Ben Colebrook - raising the stakes
/Article by Frances J. Karon
Ben Colebrook spent his 45th birthday eating a slice of pizza alone on a Friday night in Brooklyn. He was in New York on an overnight trip from Kentucky for a show the next afternoon in which his Raise Cain was given odds of having little more than a walk-on part.
Despite expecting a strong performance, Colebrook didn’t stay for the closing curtain.
Once he’d given José Lezcano a leg up in the saddle, Colebrook headed out of the track’s front gate, where an Uber was waiting for him. The car idled long enough for the trainer to get a live view of the field leaving the starting gate. He watched the rest of the race on his phone, and that’s how he saw his 23-1 shot win the Gr.3 Gotham by 7½ lengths, guaranteeing Raise Cain enough points to qualify for a start in the Kentucky Derby.
As the Uber drove from Aqueduct to Kennedy International Airport and maneuvered traffic less eventful than Raise Cain’s stretch run around Howgreatisnate, who’d thrown his rider at the start, the bay son of Violence was joined in the winner’s circle by only his jockey, groom, and a barely visible valet. Colebrook began to receive texts. “Are you OK? What happened?”
Colebrook was fine. He’d ducked out early because he didn’t want to miss his flight to Cincinnati, just across the Ohio-Kentucky state line from Turfway Park, where he had Scoobie Quando, also on the prowl for Derby points, entered in the John Battaglia Memorial Stakes later that night.
His runners didn’t pull off the stakes double. Scoobie Quando was second in a field of 12—a good effort in only his third start. The original plan was to keep the colts, both owned by Andrew and Rania Warren, apart for their next races; but when Scoobie Quando had to scratch from Turfway’s Gr.3 Jeff Ruby Steaks for a minor issue, it meant he’d need to connect a Hail Mary pass to score a Derby saddle towel. The Gr.2 Wood Memorial at Aqueduct and the Gr.1 Toyota Blue Grass at Keeneland on the same day had enough points up for grabs, and after weighing their options, they decided to stay home and enter Raise Cain and Scoobie Quando in the Blue Grass. Colebrook would gladly have taken a win in either race, but as he says, “The Wood Memorial would be great to have on your resume, but I’m a Keeneland guy.”
Indeed.
Ben Colebrook trains out of Keeneland’s year-round Rice Road barns, on the other side of the street from the main facility. “Keeneland’s part of the reason why I’ve had, if you can call it a successful career, it’s been because of being stabled at Keeneland. It’s probably the major reason why I’ve gotten horses. People want to have their horses here, and there’s only so many stalls down there on Rice Road.”
The son of now-retired farm manager John, who trained a few horses on the side and compiled a record of 18 wins in 140 starts from 1991–1995 and 2007–2012, and Mary Jo, Colebrook is the oldest of two sons. By the time his father was yearling manager at Don and Mira Ball’s Donamire Farm in Lexington, Ky., four-year-old Ben would get on the pony and ride around the farm’s private training track. But as he grew older, Colebrook considered taking a different direction with his life. “I was trying to get away from horses.” He laughs. He paid his own way through a few years at the University of Kentucky, pursuing a business degree while getting on horses around his class schedule. “Burning the candle at both ends,” he says.
“Horse racing gets in your blood. It’s sticky. I tried to be normal and have a normal life…” After a pause, he adds, “It didn’t really take.” The allure was too great. He left college without graduating.
“Sometimes,” he says, “you wish you just would have stayed in school, but I don’t know. There’s good days and bad days, obviously. But then at this stage, you’re pretty much committed anyway. Literally committed. Or,” he jokes, “should be committed.”
Most folks entrenched in a precarious 24/7/365 business can understand the latter sentiment, even if it’s meant tongue in cheek. In an alternate reality, Colebrook, true to his easy going personality, would have liked to be a “ski bum” in Colorado. “I’d have to be doing something outside. I’d go postal working in an office.”
Instead, his office is his pickup, the track rail, and the Keeneland grandstand. It’s not the Rockies, but it sure beats a cubicle—and he still makes time to go skiing every winter anyway. His “assistant,” Cash, a five-year-old black Lab, keeps morale high from the backseat of the truck. “He’s excited in the morning. At 4:30, he’s all, ‘Come on, let’s go!’”
