#Soundbites - Is there too much racing?
By Bill Heller
Once upon a time, racing in most locations had an off-season. That created anticipation for its return. In the Northeast, when racing only lasted from March through November, you actually missed it in the off months, and you got really pumped up for its return. Those days are long gone.
Racing these days is year-round, and some tracks offer massive cards on Saturdays, as many as 14 races a day instead of eight or nine.
So we asked trainers: Is there too much racing?
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Bob Hess Jr.
I don’t think there’s too much racing. But I think nowadays, eight, nine races a day with huge fields is ideal, not 12. I think the average person doesn’t want to be stuck there for more than three hours. In terms of promoting it with young people, eight would be ideal. Again, they don’t want to be stuck there. They get bored.
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Al Stall
I would say, no, there’s not too much racing. The foal crop is going down, so maybe that will inspire us. There are less opportunities. It could change if we wanted to do it. Cards at Gulfstream Park wear you out with 12 or 13 races. But you don’t have to stay the whole card. Young people now, there’s so much more to do. I would love to be able to educate them about our game.
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Bill Mott
I think the boutique meets seem to do the best. Longer meets—they never seem to end. People get bored. I think you wear people out with 14 races a day. Eight or nine is enough. I understand what they’re thinking, These guys aren’t stupid. And they look at the numbers. Most places need five days a week. Different people who work around the track need it. You can’t have a full-time employee and race two days a week. It makes no sense. But Instead of running 11, 12 or 14 races, you should run eight or nine. There’s going to be hard-core gamblers who would sit there for 12 hours, but I think they wear other gamblers out. I think they’re wearing people out.
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Graham Motion
I think there is too much racing. Look, every race office in the country is looking for horses. I believe that less racing would bring a better product for the bettors. I think less racing, at the end of the day… it’s just common sense to me. People want to see good racing and good fields. Twelve races a day—it’s way too much for everybody, bettors, horsemen and their employees. It’s very stressful for everybody. When your boys are at the track at 4:30 in the morning and still there at 6:30 or 7 or 8 (pm), I think it wears on everybody. Probably the gamblers as well. Jockeys begin at 5:30 in the morning, and they’re there until 7 or 8 (pm). How could a jockey be at his absolute best the entire day? They’ve got to be sharp, thinking quickly and making decisions. How can you keep doing that at 7 o’clock in the evening if you’ve been there all day?
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Trainer Profile - Bill Mott
By Andrew Champagne
Some trainers start their careers with dreams of winning a garland of roses, or a gigantic trophy.
Hall of Fame trainer Bill Mott’s first big prizes, though, were substantially smaller.
“When I was 15, I got my first horse to train, which my father purchased for $320,” Mott recalled. “I put the horse in training. We ran her at a small fair meet in South Dakota, and she dead-heated for the win the first time I ever ran her.”
“The purse was $500, and we had to split 60% down the middle. I also won a blanket and a cooler. Because it was a dead heat, we flipped a coin.”
Mott still has the blanket and cooler from that race, and over the past 50 years, he’s added plenty of other pieces of hardware to his ever-growing trophy case. His career is one built on simple values instilled in him by some of the top horsemen in the Midwest during the 1970s, a group that included Keith Asmussen, Bob Irwin, and Hall of Fame conditioner Jack Van Berg.
“The major lesson I learned is, just show up and work,” Mott said. “The Asmussens were a hard-working family, and of course you can see what they’ve produced. Van Berg was the same. You worked hard, and you were a part of everything that went on. If you were interested, you were going to learn something.”
Riley Mott and Elate
After several years of honing his craft as an assistant, Mott went out on his own in 1978. When asked about obstacles he had to overcome as a new head trainer, he was quick to thank Van Berg and an assortment of owners that helped him get off on the right foot.
“Jack had given me a big opportunity, and I had owners that came to me,” Mott explained. “I didn’t go out and hustle any horses or try to recruit anyone. Everything just fell into place. I showed up for work and things kept happening. My phone was ringing, and people were wanting to send me horses.”
Less than 10 years later, a son of Nureyev found his way into Mott’s barn thanks to owner Allen Paulson, and he would help shine a light on his conditioner’s world-class talents. His name was Theatrical, and while he had won several stakes races in Europe, it wasn’t until he came to the United States that he achieved his greatest success.
Theatrical won seven of nine races in 1987, including that year’s Breeders’ Cup Turf at Hollywood Park. In total, his campaign included six Grade 1 victories, and he was crowned as that year’s Champion Grass Horse.
“Theatrical was my first champion, my first Breeders’ Cup winner,” Mott said. “He let everyone know that I could train a good horse, that I could train a Grade 1 winner, that I could train a champion. Theatrical being owned by Allen Paulson is the reason I got Cigar.”
Six and a half years after Theatrical walked off the racetrack for the final time, Cigar was transferred to Mott’s care. He had started his career in California for trainer Alex Hassinger, but was sent east at the recommendation of Dr. Steve Allday following double knee surgery.
“I remember getting on him when we took him to Belmont,” Mott recalled. “One morning, we went to the training track. I galloped him, and I remember going back to the barn and just raving about this horse. The adrenaline had kicked in, and I was spouting off. I said, ‘this horse is like a machine.’
“I’d been on a lot of good horses, and I know what most good horses feel like. There’s a difference. You can sometimes feel that special horse underneath you. He was one of those.”
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Claiborne Farm & Adele B Dilschneider
It’s hard to believe there is a more iconic farm than Claiborne in Paris, Ky., which celebrated its 100th year of operation in 2011 and was honored that year with an Eclipse Award of Merit for outstanding achievement in Thoroughbred racing. “It’s more of a tribute to my grandfather and father,” Seth Hancock, the 64-year-old owner, partner and manager of Claiborne, said. “My grandfather (Arthur B. Hancock) started all this over here in Kentucky, and my dad (Arthur B. “Bull Hancock Jr.”) built it up into what it was, and I’m just trying to keep it going.”
