NOEL & WENDY HICKEY A FEW MARTINIS, A FILLY, AND A LIFE IN RACING
WORDS - KEN SNYDER “Never leave home without it" from the TV commercial for a credit card is a lesson that was career and life changing for Wendy Hickey, a Welsh emigrant and her husband Noel, also an emigrant but from Ireland. Fortunately, she learned from the mistake made by someone who left home without his checkbook. Worse, he had made the winning bid on a horse at a horse auction in Colorado.
"He had a few martinis," explained Wendy Hickey. No check, no horse. "So I ended up buying the horse that I hadn't even looked at" - a yearling filly.
The purchase of the instead of the checkless and feckless bidder was the entry point for Wendy and Noel to get into racing. Their filly raced in Arizona and Colorado for one year before Wendy gave her to a friend.
The single year of racing awakened the proverbial horse gene in both Wendy and Noel. Wendy began putting together partnerships in horses and racing them in Arizona and Arapahoe Park in Aurora, Colorado. That spanned eight years. Inspiration for partnerships came in part from the movie Dream Horse, the story of a small community, ironically in Wales, that came together to own a horse, appropriately named Dream Alliance. The horse won the 2009 Welsh Grand National.
In the last two years, the Hickeys have begun breeding horses, traveling monthly to a farm in Paris, north of Lexington, to check on progress with weanlings, yearlings and broodmares in foal.
The other part that led the Hickeys into breeding was a budding interest and investigation into Thoroughbred pedigrees while racing in Arizona and Colorado. "I started spotting mares that were up and coming on the racetrack and looking at their bloodlines," said Wendy. I got interested and actually claimed some, brought them to Colorado, and then took them out to Kentucky to breed."
Currently the Hickeys have seven foals due this spring and this is their second crop sired by Kentucky stallions. The Hickeys will face a decision many breeders have the luxury of making. "Until you see a foal, you don't know whether you want to race them or sell them." Mares will come back to Colorado, Nebraska and Wyoming to foal and take advantage of breeding incentives. Colts and fillies foaled in Colorado will be raced in that state by the Hickeys.
Horse breeding, essentially, is agriculture subject to weather like any other crop in the field. Last year, during the breeding season, an ice storm hit the Bluegrass, hampering travel and altering the reproductive cycles for many mares. A percentage of mares do not take on the first breeding and have to come back for subsequent matings. Transportation in bad weather was an issue at times last year and had some effect on this year's crop of foals. Primarily the result will be more late foals this year.
"Because everyone wants to foal at the beginning of the year, it's kind of caused a bit of a scramble, because everyone wants to get their mares back and breed again," said Wendy, referring to second and sometimes third matings with a stallion to produce a foal.
"We had a couple of mares that did take straight away, but not all. There's wait time involved in a mare coming back into heat and then scheduling with the desired stallion."
The Hickeys have an advantage over many out-of-state breeders with a location in Paris [KY] which reduces the number of trips back and forth between states. Ironically, Rob Ring, who bred the horse that Wendy Hickey bought at the auction in Colorado, is now their breeder in Kentucky and oversees their operation there. Wendy is the primary decision maker in matings and Ring also has input into stallion choice.
Wendy's pedigree interests took her to a specific bloodline: Sunday Silence and his progeny. This horse won both the Kentucky Derby and Preakness in 1986. When overlooked by breeders here in the U.S. after retirement, he was sent to Japan where he was the leading sire there a record thirteen times. Progeny has won major races all over the world, and descendants in the U.S. have, in part, restored his reputation as a sire. In 2016, he was the leading broodmare sire in North America. (Read North American Trainer - issue 59 / spring 2021)
Tale of Ekati, whose dam Silence Beauty is a daughter of Sunday Silence, was the stallion a Hickey mare was bred to in 2024. The Hickeys brought the foal, a filly, back west to Wyoming. "She's quite small, but it's good to have a 'small' because Wyoming tracks are pretty snug. You need a small horse to get around the bends." said Wendy.
