Graded Stakes Winning Owners - Dennis Albaugh, Albaugh Family Stable (Catching Freedom)

Before he could afford to buy Thoroughbreds, Dennis Albaugh had to succeed in business.

And though the start of his one-truck company out of his garage in Ankeny, Iowa, in 1979 was an utter disaster that nearly wiped him out, Albaugh preserved and now owns the ninth largest agricultural chemical company in the world, selling in 44 countries and manufacturing in nine.  

Though he grew up on a farm with a couple of riding horses, he was intrigued with agriculture: “I was always intrigued that you can spray crops with chemicals to protect them.” After two-years of college, he worked for a chemical company for three years. When the company asked him to relocate his family to Birmingham, Alabama, he declined. “I started my own company,” he said. 

That wasn’t easy. “I had to convince my wife to take a second mortgage on the house,” he said. She agreed. “She trusted in me, I guess,” Albaugh said.

The second mortgage allowed Albaugh to receive a $10,000 loan from the Small Business Administration. “It was very tough, I was very new in the business. It was a start-up company.”

 He purchased an old oil tanker, bought weed-killing chemicals from a company in Des Moines and delivered them to a company in South Dakota on his very first run. “It was a 200-mile run,” Albaugh said. “On the way up, I thought this truck was running smoother and smoother.”

He reached his destination. “I put the hose in the receiving tank,” he said. “Nothing was coming out. I opened the lid. It was empty. I said, `Oh, boy, I just spent $8,000 of my $10,000.’ It was very scary.”

The seals on his truck had failed, and he had dumped his entire load on the trip. “I called the Department of Agriculture and told them I dripped chemicals, but nothing toxic,” Albaugh said. “They said, `Thanks for killing all our weeds.’”

Telling the Department of Agriculture was easier than telling his wife what had happened. She asked him, “How did your first delivery go?”

He told her. She didn’t blink.

Undeterred, Albaugh got a couple days' leeway from his buyer in South Dakota. He quickly bought a new truck and made the same delivery.

And then he grew his company. In 1993, he bought his company’s biggest competitor. “We really soared after that,” he said. “I don’t know the word `no.’”

His incredible success in business mirrored his ongoing success with Thoroughbreds, which also had humble beginnings after his son-in-law Jason Loutsch, who is now Albaugh Family Stables Racing Manager, nudged him into the business. Last year, the stable had three runners in the Kentucky Derby including the favorite, Angel of Empire, who finished a fast-closing third. This year, Catching Freedom has them returning to Louisville on the first Saturday of May.

Loutsch still can’t believe it: “Growing up, my best friend had a horse farm two miles from Prairie Meadows,” Loutsch said. “We made believe we were jockeys.”

Loutsch bought a horse, Mr. Mingo, in 2003, and shared the experience with Albaugh. Mr. Mingo finished second in a $59,000 Iowa-bred stakes in his second start for his new owners. “Dennis said, `This is a lot of fun. Let’s get more horses,’” Loutsch said.

They did, buying a half-share of a two-year-old Trippi filly for $42,000 at the Ocala Two-Year-Olds in Training Sale in June, 2005. They named the filly Miss Macy Sue for Albaugh’s granddaughter, and gave her to trainer Kelly Von Hemel.

“She took us all over the country,” says Loutsch, “Then she turned into one of the best broodmares in the country. It really got our juices flowing.”
Albaugh said, “It was unbelievable. We went around the country and she kept doing well.”

Their talented filly won 11 of her 25 starts, including the Grade 3 Winning Colors Stakes at Churchill Downs and five other stakes. She had five seconds and three thirds, including a third in the 2007 Breeders’ Cup Filly & Mare Sprint at Monmouth Park. She earned $880,915.

But she wasn’t done making money. She produced Liam’s Map, who had six wins and two seconds in eight starts, earning $1,358.940,  Matera, a four-for-10 winner who earned $309,040 and Taylor S, who went three-for-seven and made $121,518.

Tired of not racing her talented progeny, Albaugh bred her to Giant’s Causeway and named her colt Not This Time. After finishing fifth in his debut, he won a maiden race by 10 lengths, the Grade 3 Iroquois Stakes by 6 ¾ and finished second by a neck to Classic Empire in the 2016 Grade 1 Breeders’ Cup Juvenile.

He’d already made $454,183, but he didn’t race again. He’d hurt a tendon in the Breeders’ Cup race, making his performance even more impressive. Retired to stud, Not This Time finished 2023 as the eighth leading stallion with $13,223,548 in progeny earnings. He stands this year at Taylor Made Stallions for $150,000. “He pays a lot of bills,” Albaugh said.

 Along the way, Albaugh and Loutsch began an earnest pursuit of racing’s greatest prize, the Kentucky Derby. In 2016, their Brody’s Cause finished seventh. The next year, J. Boys Echo was 15th. In 2018, Free Drop Billy finished 16th. Dale Romans trained all three horses.

Last year, Angel of Empire, trained by Brad Cox, was third and Cox-trained Jace’s Road, owned in partnership with West Point Thoroughbreds, was 17th. Albaugh Family Stable and Castleton Lyons-owned Cyclone Mischief was 18th.

Catching Freedom, who is trained by Cox, has them dreaming again. “This is the 150th Derby,” Loutsch said. “We know how hard it is. It’s extremely hard to win. There are so many things that have to go right. There are so many factors going into it. This horse definitely wants to go a mile and a quarter. Hopefully, we’re fortunate enough to get a good trip.”

Albaugh said, “Just to get to the Kentucky Derby was a big honor. Having three horses last year was unheard of. We checked the history. We think that’s the record. We’re very thrilled to get back this year.”

Family is an integral part of Albaugh’s life. Loutsch and Albaugh’s daughter Tiffany have two girls, Julianah, 24, and Milan, 18. “They’re in charge of social media,” Loutsch said. “They go to all the races.”

Asked how hard it is to work for his father-in-law, Loutsch said, “Not hard at all. He’s truly one of the best guys in the world. He makes life real easy. No ego. Most importantly, he is fair and honest. He’s invested a lot in the game. We have a lot of fun together.”

Albaugh said, “My son-in-law got my interest going, it’s a whole family. It’s a lot of fun to go with all your family, it’s a lot of fun to get together.”

Especially if it’s in the winner’s circle on the first Saturday in May.

Graded Stakes Winning Owners - Eric and Sharon Waller (Stronghold)

Though Eric Waller was 10 years old when he accompanied his father to Santa Anita, he never really felt connected to Thoroughbreds.

His success with Barranca Insurance, which opened in Rancho Cucamonga in 1972 and is now run by his daughters, allowed him to purchase a couple of horses.

“Not Thoroughbreds,” Waller said. “One was a Paint, and one was a Quarter Horse. I wanted horses to ride. I thought that might be fun. It was at that time I realized I did feel something special about horses. I didn’t realize that was inside of me until I bought those horses. I found inner calmness and appreciation for the animal.”

