Chris Hartman in profile - still learning and still winning

Article by Ken Snyder

Chris Hartman took a pass on high school. Got promoted to groom before he knew how to muck a stall. Blew right past the assistant trainer’s position to trainer. And then, he leapfrogged $3 million in earnings, going from $2.9 million in 2021 to $4.2 million in 2022. Earnings in both 2023 and 2024 exceeded $5 million.

His story is at least as remarkable as his ascent through Thoroughbred racing and really, through life. 

He went to work on the racetrack at the ripe old age of 11, drawing his first paychecks not from his trainer-father Stan, but Molly Pearson at Prescott Downs. 

”Molly’s mother had actually made her hire me. She said, ‘You need to hire this boy, he needs a job.” It was an idea Pearson wasn’t keen on. She didn't like the way he mucked stalls. When Molly told her mom of Hartman’s weakness with a muck fork and straw, her mother replied, “Well, that's good. Then he shouldn't be cleaning stalls anyway.’”

It was the beginning of his education in ground work. 

Hartman and Molly Pearson would groom horses together and give him valuable experience. She was, in Hartman’s words, “quite a caretaker of her horses. She'd have me rubbing their legs, putting jell on their legs and putting wraps on them.” 

Hartman, 52, doesn’t remember life without horses.  “I grew up with Thoroughbreds in the backyard.” His boyhood was spent with his dad at Turf Paradise, the Arizona county fair circuit, or Prescott Downs (now Arizona Downs). 

The road called to Hartman at age 15 when an exercise rider going to Minnesota from Arizona asked him if he wanted to go along with him. His response? “Hell, it sounds like fun.” It was the beginning of a jaunt that took him from Minnesota to Tampa Bay Downs and back up to Kentucky.  ‘Fun,’  though, was secondary for Hartman.

“I wanted to learn everything I could about a horse. So I sort of moved a little bit,” understating it considerably. He built his future watching those around him, studying individual horses carefully, and putting into practice something his grandfather, also a trainer, said to him: “You should always be able to learn. You can’t know everything about a horse.

“To this day, I try to learn all I can.”

Learning from his own horses began for Hartman at age 14 when trainer Michael Freeman at Turf Paradise agreed to sell him a horse named Jat Alane for $300. When Hartman showed up at Freeman’s barn - lead shank, halter, and money in hand - the trainer told him he had changed mind on the deal. It was a ruse that got Hartman fuming. He was mad enough to tell Freeman his dad had warned him about “people like you.” The trainer relented with the put-on and the nixed deal; he gave the “youngster,” as he called Hartman, the horse. The transaction probably was part of Hartman later running the shedrow for Freeman when he was 16.  

Hartman’s next purchase came when he noticed a horse cooling out on the backside after a race. “He’d just ran and he was running off with the hotwalker, so I knew the horse didn't give all he had in the race.” He approached the horse’s disgruntled trainer, Sheridan Majors, at probably just the right time. When Hartman asked about the horse, Fine Hostage, the trainer said, “’Give me five-hundred dollars and you can have this s.o.b.’ So I said, ‘I'll be right back.’ I went to my room and got the money and came back with it. That's how I got him.”

Hartman trained the horse off the poor performance list and won the second time out on December 28, 1990 when he was 17. “He paid one-hundred eighty-nine dollars. I was training horses but I wasn’t old enough to have a license, so the horses were in my dad's name.”

“When I was training that horse, I really wanted to figure it out for myself;  was it really about the horse, or do you just need good horses, or do you have to go underneath somebody and be an assistant?”

Fine Hostage, indeed, helped Hartman ‘figure it out’ with another win in his fourth start for him on February 2, 1990.  

At the time Hartman was working for another trainer, Dale Hunt, who bridled at an employee with his own horse.

“I had told him, ‘I'm gonna’ get a horse.’” 

Hunt apparently thought Hartman wasn’t serious. After the acquisition, the inevitable happened with Hunt. “He told me, ‘I don't want you spending all your time with that horse,’ and I said, ‘Okay, that's fine. I'll give you my notice now. I'm going to be spending a lot of time with him. I guess you're gonna need somebody else.’ 

“He's like, ‘Whoa, whoa, you ain't got to be doing it like that.’”

The exchange, at least for Hartman, was strictly business without emotion. “I wasn’t upset with the guy. I had a game plan.”

The plan included leaving the Southwest for a stop at Churchill Downs where Hartman worked for trainer Johnny Tammaro as night watchman. That job took him from Louisville to Saratoga. A thousand dollars was stolen from his wallet - this soured Hartman. From Saratoga he returned to Arizona.  It was the jumping off point for him as a trainer. 

“I had the mindset, I was going to learn either how to train a horse or go back and just get a job when I was really of age to do it. The whole goal was just to see if I can make a horse as good as they can be, if they are good enough to win, regardless of what the form looks like.” 

The training regimen, the feed, the close watch on health and injury are, of course, the primary tasks of a trainer. But Hartman applied an intangible that is easily discounted or dismissed that made him successful, first in the Southwest and now at Churchill Downs. And it might also take him into the national spotlight in the future. 