Hancock, who graduated from the University of Kentucky’s College of Agriculture in 1971, and his wife Dell have done more than keep it going. They have continued a standard of excellence at the historic farm whose most recent stars include 2010 Breeders’ Cup Classic winner Blame, who began his stallion career at Claiborne in 2011, 2012 graded stakes winners Cease and Rumor and 2013 triple graded-stakes winner Departing. All three were campaigned in partnership with Adele Dilschneider.
Many of the sport’s greatest champions preceded them, none more accomplished than Triple Crown Champion and two-time Horse of the Year Secretariat, whom Seth Hancock syndicated for a then record $6 million in 1972, the same year he took over Claiborne following his father’s death. Blenheim II, Bold Ruler, Conquistador Cielo, Damascus, Danzig, Easy Goer, Triple Crown Champion Gallant Fox, Mr. Prospector, Nasrullah, Nijinsky II, Princequillo, Round Table, Sir Gallahad III, Sir Ivor, Tom Rolfe and Unbridled are among the long list of Thoroughbred royalty tied to Claiborne.
Hancock has long been an industry leader. He is a director of Keeneland, a member of The Jockey Club, vice chairman of the Thoroughbred Owners and Breeders Association and a member of the American Graded Stakes Committee. He was on the board of directors at Churchill Downs from 1973 to 2008.
Hancock’s brother, Arthur, owns and operates Stone Farm adjacent to Claiborne.
Dilschneider is a native of Alton, Ill., across the river from St. Louis, Mo. Her great grandfather, William E. Levis, was the founder of Corning-Illinois Glass, a prominent maker of beer bottles in the middle of the 20th century. Her grandfather, John Olin, bred and owned Cannonade, who won the 100th Kentucky Derby in 1974 for Hall of Fame trainer Woody Stephens and Hall of Fame jockey Angel Cordero Jr. She owns approximately two dozen racehorses and 30 broodmares in partnership with Claiborne, and frequently travels from Missouri to watch her horses race. “I wouldn’t be in this business if I can’t watch my horses race,” she said.
Preston Stables LLC
“In the oil business, you get a dry hole and lose 80 percent of the time,” Art Preston said in a 2011 article in The Blood-Horse. “It’s like racing. If you persevere, you’re going to hit the big one.”
His seven-year-old Flat Out persevered. After finishing second in the Woodward, third in the Jockey Club Gold Cup and eighth in the Breeders’ Cup Classic, Flat Out won the $500,000 Grade I Cigar Mile for trainer Bill Mott, who trained two-time Horse of the Year Cigar. Preston purchased Flat Out for $85,000 at the 2007 Fasig-Tipton Kentucky July Yearling Sale under a stable name, Oxbow Racing. Preston also raced as LOR (Lone Oak Racing) Stables and as Prestonwood Farm with his brother Jack and their late brother, J.R. He and Jack are frequently mistaken for each other.
A native of Oklahoma who now lives in The Woodlands in Texas, Preston graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in geology from the University of Illinois. After working as a geologist in the Illinois Basin, Preston and his brothers partnered on several ventures in gas and oil, real estate, cattle ranches, nutritional supplements marketing, fiber optics, restaurants, geothermal power generation companies, and, of course, Thoroughbreds.
Preston founded Presco Inc. in Woodlands in 1991. Presco Inc., a natural gas exploration and development company, has offices in Texas, Michigan, Colorado, Oklahoma and Kentucky and oil and gas production facilities in Colorado, Montana and Oklahoma. According to Presco Inc.’s website, Preston’s companies have developed and sold numerous oil and gas assets with cumulative sales prices, not including normal production revenues, in excess of $400 million.
His success in business allowed him to get involved in racing. He purchased a percentage of a claimer in the late 1970s, and then, with his two brothers, began Preston Farm near Quanah, Texas. Then they opened Prestonwood Farm in central Kentucky. Prestonwood Farm was re-named WinStar Farm when it was sold in 2000 to Kenny Troutt and Bill Casner.
Prestonwood Farm’s top horses included 1987 Eclipse Award Champion Sprinter Groovy; 1999 Champion Older Male Victory Gallop, who denied Real Quiet the Triple Crown by edging him in the 1998 Belmont Stakes, and Da Hoss, who won the Breeders’ Cup Mile twice in 1996 and 1998.
Preston, who had another multiple stakes winner this year in Flashy American, keeps his horses at his 800-acre Oxbow Farms in Paris, Kentucky, 30 miles north of Lexington. His current stable of 50 horses includes weanlings, yearlings and the ones now racing. Tim Schuh trains most of Preston’s horses. Preston tends to name his horses using the first letter of the sire’s name. Flat Out, a son of Flatter, has now earned just under $3.5 million.
Juddmonte Farms
Typically, talented Thoroughbreds owned by Prince Khalid Abdullah’s Juddmonte Farms don’t take second billing. Since buying his first Thoroughbred in 1977, and winning his first graded/group stakes two years later, Abdullah has developed Juddmonte into an international racing empire whose list of champions will be forever linked to the unbeaten Frankel, named for the late Hall of Fame trainer Bobby Frankel, who raced Juddmonte’s horses in the United States for 20 years before his death in 2009.
Juddmonte boasts multiple Classic winners in England, France and Ireland, and has amassed 11 Eclipse Awards in North America, including five for breeding and two as owners. Empire Maker’s victory in the 2003 Belmont Stakes gave Juddmonte its only Triple Crown Classic winner. He was trained by Frankel.
Now another Hall of Fame trainer, Bill Mott, handles Juddmonte’s horses in North America.