That would be tested after he bought and began breeding Thoroughbreds. His early struggles and then continuing success on the track was tempered by horrible happenings trying to develop a broodmare band. But the Wallers never gave up and they now have a home-bred Kentucky Derby contender, Stronghold, a horse they can proudly point out traces back to four generations of their own Thoroughbreds.

Despite two of their stars dying while giving birth. Despite two mares who savaged their own foals.

Asked how he got through the rough parts, Waller said, “I wish I could tell you. I’m not a quitter. I believe someday, somehow, I’m going to get me a Grade 1 winner. I feel that was my goal. I hadn’t achieved it, so I couldn’t quit.”

Stronghold, who won the Grade 3 Sunland Derby by 2 ¼ lengths in an impressive three-year-old debut, added the Santa Anita Derby April 6th in his final prep for the Kentucky Derby. He is already the Wallers’ highest earner. Stronghold’s dam, Spectator, is second and Stronghold’s third dam, Swiss Diva, is third.

The Wallers’ entrance into Thoroughbred racing was disappointing. “My wife knew a retired jockey,” Waller said. “He had an old mare. She was in foal to a stallion named Lucky Sack. I went ahead and took the mare. I didn’t know anything about racing. I had that foal and decided to race that foal. That was about 1995. Of course, I didn’t have any success. I said, `I’m going to try a different route.’ There was a sale in California, Barretts. There was a mare in there by the name of One Stop. She was by Mr. Leader, in the family of Distorted Humor.”

One Stop is the fourth dam of Stronghold.

One Stop won just one of 19 starts and made $34,985. Waller bred her to Swiss Yodeler. The resulting filly, Swiss Diva, is the third dam of Stronghold.

Swiss Diva won her first three starts, including a $138,000 stakes for California-breds, by 8 ½ lengths, then finished fifth by 4 ½ lengths to superstar Rags to Riches in the Grade 1 Las Virgenes. Swiss Diva finished her 14-race career with four victories, three seconds and earnings of $240,399.

Put into perspective, the Wallers had won just seven of 76 starts from 2002 through 2013.

Envisioning a foundation broodmare, Waller bred Swiss Diva to Henny Hughes. Swiss Diva died foaling Diva’s Tribute. Though unraced, Diva’s Tribute is Stronghold’s second dam. 

Bred to Jimmy Creek, Diva’s Tribute delivered Spectator. She won three of her first four starts, including the Grade 2 Sorrento Stakes at Del Mar and was second to Midnight Bisou in the Grade 1 Santa Anita Oaks. Spectator retired with three victories, one second and one third from nine starts with earnings of $323,951.

“Spectator died giving birth to her foal,” Waller said. “A punctured colon. I was just sick. There are just so many lows in this business. There’s nothing lower than losing a horse.”

But the foal who survived was Stronghold. “Stronghold grew up on a nurse mare, just as his mother did,” Waller said.

“The people at Mulholland (Mulholland Springs Farm, where Stronghold spent his early days) told me this horse was a man among boys, a very classy looking individual that shows a lot of quality,” Waller said. “I took that seriously because these people are commercial breeders. They see hundreds of yearlings.”

In April of his two-year-old second, Stronghold was sent to California-based trainer Phil D’Amato, who had a string of horses in Kentucky. “Stronghold cast himself in the stall,” Waller said. “We wound up missing several weeks of training. Then, finally, things returned to normal.”

Stronghold finished second and first in a pair of maiden races at Ellis Park and Churchill Downs, then finished second in the Grade 2 Bob Hope Stakes to undefeated Nysos at Del Mar. He was second again by a half-length to Wynstock in the Grade 2 Los Alamitos Futurity.

Stronghold’s handy victory in his three-year-old debut in the Grade 3 Sunland Derby sent him soaring up the list of Kentucky Derby contenders. His sensational :58 2/5 work should have him moving forward as he tackles tougher opponents.

If all this is exciting, Stronghold doesn’t seem to notice. “He’s so quiet in the paddock, Phil thinks he’s sleeping,” Waller said. “He doesn’t turn a hair.”

Gamely bulling his way through horses, Stronghold won the Santa Anita Derby by a neck, giving Waller his ultimate goal, the one he stuck to despite all the heartache. “The Santa Anita Derby was our first Grade 1,” Waller said. “That’s why I’m in the business. It’s not about the money anymore, it’s about the achievement.”

And his determination. Achievement can’t happen if you give up.

Changing Paths: How the Road to the Kentucky Derby Has Changed the Path to the Triple Crown

Article by Jennifer Kelly

The Triple Crown has evolved into more than three historic stakes races; indeed, it dominates the first half of the racing calendar, driving the complexion of the three-year-old division and influencing both owners’ and trainers’ goals for their horses. The first of the three, the Kentucky Derby, has become the stuff of dreams, inspiring many owners of a young Thoroughbred to pursue their own piece of history. Preparing a horse for the first Saturday in May has taken on a new dimension with the addition of the Road to the Kentucky Derby points system. 

How much has this new priority affected trainers’ plans for their Triple Crown hopefuls? While trainers remained focused on preparing their horses to peak in late spring, how they get there has changed in the decades between the first eleven Triple Crowns and the 21st century’s two winners, a change that is both a result of and an influence on the approach to the Derby prep season. 

Path to the Crown

Preparing for a Triple Crown campaign over the last century has been as individual a pursuit as the horses themselves with the approach falling into a pattern in the later decades. Sir Barton went into the 1919 Kentucky Derby a maiden with no starts before his trip to Churchill Downs, a strategic move on trainer H.G. Bedwell’s part: the Derby had maiden allowance conditions at the time, which meant that the son of Star Shoot went to the starting line carrying twelve pounds less than favorites Eternal and Billy Kelly. 

Gallant Fox had only the Wood Memorial ahead of the Preakness Stakes, which came first in 1930. Counting that classic, the Fox had two races prior to his turn at Churchill Downs. His son Omaha was similarly tested in 1935; he opened his season with a win in a one-mile, 70-yard allowance before finishing third in the Wood Memorial at the same distance. War Admiral started 1937 with wins in a six-furlong allowance and then the 1 1/16-mile Chesapeake Stakes before heading to Louisville. 

The four Triple Crown winners of the 1940s were war horses not just because of the international context of that decade, but also because of their preparations for the triad of races. Whirlaway raced seven times at distances from 5½-furlong sprints to 1⅛-mile tests between early February and the first Saturday in May and all were in-the-money finishes as Ben Jones struggled to find a solution for the colt’s tendency to bear out on the far turn. Count Fleet echoed Omaha with his two starts in an allowance and the Wood Memorial, winning both. Assault started his path to Derby with three starts, a six-furlong sprint, the 1 1/16-mile Wood Memorial, and then the one-mile Derby Trial two days before the big race. Citation raced eight times in early 1948, finishing second only once, before his Kentucky Derby, starting with a six-furlong sprint in early February and stretching out to 1 1/8 miles twice. 