Colebrook came up under numerous good horsemen, including Bill Harrigan, Fred Seitz, Hall of Famer John Veitch, and Christophe Clement.
Harrigan liked what he saw in young Colebrook, who juggled getting on Harrigan’s horses while going to the UK. “Ben’s kind of a family member of ours; that’s how we feel,” says Harrigan, who broke and handled the pre-training of Horses of the Year A.P. Indy and Mineshaft and currently has a two-year-old homebred in Colebrook’s barn. “He always got along great with horses, was very interested in it, and was a super guy to have around because of his personality. Those are the kind of guys that go on to make it. They’re happy in their job, and they’re interested in their job and they like to work.”
In 2002, Colebrook traveled to Saratoga with a steeplechaser for Harrigan and farm trainer Mark McEntee. McEntee was friends with Clement from the time both worked for trainer Shug McGaughey, so when one of Clement’s riders got hurt, Colebrook got on some horses to help out McEntee’s old friend. Colebrook and Clement stayed in touch, and by 2007, Clement convinced him to join his team. “I never really wanted to go to New York, so I was kind of reluctant,” says Colebrook. “When we talked about it more, I said, ‘I like central Kentucky, and this is where I want to be.”
Clement set up his new assistant at Keeneland, sending him two-year-olds and lay-ups. Colebrook says, “Christophe really liked the synthetic track for the babies because he didn’t have to miss any time for the weather. You’d ship horses to Saratoga, and it would rain for weeks and he wouldn’t be able to get a line on his babies, so it worked out really well for him here.”
He oversaw a Kentucky division for Clement for nearly five years. By then, says Colebrook, “It got to the point where it was time for me to do something on my own. And Christophe was good about it; he helped me out.”
Things began to fall into place.
The Ball family’s Donamire Farm was among Colebrook’s first owners, and to this day their support has been unwavering. For two decades, Katherine “Kay Kay” Ball, who’d met her husband Mike through John Colebrook, trained many of their horses herself, but she was ready to give Colebrook his shot. “I was always asking Ben when he was going to start training,” Ball says. When he called to tell her, she said, “Can you come to the barn?” Ten minutes later, she was showing him a filly, asking him if he wanted to train her. He did.
Colebook prepared to take his trainer’s test. The day he walked into the racing office, his former boss John Veitch, by then a Kentucky state steward, was sitting in there. Veitch asked, “Did you read the book? Did you study? Are you going to pass?” Colebrook said, “I think so.”
Veitch told him, “Go in there and get your damn license.”
This was during the era when the main track at Keeneland was a synthetic, all-weather surface, and not as many people were willing to train over it full time, so Colebrook was allocated space on Rice Road after another trainer was suspended and lost his stalls. “I snuck in. I was so lucky,” he says.
Colebrook started off slowly with his own stable—paying tribute to his mentor by training, Clement-style, in quarter sheets—while keeping a few horses for Clement. He made one start in 2012 and two late in the spring of 2013. But by autumn, he was better prepared; his first horse to hit the board was Donamire’s Holiday Stroll, third in a maiden at Kentucky Downs in September. In October, he saddled his first starters at Keeneland, breaking his career maiden with Mt Tronador for Darrell and Lendy Brown and English Estate. Colebrook’s runners also came in second twice and fourth once that month, from all his starters at the meet.
“I had four runners at Keeneland, and they all ran good. I’m thinking I’m like the big man on campus there until [Keeneland’s then-director of racing Rogers] Beasley called me into his office one day. He said, ‘How many horses did you run?’ I said, ‘Four.’ He said, ‘You have 15 stalls. Do you think that was enough starts?’ I called Christophe afterwards and I said, ‘Man, I’m going to have to hustle and get some horses here after the talking-to I just got.’ And the next meet at Keeneland, I don’t know how many horses I ran—anything with a mane or a tail—and I won a race. The next fall, I won the [Gr.3] Valley View [at Keeneland], and after that, it was pretty good with Beasley. I didn’t blame him. Those stalls are gold.”
Keeneland has been the scene of Colebrook’s milestones: in 2013, his first win; in 2014, his first Graded win, in the Valley View with Sparkling Review, who later won the Gr.2 Mrs. Revere at Churchill Downs; and in 2018, his first Gr.1 win.
