiro Restrepo, Jose and Rita Aguirre)
Back in 2015, Ramiro Restrepo, then working for Fasig-Tipton as a sort of South American ambassador, met Venezuelan trainer Gustavo Delgado Sr. at Keeneland. He said, "Let's start working with each other. I'll own an interest in some of the horses, and you bring people to come in and be partners," Restrepo said. "Then, I owned pieces of some of those horses."
CHIEF WALLABEE - Mike and Katherine "K.K." Ball
With their home-bred Chief Wallabee stepping into the pre-Kentucky Derby spotlight, Mike and Katherine "K.K." Ball are in unfamiliar territory. "We're not used to this much hype," Katherine said.
Mike and Katherine Ball have spent decades racing and breeding Thoroughbreds in Kentucky without getting as much of a whiff of the Kentucky Derby. Both spent more than a decade training their horses.
"As long as we've been in the business, it's our first Derby," Katherine said. "We are enjoying every minute of it."