Secretariat’s path to Louisville went through a trio of races in New York, progressively lengthening the distance from seven furlongs in the Bay Shore to 1⅛ miles in the Wood Memorial. Seattle Slew had a similar preparation in 1977, stretching out from a sprint to nine furlongs, while Affirmed started four times, starting with a win in a 6½-furlong allowance, in California before coming west for his 1978 Triple Crown run. 

Keeneland Library Morgan Collection - War Admiral with C. Kurtsinger after winning Preakness Stakes 05.15.1937

Most of the first eleven winners prepared with races increasing in length as the first Saturday in May grew closer. While the number of races to get there varied by horse, that philosophy remained mostly unchanged, though now the need for points puts a heavier influence on the choice of prep races for potential Triple Crown horses. 

A New Approach 

Prior to 2013, the conditions for entry into the Kentucky Derby evolved from paying the entry fees to using criteria like graded stakes earnings to rank potential starters ahead of the first Saturday in May. The oversized 23-horse field in 1974 made it clear that the field size for the first Triple Crown classic needed to be capped. The following year, Churchill Downs limited the field to 20 horses with career earnings as the criteria for qualification. Contrast this with the Preakness and the Belmont Stakes, which both have 14-horse limits. 

As 20-horse fields became more common in the 1980s and onward, Churchill Downs had to change their metric from career earnings to stakes earnings to graded stakes earnings. The points system evolved as a fairer solution to the problem of qualifying for the Derby starting gate. In 2024, the Road to the Kentucky Derby series offered 37 races with points ranging from 1 point for fourth place in an early prep to 100 points for the top tier qualifiers like the Santa Anita Derby, the Wood Memorial, and the Bluegrass Stakes. In addition to the traditional American prep races, Churchill Downs has added both European and Japanese Roads to the Kentucky Derby in an effort to make the race more global. 

Since the introduction of the points system in 2013, the number of races for North American horses has remained relatively the same, with the inaugural season counting 36 races and the 2024 edition with 37. To make the Derby more appealing internationally, Churchill Downs added the Japanese series in 2017 and the European in 2018. The series starts with 13 two-year-old races, ranging from one mile to 1 1/8 miles, and then picks up steam in mid-January with the Lecomte at Fair Grounds and ends with the Lexington at Keeneland in mid-April. The same-year series starts with one-mile races and expands to multiple 1 1/8-mile tests, with the Louisiana Derby clocking in as the longest at 1 3/16 miles. 

With that in mind, how has this shift from graded stakes earnings to points changed how a trainer approaches conditioning their charges for the five-week Triple Crown season? 

Now and Then

Hall of Fame trainer Todd Pletcher is no stranger to the Triple Crown season. Since 2000, he has started 64 horses in the Kentucky Derby with two wins, Super Saver in 2010 and Always Dreaming in 2017, and four Belmont Stakes to his credit, including Rags to Riches, the last filly to win the historic stakes. 

Looking back at his first Derby winner, the path to Louisville with Super Saver “was sort of an interesting one because we really got behind schedule. After the Tampa Bay Derby, he got sick, which ended up pushing us back a week, and we ended up landing on the Arkansas Derby as his final prep, when generally we would have preferred to have four or five weeks from our final prep to the Derby itself. Seemed like the horse had the best month of his life during those three weeks leading up to the Derby.” Getting the WinStar colt enough graded stakes earnings to qualify for the first Triple Crown classic worked out with his placings in the Tampa Bay and Arkansas Derbies in addition to his win in the Grade 2 Kentucky Jockey Club Stakes the previous season. 

In 2017, though, the road to Louisville required collecting enough points to get into the gate. Always Dreaming started his three-year-old season with a win in a maiden special weight and then Pletcher and the colt’s partnership had to make a decision. “The real conversation that we had to have was whether or not we ran in the Fountain of Youth or if we ran in the allowance race the day of the Fountain of Youth. The horse was training exceptionally well, we were very confident that we were on the path to the Derby, and that we had a legitimate derby contender. But in order to make the decision to run in the allowance race, we had to have everyone on board to say that they were willing to roll the dice on one prep race.”

To earn his points, Always Dreaming then had to win the Florida Derby, his lone stakes before the Derby, where “if we didn't finish in the top two, or even if we finished second, it wasn't guaranteed that we would get in based on points,” Pletcher remembered. “Everyone was comfortable with that decision. Everyone wanted to bring him along that way. In this case, we decided to go with that plan and take a shot with one prep race.” The Bodemeister colt won his lone prep and earned 100 points, which guaranteed his place in the Derby starting gate. 

Nick Zito won his two Kentucky Derbies in the 1990s, when graded stakes earnings were the standard for qualification, which meant that juvenile stakes wins counted more than they do today. “Go for Gin won the Remsen as a two-year-old and then came back in the Fountain of Youth and in the Florida Derby, and then he was second in the Wood. So he had already qualified,” he remembered, “Basically, today, with the point system, they're just trying to get as many points as they can because they know there are a lot of horses that are trying to get to the Derby.”

Now, the Hall of Famer sees the Kentucky Derby as “more of an event. I remember Carl Nafzger’s ‘I love you, Mrs. Genter.’ […] And then, of course, Lukas and Baffert keeping this thing up. A lot of people just wanted to be in the Derby after that.” The increasing cachet of having a horse in the Derby has driven more owners to chase the points necessary to be in the Top 20 by the first week of May. 

If a trainer has a Triple Crown contender in the barn, then the point system changes how they map out the horse’s early starts in pursuit of points. “I think what they're doing is, at two they're trying to break the maiden. Then when they get to three, if they haven't broken their maiden at two, [they] go longer […] to try to break the maiden. And after they break the maiden, a lot of them go right into a stakes,” Zito observed. “My theory is they get the calendar out, they see the Jeff Ruby, or they see the Rebel, or they see this race, or that race, or this race, or Gotham, I better go there because I got to get some points.”

The Road to the Kentucky Derby may have influenced some changes to trainers’ strategies for their hopefuls, but it also has mirrored the trend toward racing less often in order to optimize a horse’s performance. The points distribution plays into that strategy, prioritizing the traditional preps in late spring.

Changing Strategies 

All of the races in the points system are a mile or longer, which favors horses stretching out earlier than they may have previously, making shorter races, even stakes, less of a target. “The point system has, I'm not going to say eliminated, but to a large part, greatly decreased trainers running horses in, let's say, the Swale,” Pletcher observed. “Traditionally, a lot of guys would do that and then go to the Fountain of Youth and Florida Derby and kind of take that gradual route of stretching out. And that's just not the way a lot of people are training. They're going to go straight to a long race, and long races have points.”