“I've got a love for horses. There's no doubt about it. They're magnificent to me. I love to see them in flight, just running. When you know that a horse just gives you everything they've got when they run, it does something for me. I was very blessed in the fact that I was born into something that I really enjoy doing,” he said. 

The desk in his office at Barn 48 at Churchill Downs is strategically placed for him to look down the shedrow at every stall on one side of his barn.

“I spend a lot of time here at the barn just looking down the shedrow. At eleven o'clock here, we feed them, and all their heads start to pop out from the stall door. They know, eleven is ‘din-din’ time. They'll start nickering when the feed starts coming. It's a good time.”

If there is a favorite aspect of training for Hartman it is learning the personality of each of his horses.

He talked about a filly in his barn he described first as “very difficult” before amending it quickly to “super difficult.” How “super”? She had ripped off her hind shoes loading in the horse trailer on the way to Hartman’s barn at Churchill Downs.

A cold water spa just across from Hartman’s barn presented another difficulty for the filly. Hartman smiles recounting a recent incident. 

“She goes in that thing all the time. About every third day, though, she decides she wants ‘more attention,’” as he termed it. “The other day she was kicking, using her hind legs. I thought, ‘somebody's going to get hurt.’ I came over and stood behind her and just started nudging her. She stopped and turned her head to look at me, turned some more to look at me , and then she walked right in.

“That’s just her. That’s what she does.”

Difficult or easy, all of Hartman’s horses run and run often, a reputation which he earned early in his career and still earns.

“Your magazine says ‘Trainer,’ right? It doesn’t say ‘Stall.’ I think you gotta’ run them.” At the time of writing, the 30 horses he has currently at Churchill Downs have made 56 starts in 38 days of racing—not that far from two starters per day. 

His absence of shyness around the entry box has paid dividends. His career win percentage is the same as racing luminary, trainer Steve Asmussen.

Despite that better-than-average win percentage, he dismisses statistics. “There are some real good trainers that are ten percent, twelve percent, and fifteen percent. I think people get a little too focused on the percent, not on the horse.” He goes so far as to say that a focus on statistics by trainers accounts for the increasing number of scratches and small fields. “They’re scared to run them because they want to keep their numbers up.”

The task, according to Hartman, is spending a lot of time determining where they run. Like any trainer, he likes to run his horses where they have a shot at winning but that doesn’t mean shipping a horse to a small track from Churchill Downs to improve chances of a win. “If I've got a horse that needs to be at Belterra (in Cincinnati) then they’ll be at Belterra,” making an oblique reference to trainers who shop for easy spots. He thinks it is one cause of smaller fields and more scratches at major tracks.  

The path to the success Hartman has achieved to date began with his first venture to Lone Star Park outside Dallas. That’s where he introduced a newcomer, Joe Davis, to horse racing.

“He called me up and wanted to talk about getting in the game. He had never owned a horse.  

“He was the first guy that really invested in a lot of horses with us, and that probably changed the direction for me.” Three straight wins for horses with Davis’s first three starters for Hartman didn’t hurt in cementing the relationship. 

“Before, I was just plugging along, trying to get us in the Midwest.” Hartman has had as many as 45 horses owned by Davis in his barn through the years.

The other major boost to Hartman was giving Oaklawn Park a shot in 2013. In 77 starts in Hot Springs, Hartman horses won 16 races for an impressive 21% win rate and 12th place in trainer standings for the meeting. 

The move was the beginning of “getting better horses and new owners.”

Of course, that doesn’t just happen. “If you’re winning races, owners will come.”

One new owner Hartman met at Oaklawn, James Driver, brought him 15 horses that the trainer knew were well-bought, solid horses.

“He had replaced his previous trainer and called me and said he wanted to make a switch,” recalled Hartman. “I was a little bit surprised. I thought they had a good thing going myself. I said to him, ‘Well, maybe you'll work it out with him.’

“I try to quiz someone a little bit, you know, to see what’s going on. Are they firing their previous trainer because, ‘I don't like the way he picks his races,’ or whatever. I’ll ask, ‘Well, where do you think they should run?’ And then you might find out the reason why they're firing the trainer is because they want to run them in allowance races. Well hell, it ain't gonna be much different with me. I want to find out what the guy's doing. What's the thinking? Is he firing the trainer just to make a change or is there a legit reason.”

This may go a long way in explaining the long relationships he has had with key clients and the success he has brought them. “Joe Davis told me, ‘Chris, we've been together longer than two of my marriages.’”

From Oaklawn, Hartman, a noted storyteller on the backside at Churchill Downs, employed ‘a little bit of convincing’ with some of his clients to give Kentucky and Churchill Downs a try in 2015. 

“We had twelve horses for Driver and I thought they’d fit here,” said Hartman. He is still traveling the Churchill Downs-Oaklawn Park circuit each year. He also still has horses from both Davis and Driver.

What is next for Hartman? The last two $5 million-dollar years bode well for the future. 

“You always have to go forward. I'm just trying to get better horses.”

The challenge he embraces to get the most from horses is something that has never left him. “I'll be honest, if I had fifty-two stake horses in the barn right now, and there's fifty-four stalls, I’d still have a couple claimers. I love trying to figure them out. Some people like to mess around with old cars, and I like to mess around with horses.” 

And making them, of course, as good as they can be. 

Stay tuned.