Another foal was sired by Highly Motivated out of an Irish mare, The Ginger Queen, from the Galileo bloodline. The third foal is by Gift Box, sired by Twirling Candy, winner of $1.1 million in purses including two Gr.2 races and a pair of Gr.1's, including the Gold Cup at Santa Anita.
"Right now, we have seven horses, three yearlings and four mares," said Noel Hickey. Among horses expected to foal this year by Mendelssohn, Drain the Clock, Gun Pilot, and Speightstown.
Foaling requirements to qualify as a state-bred in western states vary for the Hickeys. "Wyoming is the trickiest one because the broodmare has to be registered and in the state by the fifteenth of August prior to birth. So if you've had a mare that's had a foal late, you have to move the mare with a foal at her side, but before weaning."
Fortunately, as with their Paris location, there is a broodmare facility in Laramie, Wyoming for mares in foal and new foals. "Wyoming is really starting to advance now," said Wendy.
There are quite a few stallions there-Finnegan's Wake, King Zachary, and Dennis' Moment. "People are starting to catch on with the breeders' funds that you can get. They're trying to encourage people to foal out there and to build the racing program in Wyoming. Nebraska is doing something similar."
This past year Taylor Made Farm in Nicholasville, Kentucky introduced a "State-Bred Initiative Program" offering free seasons to four stallions at their farm to out-of-state mares who will foal in those states. The program hopes to boost regional breeding outside Kentucky and counter, to some degree, the continuing decline in North American foal crops. The Hickeys are prime prospects for the program.
The Hickeys make their home in Denver and own a combination 'Irish-Welsh' pub/off-track betting (OTB) facility - The Celtic on Market.
It was originally called the Celtic Tavern before relocation to 14th and Market Streets in Denver.
The move downtown and opening on St. Patrick's Day in 2017 was memorable for some nail-biting, last-minute wrangling over a liquor license, rivaling a neck-and-neck battle to the wire between two Thoroughbreds.
After numerous construction delays consuming parts of 2015, all of 2016, and the first three months of 2017, the new Celtic on Market was finally ready to open with all permit issues hurdled...except for liquor.
"We were not allowed to bring any liquor or beer into the restaurant until we had a license.
"We had trucks lined up outside, and so we called the liquor board and said, 'Could you send someone down to sign off on our liquor license?'" The reply, on the most important day of the year to the Irish and expecting brisk business, was "not until next Tuesday."
"I said, 'You don't understand, it's Friday and it's St. Patrick's Day and we need to open." The attitude they got in response was one we've probably all had at one time or another dealing with government officials: “’I’m sorry, sir, it will be next Tuesday’ and they hung up on me!” Hickey said, shaking his head at the memory.
A last-minute call to the chief of staff for Denver’s mayor produced a call back five minutes later from the same liquor board official who had hung up on Noel. Good news delivered coldly: “We’ll be down there in ten minutes.”
“That was three-thirty in the afternoon and at five pm we opened with a full house,” Noel Hickey said.
Nine years later The Celtic on Market will celebrate St. Patrick’s Day and its nine-year anniversary of that opening in the new location.
Today the venue is a center for emigrants from Europe and elsewhere to gather for Premier League matches and other major sporting events around the world like the Melbourne Cup. At the time of writing, the big promotion of the day was Spain’s major soccer match, El Clásico, pitting Barcelona against Real Madrid.
Horse racing is the daily mainstay for Denver horse racing fans and bettors along with out-of-town visitors coming into Denver for Broncos football games.
Noel greets visitors as the front-of-house guy. “I’m that guy that schmoozes people. Wendy does all of the back of the house for the bar, the OTB, and FanDuel.
Fittingly, the two met in an Irish pub in Düsseldorf, Germany that Noel owned 36 years ago. They’ve been married 34 years.
“We spend twenty-four hours a day with each other. We’re very lucky in the sense that we work well together,” said Noel.
Ah, there it is the luck of the Irish: a horse that fell into their lap to start the Hickeys in racing; the involvement that sustained and made possible horse breeding in Kentucky; and last but not least, owning Denver’s only OTB. What could be next? Given all that has already happened, the two of them in the winner’s circle of a Triple Crown race wouldn’t be a surprise.