“Now most of them concentrate on the bigger races. If they don't have the points to begin with, they're going to have to run in a place where they could qualify,” Zito pointed out. “If you run first or second in one of those, chances are you might get in over horses that have accumulated points during the year. So, basically, it'll come down to those last three days, sometimes.”

This emphasis on points rather than earnings has eliminated the chance for early graded stakes winners and stakes-winning sprinters to get into the gate on the first Saturday in May. Even if those early winners did not train on at three, they still had earned a chance to try the Kentucky Derby; similarly, sprinters could set or stalk a fast pace early in the race, setting the stage for closers to make their run for glory in the stretch. The points system instead favors classic distance horses, especially those who can win at eight furlongs or longer early in their three-year-old seasons. With the higher point value preps in late spring, the system minimizes what a horse does in their juvenile season, which means that trainers face a new challenge: how to season a Triple Crown hopeful enough to handle the dynamics of a 20-horse field over ten furlongs while also having them in peak condition for that distance. 

Pletcher also pointed out “the other biggest impact is on fillies. A filly would have to step out and run against colts in a final prep in order to earn enough points,” as Secret Oath did in 2022, but only after she had accrued enough points toward a place in the Kentucky Oaks. Swiss Skydiver also stepped outside of her division to run second in the pandemic-delayed 2020 Bluegrass Stakes, which gave her enough points to qualify for the Derby starting gate. In the end, both fillies deferred that opportunity and ran in the Kentucky Oaks, leaving Devil May Care as the last filly to contest the Derby, finishing 10th in 2010, three years before the points system was instituted. 

Another trend over the five years has been the decreasing number of Derby starters contesting the Preakness. Other than Super Saver and Always Dreaming, Pletcher has “historically skipped the Preakness with a lot of our Derby contenders, and I think that's a good example of trainer management that's evolved over the years. And taking those horses and giving them five weeks in between the Kentucky Derby and the Belmont is part of the reason why we've had a lot of success” in that final Triple Crown classic. 

Zito followed a similar path with his most recent Belmont Stakes winners. “We ran Birdstone, one of the most memorable Belmonts ever, beating Smarty Jones. But he ran in the Derby; he didn't run in the Preakness,” the Hall of Famer observed. With Da’Tara, “he never ran in the Derby, and then he won the Belmont and stopped Big Brown.” His most recent Triple Crown starter, Frammento in 2015, earned his spot in the Kentucky Derby through in-the-money finishes in the Fountain of Youth and the Bluegrass Stakes. After finishing 11th behind American Pharoah, Zito opted to skip the Preakness and instead sent Frammento to the Belmont, where he finished 5th behind the Triple Crown winner. 

The Road to the Kentucky Derby is in its twelfth year, the number of horses going from Louisville to Baltimore remaining steady, with an average of four horses making the trip, until 2023, when only Kentucky Derby winner Mage tried the Preakness Stakes. So far, the decreasing number of horses returning for the Preakness may be attributed more to the trend of spacing races out rather than the effects of pursuing points, a phenomenon which has prompted discussion about expanding the gaps between the Triple Crown classics. As of 2024, any changes to the classic calendar remain an ongoing debate without an immediate resolution. 

The sport has seen two Triple Crown winners since Churchill Downs introduced the Road to the Kentucky Derby points system. Those two champions plus I’ll Have Another and California Chrome were the only horses to win two or more classics in the 2010s; in the century since Sir Barton, that number echoes most decades except the 1920s and the 1950s. So far, the 2020s have not seen any horse win more than one classic, but the question of what is behind trainers’ changing approaches to the Triple Crown season will require more time to answer.   

Graded Stakes Winning Owners - Kris Chandler (Spirit of Makena)

Article by Bill Heller

Spirit of Makena wins the 2023 Triple Bend Stakes at Santa Anita.

When Kris Chandler’s five-year-old horse Spirit of Makena, owned and bred by her recently-deceased husband Bruce, captured the Grade 3 San Carlos Stakes at Santa Anita, March 1st, in his stakes debut, Kris Chandler watched on TV. When trainer George Papaprodromou pointed Spirit of Makena to the Grade 2 Triple Bend Stakes at the same track May 27th, Chandler decided to watch the race in person. “It was the first time I went to the track in four years,” Chandler said.

It was worth the wait. Spirit of Makena won the Triple Bend by a length and a quarter under Joe Bravo, making him four-for-five lifetime. “It was emotional on a lot of levels,” Chandler said. “Horse racing was his passion, and he waited a lifetime for this. He had horses for over 40 years and never had a horse like this. So it’s beyond special.”

Patience allowed Spirit of Makena to develop. A variety of issues delayed his career debut until August 5th, 2022, when he won by 2 ¼ lengths as a four-year-old. A head loss finishing second in an allowance race has been his only blemish. Working around quarter cracks, Spirit of Makena won an allowance race before tacking on a pair of graded stakes victories. 

The one with Chandler there was unforgettable. “She was very happy, very emotional,” Papaprodromou said. “She wished Bruce was there with her. I got to meet Bruce. They’re great people and he’s a nice horse. I’m grateful to train a horse like that and I would like to thank the owners for giving me a horse like that. It’s great to train for them. We are looking forward to a nice future with him.”

That future will help Chandler move on with her life after losing Bruce last October 16th, the day before their anniversary, following a four-year battle with cancer. “I met Bruce in Maui in Hawaii 26 years ago,” Chandler said. “Bruce and I did horses together. I’ve always loved horses, since I was a little kid, with my dad.”

Bruce Chandler’s family owned The Los Angeles Times and its parent, the Times Mirror Company, for decades. 

Kris Chandler got more involved with her husband’s horses over the years. “Because I paid attention to the breeding,” she said. “He named me Director of Breeding. That was his title for me. He was breeding to horses in California. I convinced Bruce to breed to Ghostzapper (in Kentucky). I said, 'This is a great sire.’ I convinced him that if you want to get a good horse, you must breed to a good horse.

Spirit of Makena’s dam, Win for M’lou by Gilded Time, was bred by the Chandlers and named for Kris’s mom. “My mom got so excited,” Chandler said. “She was going to be famous.”

Somewhat. Win for M’lou became the Chandler’s first $100,000 winner ($115,230), surpassed only by Mai Tai ($140,405). Spirit of Makena has taken the Chandlers to a new level, having already earned $347,600 in just five starts.

Unfortunately, Spirit of Makena took forever to make it to the races. And Bruce became ill. “He got sick in 2019,” Chandler said. “He wanted to keep going. Our favorite place in the world is Maui, and part of it was because he had to live there the past few years. I’ve been taking care of my husband for the last four years. His mobility got worse and he couldn’t travel. Horse racing was the only thing he could watch. It’s still emotional being without him right now.”