He doesn’t love to talk about that Gr.1 winner, Knicks Go.
Colebrook trained Knicks Go for the Korea Racing Authority during the colt’s two- and three-year-old campaigns. They won Keeneland’s Gr.1 Claiborne Breeders’ Futurity by 5½ lengths at 70-1 and were a 40-1 second in the Sentient Jet Breeders’ Cup Juvenile.
“I was probably a little naïve with him. He was so fast and so hard on himself in the morning, and I just kept thinking, ‘You’ve gotta get this horse to relax.’”
Knicks Go made six starts, five in stakes, in a five-month span as a two-year-old and eight times—seven stakes—from February to November at three. Colebrook kept advising the owners that the colt needed a break, but they wanted to keep going. “He just lost his confidence and I…” he pauses, “I started to lose my mind.”
After his final start at three, Knicks Go—who was Horse of the Year at five—was switched over to Brad Cox. “He ran one big race with Brad [at allowance level], and then he got hurt and got more time off. Brad had a fresh horse and just got to send him, and that’s probably what he always wanted to do. But it is what it is.”
Limousine Liberal, ridden by José Ortiz, leads the field down the home stretch to win the 2017 Churchill Downs Stakes on Kentucky Derby Day.
Colebrook is happier to talk about the Ball homebred Limousine Liberal, who ran in Kay Kay Ball’s colors and won or placed 22 times in 27 starts, from 2015-2019. “The coolest thing about him is you didn’t need to worry about him; you didn’t worry if he was going to run his race today. You never know when you bring a horse over if they’re going to show up, but he always did. He was like an ATM machine,” he says.
The Successful Appeal sprinter set track records at Ellis Park and Keeneland, notched three Gr.2 races and a Gr.3 among his six stakes wins, and was second or third in 13 other Graded stakes—four of them Gr.1’s. He made his stakes debut in his third lifetime start, finishing second behind eventual champion sprinter Runhappy in the Gr.1 King’s Bishop at Saratoga.
Limousine Liberal was on the board—including a second by a nose, a second by a neck, and a third by a nose and a neck—in seven of eight tries at Keeneland; but he only won there once, in an allowance optional claimer. After one of those narrow losses, Mira Ball—the matriarch of the Donamire family—pulled Colebrook aside to tell him that the farm is “cursed” in Graded races at Keeneland. “Your horse ran awesome today,” she said. “I’m really proud of you, and I just want you to know it’s not your fault.”
For his part, Colebrook was just as proud to give something back to the Ball family. “Donamire hadn’t had a good horse in forever, and Mike and Kay Kay had never really had a good one on their own, so Limousine Liberal definitely put the wind in everybody’s sails again. Kay Kay’s all in all the time, but you know, when you’re not having any luck, it’s not any fun.”
He also trained Edward Seltzer and Beverly Anderson’s Gr.3 Arlington Classic winner Surgical Strike, as well as the LNJ Foxwoods filly Fancy Dress Party, whose five wins in six starts include the Gr.3 Beaumont at Keeneland.
The Limousine Liberal years were a particular high point for Colebrook. “When I got Cash” (that’s his dog; he and wife Marina also have a mini-Aussie, Luna),“I knew I was in for a dry spell,” he says. “Limousine Liberal won the [Gr.2] Belmont Sprint Championship, and I picked Cash up—I got him from a breeder in New York—and got on a private plane with Kay Kay and flew back home. I don’t think you could have a much better day than that: get a new dog, win a Graded stake, and fly back on a private jet. I knew that I’d be paying for that, with the highs and lows—that there would be some big lows.”
That’s the natural cycle of the business: an abundance of lows relative to the highs—more so for a trainer with a small-to-medium stable, which, in Colebrook’s case, is by choice. He hopes simply to maintain what he considers a manageable stable of 50—his “sweet spot.”
He says, “Any more than that, I can’t find the help to do it. Right after Sparkling Review, I got a lot of horses. It all happened so fast, and suddenly, I had 70 horses. If I could have them all in one place it would be different, but I don’t want to have all these strings everywhere and a bunch of assistants. It wasn’t my cup of tea.