She’s had and still has a ton of support from her Hawaiian community. She lives on Makena Road in Makena. “Everyone in Hawaii is behind the horse,” Chandler said. “The McKenna Golf and Beach Club are like family. The general manager, Zak Fahmie, sent a letter to all the members about this horse, a once-in-a-lifetime horse. He’s kind of like a miracle horse. We didn’t think he was going to get to the racetrack. He was at the farm in California for two years. For him to be a horse like this, it’s a miracle. From being so injured to being such a great horse. It’s a great story. We took our time with him. He’s getting better. He’s just a wonderful horse, very intelligent. You can pet him.”

Spirit of Makena keeps her and her husband connected. Initially, after her husband passed, Chandler thought she was going to get out of racing. Now she has a horse who may take her to the Breeders’ Cup Sprint at his home track, Santa Anita. “I’m trying to get out, but this is getting me very excited,” she said. “Having a horse like this, I kind of feel Bruce’s spirit. I think he just knows.”

Opinion: Earle Mack - No More Dirt

Earle Mack

In the wake of the tragic deaths of 12 horses at Churchill Downs, the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority (HISA) has called for an emergency summit. This presents both a moment of leadership for HISA and an important test for the independent directors of the Churchill Downs Corporation to protect shareholder interests and ensure the survival of the entire horse racing industry. They must step up and meet the moment or step down. This can be achieved by ending dirt racing in America and transitioning to synthetic surfaces.

These heartbreaking events in recent weeks have forced the horse racing industry to confront a harsh reality. On average, two Thoroughbred horses lose their lives every day on U.S. tracks. If we fail to take decisive action, the Triple Crown and horse racing itself may soon be mourned as relics of the past.  Animal rights groups, emboldened by each equine death, are gaining traction in their campaign against horse racing. The calls to ban or severely restrict the sport grow louder with each life lost. We cannot afford to lose this race for the soul and survival of our sport.

Tradition holds great power in our sport, with our most prestigious races historically being run on dirt tracks. However, the stark and troubling statistics demand a shift in thinking. We must abandon old norms and embrace new practices that prioritize the safety and welfare of our noble equine athletes.  The benefits of synthetic tracks are not mere conjecture; they are a proven truth. Their superior safety record and fewer injuries make their adoption not just an option but an ethical imperative.

Skeptics may argue that altering the character of the Triple Crown races would alienate fans. However, declining attendance at Thoroughbred races tells a different story. Fans are turning their backs on a sport they once adored, disheartened by the undeniable fact that their entertainment comes at a deadly price. When other sports have bravely evolved to improve safety and gameplay, we must question why horse racing clings to traditions that increasingly prove deadly.

Certainly, progress has been made. Since 2009, fatal injuries during races have declined by 37.5%. But when we consider that synthetic tracks have been proven to be three times safer than dirt tracks, it becomes glaringly apparent that we have only scratched the surface of what we must achieve. We have solid evidence, compelling data, and a clear path forward. It is time we summon the courage and resolve to embark on this path. Ironically, despite their proven safety record, synthetic tracks are in decline. This is primarily because our marquee Triple Crown events remain steadfastly tied to dirt. The stubborn adherence to tradition in our industry's pinnacle races is a disparity we can no longer afford. Shifting the surface of the Triple Crown to synthetic would be a revolutionary step, igniting an industry-wide transformation and ensuring a safer, fairer field for our equine athletes.

This is where the independent directors of the Churchill Downs Corporation can make a historic difference. Independent directors have played a crucial role in preserving shareholder value and rebuilding consumer trust for some of the world's largest companies.

In 2015, Volkswagen faced a scandal involving emissions test cheating, leading to the resignation of the company's CEO and the appointment of a new board of directors, the majority of whom were independent. The new board took swift action to address the scandal, and Volkswagen is now working to rebuild its reputation.

In 2017, companies such as Uber and The Weinstein Company appointed independent directors to address workplace harassment following a series of scandals in that regard.

In 2018, companies like Equifax and Marriott appointed independent directors to improve their cybersecurity measures after experiencing a series of data breaches.

Today, the challenges facing both the Churchill Downs Corporation and our industry provide an opportunity for its independent directors to lead by proactively and boldly addressing the crisis of equine safety instead of reacting to a growing regulatory and societal movement to ban the sport.

That is why I am calling on the independent directors of the Churchill Downs Corporation, Daniel P. Harrington, MBA, CPA, Ulysses Lee Bridgeman Jr., and Robert L. Fealy, CPA, to get on board today and publicly support this change.

The responsibility lies with horse racing's governing bodies, influential race track directors, and all key stakeholders to rally behind a transition to synthetic tracks. Their public endorsement and commitment to safer racing conditions would signal the beginning of the transformative change our industry desperately needs. But Churchill Downs Corporation must lead the way.

Fortunately, we are not without hope. NYRA's Belmont Track, a vital component of the Triple Crown, is already leading by example, planning to install a synthetic track for its 2024 spring meet. This serves as the spark we need to ignite a safety revolution.

Next year marks the historic 150th anniversary of the Kentucky Derby. This milestone should be more than a nostalgic reflection on the past; it should be a fervent pledge for a safer future. A future where our sport remains a thrilling spectacle but also evolves into a beacon of safety, integrity, and respect for our equine athletes.

The prestigious Triple Crown races–the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness S., and the Belmont S.–now stand on the edge of a daunting, dark abyss. Each life lost serves as a deafening alarm, signaling that change is urgently needed and indeed horse racing as a whole hangs in the balance. We owe it to our equine athletes, our loyal fans, and future generations to ensure that our sport does not crumble into a mournful memory of bygone times.

We stand at the threshold of a monumental shift. Our response to this crisis must be immediate, bold, and unwavering. The clarion call for a race towards a safer future is sounding. Switching surfaces will mean fewer breakdowns and fewer drugs in the sports. Let us answer this call with the courage and determination our horses display every time they take to the track.

This is our defining moment. Let us ensure that the Triple Crown not only continues to sparkle with excitement and glory, but also radiates a renewed commitment to the safety and well-being of our equine companions. The reins of the future of horse racing are in our hands. We must grasp them firmly and steer our sport towards a safer, more responsible era. The heart of horse racing beats in the chest of every horse that runs for us; let us honor them by championing a sport that safeguards their lives.

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.

Golden anniversaries - The New York State Thoroughbred Breeding and Development Fund Corporation and the Jockey Club of Canada

Article by Bill Heller

The New York State Thoroughbred Breeding and Development Fund Corporation and the Jockey Club of Canada are celebrating their golden anniversaries in 2023, and both are as vibrant and vital as they have ever been.

Each organization benefited from strong leadership in its early days. Dr. Dominick DeLuke, an accomplished oral and maxillofacial surgeon in Schenectady, New York, became the first president of the New York Thoroughbred Breeders Inc. DeLuke was seldom in the spotlight while he did the grunt work of getting New York-breds more competitive. 

E.P. Taylor, the co-founder of the Jockey Club of Canada, was a legendary figure in Thoroughbred racing who is most remembered for his immortal racehorse and sire Northern Dancer. Taylor was seldom out of the spotlight. Asked of E.P. Taylor’s impact, Jockey Club of Canada Chief Steward Glenn Sikura said, “How would I do that? I think the word that comes to mind is visionary. Would we have Woodbine racetrack without E.P. Taylor? Absolutely not.” 

New York-breds – Get with the Program

How do you start improving a breeding program? You begin with incentives. Using a small percentage of handle on Thoroughbred racing in New York State and a small percentage of video lottery terminal revenue from Resorts World Casino NY at Aqueduct and at Finger Lakes, the New York State Thoroughbred Breeding and Development Fund Corporation rewards owners and breeders of registered New York-breds awards for finishing in the top four in a race and provides substantial purse money for races restricted to New York-breds. The Fund pays out $17 million annually in breeder, owner and stallion owners awards and in purse enrichment at New York’s tracks.

“If it wasn’t for the rewards program, I wouldn’t be in the business,” Dr. Jerry Bilinski of Waldorf Farm said. “The program is the best in the country in my view and it helps the vendors, feed stores and all that.”

Bilinski, the former chairman of the New York State Racing and Wagering Board, bred his first New York-bred mare, Sad Waltz, in 1974. 

He acknowledges DeLuke’s vital contribution. “Dr. DeLuke was a forefather,” Bilinski said. “I had dinner with him a number of times. He was smart. He was a smart guy. He didn’t try to reinvent the wheel.”

Instead, DeLuke, a 1941 graduate of Vanderbilt University and the Columbia University School of Dental and Oral Surgery, began breeding horses before the New York-bred program even began. He humbly visited every Kentucky farm that would receive him and asked dozens of questions about everything from breeding practices to barn construction to fencing. He learned enough to own and breed several of the fledgling New York-bred stakes winners. Divine Royalty, Vandy Sue, Dedicated Rullah and Restrainor won four runnings of the New York Futurity for two-year-olds in six years from 1974 through 1979. Restrainor also was the winner of the inaugural Damon Runyon Stakes in 1979.

DeLuke purchased a 300-acre farm in the foothill of the Adirondacks and named it Assunta Louis for his parents. Two decades later, Chester and Mary Bromans, the dominant owners of current New York-breds, many of whom have won open stakes, purchased the farm in 1995 and renamed it Chestertown. They named one of their New York-bred yearlings Chestertown, and he sold for a record $2 million as a two-year-old.

Fio Rito winning the 1981 Whitney Handicap.

Long before that, the New York-bred program needed a spark, and a valiant six-year-old gelding named Fio Rito provided a huge one in 1981. Fio Rito was literally a gray giant, 17.1 hands and 1,300 pounds. Twenty-two years before Funny Cide won the Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes, Fio Rito, who was owned by Ray LeCesse, a bowling alley owner in Rochester, and trained by Mike Ferraro, who is still going strongly at the age of 83, Fio Rito put his love of Saratoga Race Course to the test in the Gr.1 Whitney Handicap. A legend at Finger Lakes, where he won 19 of 27 starts, he had posted four victories and a second in five prior Saratoga starts.

He almost didn’t make the Whitney. Two days before the race, Fio Rito, who had won his four prior starts, injured his left front foot. It wasn’t serious. But the competition was. Even though there had been three significant scratches—Temperence Hill, Glorious Song and Amber Pass—he was taking on Winter’s Tale, Noble Nashua and Ring of Light.

Fio Rito winning the 1981 Whitney Handicap.

Ridden by Finger Lakes superstar Les Hulet, Fio Rito broke through the starting gate before the start, usually a recipe for disaster. But assistant starter Jim Tsitsiragos, held on to Fio Rito’s reins and didn’t let Fio Rito get away. 

Though pushed on the lead every step of the way, Fio Rito held off Winter’s Tale to win by a neck in 1:48, just one second off Tri Jet’s track record and the fourth fastest in the Whitney’s illustrious history.

“TV and the media made sort of a big deal for a horse to come from Finger Lakes and be a New York-bred too,” Ferraro said. “It was kind of exciting for us to even compete in that race.”

The following year, another New York-bred, Cupecoy’s Joy, won the Gr.1 Mother Goose Stakes.

Still, New York-breds had a long way to go to be really competitive against top open company.

In 1992, Saratoga Dew won the Gr.1 Beldame and became the first New York-bred to win an Eclipse Award as Three-Year-Old Filly Champion.

In 1992 Saratoga Dew became the first New York-bred horse to win an Eclipse Award.

Two years later, Fourstardave completed a feat which may never be approached let alone topped. He won a race at Saratoga for the eighth straight year. Think about that. It’s the safest record in all of sports. Three years earlier, Fourstardave’s full brother, Fourstars Allstar, won the Irish Two Thousand Guineas.

And then came Funny Cide with Jack Knowlton and Sackatoga Stable, trainer Barclay Tagg, Hall of Fame jockey Jose Santos and a yellow school bus. Funny Cide was born at Joe and Anne McMahon’s farm, McMahon of Saratoga Thoroughbreds.

The McMahons, 76-year-old Joe and 73-year-old Anne, have been breeding, raising and racing horses before the New York-bred program started. They now boast a 400-acre farm with some 300 horses including 70 of their mares, 70 other mares, stallions including their star Central Banker, yearlings and foals.

“We’re very proud of what we accomplished,” Joe McMahon said. “It feels very good. It’s something we focused on for 50 years. With all the farms that have come and gone, it’s amazing that we’re still here.”

Now they have their three children helping run the business. They had nobody when they started.

A wedding present from Anne’s father allowed them to buy their farm in 1970. “It was hard,” McMahon said. “There wasn’t any interest.”

Slowly, the New York-bred program created interest. The McMahons did everything they could to help, successfully lobbying for changing the residency rules for mares in New York and beginning the New York-bred Preferred Sales. “I recruited the horses for the New York-bred sales,” McMahon said. “I’m very proud of that because that changed the whole business. It created a market. It was the early ‘90s. That was a real-game changer, and it is today.”

Central Banker with Corey Nakatani up win the 2014 Churchill Downs Stakes.

Today, the McMahons stand Central Banker, the leading stakes sire outside of Kentucky. “We went from breeding $1,000 stallions in New York to standing the best horse out of Kentucky,” McMahon said. “That’s a huge thing. He and Freud are the most successful stallions in New York.”

He continued, “We should be the poster child for the breeding program because we didn’t have anything starting out. Everything we got, we literally put back in the game. We continue to operate. I thought that was the purpose of the program: to maintain agricultural land that otherwise would have been developed commercially.”

Funny Cide was a turning point. “Funny Cide was a real game-changer for the whole industry,” McMahon said. “It was like an impossible dream come true. It was remarkable that a New York-bred won the Kentucky Derby.”