“But in saying that, it’s hard to maintain a medium-sized stable. If you limit your size, you’re going to get less good horses, and then you hit dry spells where you don’t have any good horses. I could have taken that next step and tried to get 100. Horses are probably the easy part,” he says. “It’s getting the good horses in the barn that’s the hard part. I think also numbers erase mistakes, so if you have 100 horses and you make a couple of mistakes with some good three-year-olds or two-year-olds, they don’t get noticed. But if you don’t have that many and make some mistakes, you don’t have any horses. It’s a numbers game after all, unfortunately.”
Raise Cain
Colebrook has done enough right with Raise Cain that, all being well, the colt is poised to become his first starter in a Triple Crown race. Although he was only fifth in the Blue Grass, he ran wide and covered a lot of extra ground to put in an encouraging closing move, clocking the final eighth faster than any but the first two home. Scoobie Quando finished ninth, ending all hope that Colebrook and the Warrens would have two in the Derby; but in this numbers game, one Kentucky Derby starter is more than most people get in their lifetime.
Although the Warren surname is well known in association with 2005 Horse of the Year Saint Liam and 2018 Breeders’ Cup Dirt Mile winner City of Light, those horses ran for Andrew Warren’s parents, William Jr. and Suzanne. This is only Andrew and Rania Warren’s third crop of three-year-olds under their banner: in January, Scoobie Quando became their first stakes winner, while just two months later, Raise Cain was their first Graded stakes winner. They’d been introduced to Colebrook by veterinarian Greg Fox, a former trainer who’s now the U.S. representative for the Australian company E-Trakka. Heart rate, speed, stride lengt, and other data from all the Warren trainees is monitored using E-Trakka pads during their breezes, as a complement to what the trainer sees visually.
No data is required to recognize that Colebrook’s profile is on the ascent again, but he’s been grinding long enough to know that moments like this are not the norm. On freezing winter mornings, the rail on the all-weather training track at Keeneland is a lonely place. With a laugh, he says that his goals are to “make payroll, pay bills.”
Of course he has loftier aspirations than that, but the reality is that while such modest goals may seem self-deprecating, it’s a reflection of the state of the industry, which relies heavily on its being a labor of love at every level. He says, “The horse business and horse racing have gone two separate ways, and it’s become too much of a business and not enough of a sport and a passion for people.”
It’s not getting any easier.
With the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority (HISA) in place now, one uncertainty moving forward has replaced the previously existing uncertainty moving forward. Colebrook approaches government oversight with an open mind. “I went to all the meetings about the Horse Racing Integrity Act, so I would say I was a supporter of it for sure, but when it launched, I just felt like there was a big disconnect,” he says.
“I felt like they were listening to very few voices. I talked to [HISA chief executive officer] Lisa Lazarus, and to be honest, it set my mind at ease a little bit that they are starting to realize that maybe they don’t know everything, and that trainers aren’t all Jorge Navarro and Jason Servis. The industry has done a terrible job policing itself, but I think that now they realize that the more voices and the more people that you can listen to is a good thing. They put people on there that were also anti-HISA, so I think that’s good because if you’re just going to be a sounding board for it, that’s not really what they need to hear. Everybody sees the world through their own point of view, and if you’re only looking at it one way, you’re probably going to miss a lot. And if you take a lot of vantage points and put them all together, you might get to the actual issues and what needs to be changed.”
One thing he would like to see differently is other areas of the industry taking more responsibility for problems created before the horses even reach trainers. “It’s fine to have us change everything we’ve done,” he says, “but I think we need to look at how we’re raising and breeding horses. What has more of an effect on soundness: breeding a mare that made one or two starts to a stallion that made one or two starts, or the fact that that stallion ran on Lasix? Whether you’re pro-Lasix or anti-Lasix, it’s the one thing that divides everybody. I think they could agree on 99% of the other stuff. Nobody wants cheaters. Everyone wants horse welfare, aftercare. All these are things that if you don’t agree with, why are you in the horse business?”
As for Colebrook, well, there’s no great mystery as to why a kid who started out riding a pony around a farm track just a few miles down the winding back roads of Keeneland is in the horse business. That he should end up where he is now, making a name for himself so close to where it all began, is his success story.
Years ago, when he first ran a horse for Donamire, someone asked one of the Balls, “Who the hell is Ben Colebrook? Why’d you send him a horse?”
Regardless of what happens in the Classics this year, by now, no one needs to wonder anymore.