It was also remarkable what his jockey said after winning the race.   

At the time of the 2003 Kentucky Derby, there had been a popular television commercial sponsored by the New York Thoroughbred Breeders, Inc., trumpeting the rich award program of New York State. After Funny Cide won the 2003 Kentucky Derby, commentator Donna Barton on horseback was the first person to interview Santos. She said, “You’re very happy about winning the Derby.” Jose replied with the catchline of the TV Commercial, “Get with the program, New York-breds.” Years later, Santos said, “I don’t even know how it came out of me. That surprised me when I heard it.”

Funny Cide added the 2003 Gr.1 Preakness Stakes and the 2004 Gr.1 Jockey Club Gold Cup. 

Tiz the Law wins the 2020 Belmont Stakes.

A steady stream of accomplished New York-breds, including 2006 Gr.1 Beldame Stakes winner Fleet Indian and two-time Gr.1 Whitney winner Commentator (in 2005 and 2008) followed, before New York-breds provided more jolts. Mind Your Biscuits, the all-time leading New York-bred earner ($4,279,566), captured the 2018 Gr.1 Golden Shaheen in Dubai. That summer, Diversify added his name to the list of Whitney winners.

In 2019, Sackatoga Stable and Barclay Tagg’s Tiz the Law began his sensational two-year career by winning his debut at Saratoga. He added the Gr.1 Champagne, then dominated in both the 2020 Gr.1 Belmont Stakes—the first leg in the revised Triple Crown because of Covid—and the Gr.1 Travers Stakes. He was then a game second to Authentic in the Gr.1 Kentucky Derby.

“When people buy a New York-bred, they hope he can be the next Funny Cide or Tiz the Law,” Fund Executive Director Tracy Egan said. “I think it’s the best program in the country.”

That doesn’t mean it’s been a smooth journey. “It’s been a bumpy road,” former New York Racing Association CEO and long-time New York owner and breeder Barry Schwartz said. “There were so many changes. But I think today they’re on a very good path. I think the guy they have in there (New York Thoroughbred Breeders Inc. Executive Director Najja Thompson) is pretty good. Clearly, it’s the best breeding program in America.”

Thompson said, “The program rose from humble beginnings to today when we see New York-breds compete at the highest level.”

Certainly the New York Racing Association supports the New York-bred program. One Showcase Day of all New York-bred stakes races has grown into three annually. “NYRA has been a great partner in showcasing New York-breds,” Thompson said. “We make up 35 percent of all the races at NYRA.” 

There’s a great indication of how New York-breds are perceived around the world. Both the third and fifth highest New York-bred earners, A Shin Forward ($3,416,216) and Moanin ($2,875,508) raced exclusively in Asia. A Shin Forward made 25 of 26 career starts in Japan—the other when he was fourth in a 2010 Gr.1 stakes in Hong Kong. Moanin made 23 of his 24 starts in Japan and one in Korea, a 2018 Gr.1 stakes.

Mind Control ridden by John Velazquez wins the 2018 Hopeful Stakes at Saratoga Race Course.

This year, new stallion Mind Control, who won more than $2.1 million, brought together three New York farms together: Rocknridge Stud, where Mind Control stands, Irish Hill and Dutchess Views Stallions. Mind Control’s strong stallion fee of $8,500 certainly reflects confidence in the New York-bred program.

“If you look at the quality of New York-bred horses, it just proves that it’s a success,” Bilinski said. “We’re never going to be Kentucky, but we’ll be the best we can in New York. It’s improved by leaps and bounds.”

Thompson concluded, “Anyone there at the start of the program would be proud of where we are now.” 

The Jockey Club of Canada – Great Timing

Northern Dancer, Bill Hartack up, and E.P. Taylor after the 1964 Kentucky Derby win.

If timing is everything, then E.P. Taylor and his nine co-founders, knocked the formation of the Jockey Club of Canada out of the park. The Jockey Club came to life on Oct. 23, 1973, and its board of stewards were announced Oct. 27.

The very next day, the entire racing world was focused on Canada, specifically at Woodbine, where 1973 Triple Crown Champion Secretariat made the final start of his two-year career. Racing under Eddie Maple—a last-second replacement when jockey Ron Turcotte chose not to delay a suspension in New York, costing him the mount—Secretariat aired by 6 ½ lengths in the Canadian International as the 1-5 favorite.

At its initial meeting, Taylor was elected the Jockey Club’s Chairman of the Board and Chief Steward.

The other eight founders were Colonel, Charles “Bud” Baker, George Hendrie, Richard A.N. Bonnycastle, George Frostad, C.J. “Jack” Jackson and J.E. Frowde Seagram.

“These people were all very successful at what they did,” Jim Bannon, a Thoroughbred commentator who is in the Canadian Hall of Fame, said. “They were great business people who had a great sense of adventure and got in early when it was time for the Jockey Club. They were all gung-ho to be there. I think we got the best of the best right at the beginning. They were great enthusiasts, all of them. They saw E.P. Taylor’s success, and they were glad to join him.”

Edward Plunket Taylor was the first Canadian to be made a member of the United States Jockey Club in 1953 and also the first Canadian to be elected president of the Thoroughbred Racing Association in 1964. In 1973, he was named North America’s Man of the Year. He won Two Eclipse Championships as Outstanding Breeder in 1977 and 1983.

Northern Dancer with trainer Horatio Luro, Keeneland,1964.

Of course, by then, Northern Dancer’s brilliance on and off the track had been well documented. On the track, Northern Dancer won 14 of 18 starts, including the Gr.1 Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes, with two seconds and a pair of thirds including his six-length defeat by Quadrangle in the 1964 Belmont Stakes. Northern Dancer more than atoned in his following start, winning the Queen’s Plate by 7 ¼ lengths as the 1-10 favorite. Taylor won the Queen’s Plate 11 times under his own name or Windfields Farm and bred 22 winners of Canada’s signature stakes. But Northern Dancer bowed a tendon shortly after winning the 1964 Queen’s Plate and was retired.

Initially, Northern Dancer’s stud fee at Windfields Farm in Maryland was $10,000. That changed quickly in 1967 when his first seven sales yearlings all won. Five of them won stakes. Northern Dancer’s stud fee was up to $100,000 in 1980 and climbed to $200,000 just two years later.

Northern Dancer sired 146 stakes winners, including several who went on to be great stallions themselves including Lyphard, Nijinsky II, Nureyev, Danzig, The Minstrel, Sadler’s Wells, Storm Bird, Vice Regent and Be My Guest. “Of all my father’s accomplishments in racing and breeding, I believe he was most proud of having established the Northern Dancer sire line,” Taylor’s son, Charles, said in the book Champions.

Taylor’s impact on Canadian racing can’t be overstated. He consolidated Canada’s seven tracks to three, improving Fort Erie and Old Woodbine/Greenwood and building a new Woodbine. “Without Mr. Taylor, Canadian racing would not be!” Hall of Fame trainer Frank Merrill said.    

In 1973, Taylor resigned as the Chairman of the Ontario Jockey Club to head the Jockey Club of Canada. “We’ve never had a national Jockey Club before,” Taylor said at the time. “We felt it was important to Canadian racing to have this kind of organization, which could address important racing issues of the day.”

 Fifty years later, the Jockey Club is still leading Canadian racing. Its current membership tops 100 with owners, breeders, trainers and key industry stakeholders.

Among its duties are conducting the annual Sovereign Awards; annually designating graded stakes; working to improve federal tax guidelines for owners and representing Canada at the annual International Federation of Horse Racing Authorities Conference.

“There are a lot of running parts,” trainer and Jockey Club member Kevin Attard said. “It kind of opens your eyes to a different part of racing from a trainer’s perspective. There’s a lot of things that go on a daily basis to have the product we have and put on the best show possible.”

Hall of Fame trainer Mark Casse, also a member of the Jockey Club, said, “It’s a great organization. It’s always trying to do what’s best for horse racing.”

That means continuing the battle for tax relief. “This is something that is extremely important to the Canadian horse owners and breeders,” Casse said. “It’s definitely the number-one priority.”

Sikura, who is also the owner of Hill ‘n’ Dale Farm Canada, said, “Fighting to get tax equity has been a battle for decades. We haven’t made major strides, but that won’t mean we stop trying. It doesn’t compare favorably to other businesses.’’

Asked about progress on that issue, he said, “We’re marginally better off.”

In general, Sikura said, “I think we have the same challenges most jurisdictions have. I’m cautiously optimistic. It’s always been an uphill battle, but horse racing people are a resilient group.”

Hunter Valley Farm

Article by Bill Heller

A Mo Reay

Six days before St. Patrick’s Day, the four Irish partners of Hunter Valley Farm near Keeneland found their elusive pot of gold, not at the end of the rainbow, but in the final 10 yards of the Gr.1 Beholder Stakes. That’s where their filly A Mo Reay thrust her nose past odds-on favorite Fun to Dream, giving the Irish quartet their first Gr.1 stakes victory at Santa Anita; half a world away from the Irish National Stud in Kildare, where two of the four, Adrian Regan and Fergus Galvin, met in 1991.

Hunter Valley Farm’s John Wade, A Mo Reay & jockey Flavien Prat.

“It was a surreal day,” Regan said. “When we set up the farm, the thought of having a Gr.1 was never even thought about. We were hoping to make the farm viable. We’ve been very lucky. Without my partners, it never would have happened for sure.”  

Asked if he could ever have imagined such a feat when he was a younger lad in Ireland, Adrian’s buddy Galvin said, “It was nowhere near the front of my mind.”

Certainly, their two somewhat silent partners, Tony Hegarty and John Wade, had no idea. Those two friends met in a tavern in Chicago, then became business partners, founding A & J Construction, a successful construction company in Lockport, Illinois, 30 miles southwest of Chicago. Hegarty and Wade started out as carpenter contractors and eventually switched to land developers and custom home builders. “We’re doing okay,” Wade said.

Okay enough to speculate in Thoroughbreds. “It turned out to be an amazing adventure,” Hegarty said. “We’re more or less silent partners. Fergus and Adrian pick the horses.”

They do so adeptly. “Those guys—they come up with some good ones,” Wade said.

Both Galvin and Regan credit their fathers for their equine education.

“It was part of my childhood,” Galvin said. “My father ran a small stud farm in Dublin. I have him to thank for my early grounding and the early education. He had a couple of horses in training. From the age of eight, I was by his side most of the way. I have him to thank for where I am now. He’s doing great—keeps a close eye on the U.S. My dad is 84.”

Galvin said both his parents visit the United States. “They came over last spring to Keeneland,” he said. “They really love Kentucky. There’s no place like Kentucky in the spring. Kentucky is almost my home away from home. In Ireland, everyone has some involvement. There’s a large part of our population who has connections in the horse business. They have a deep love of horses.”

They frequently pass that love on to the next generation, a tradition Galvin and his wife, Kate, who works at Godolphin, will likely instill in their four young children, Marie, 10, Harvey, 8, and twin boys Joseph and Nicholas, 6.

Adrian Regan & Flavien Prat

Galvin’s experience at Irish National Stud helped shape his future. The Stud, founded in 1918, annually offers a six-month residential course which begins every January. Its goal is “to equip learners with the knowledge, skills and competence required to perform effectively in responsible positions in the Thoroughbred industry.”

It’s where Regan and Galvin became life-long friends. Regan, too, credits his father: “I wanted to be a trainer like my father T.A. was. When I left school, I went working for him.”

Both Galvin and Regan honed their skills before deciding to buy a farm. “I’ve been lucky enough to have some great employers before we started out,” Galvin said. “First I was at Pin Oak Stud for five years. Then I ran a small operation, Newgate Farm, and did a six-year stint at Ashford. It was very invaluable to me going forward. That really sent me on the path we are on today.”

Regan spent four years at Langford Farm breaking yearlings. “I loved my time there,” he said. “It gave me a great foundation.”

Providence brought Hegarty and Wade together. “Myself and Tony became friends when we got to this country in March 1981,” Wade said. “I had just come over here in the middle of March. He came around the same time. We hung out together. We were buddies. We started our own construction business.” 

Like Galvin and Regan, Wade had a love of horses growing up in Ireland. “I loved them,” he said. “I didn’t have the funds to buy any.”

Then Wade went to Kentucky. He watched Unbridled win the 1990 Kentucky Derby—as his trainer Carl Nafzger called the stretch drive for owner Mrs. Genter—and was hooked. “That’s what probably did it,” Wade said. “I had another Irish friend who would go to Keeneland: Pat Costello. He advised me to take a run out to Lexington to see the farms. I met a bunch of my countrymen. Every now and then, some of them did syndicates. I said, “If you do it again, count me in.” Then I talked my partner, Tony, into getting involved.”

Hegarty didn’t have an early equine education in Ireland. “I’m from northwest Ireland,” he said. “Horse racing is in the other parts of Ireland. Up my way, there was no horse racing. There are no tracks.”

Yet, he was all-in joining his friends to buy and breed Thoroughbreds. Together, the four Irishmen purchased Golden Gate Stud in Versailles in 2004 and renamed it Hunter Valley Farm. In its first year of operation, its first yearling that went to auction was Scat Daddy. All he did was post five wins, including the Gr.1 Florida Derby, in nine starts, earn more than $1.3 million and become the sire of 69 stakes winners, including undefeated Triple Crown Champion Justify before dying at the age of 11. Hunter Valley Farm had sold him as a yearling for $250,000. “Unbelievable to have that quality of horse in our very first year,” Wade said.

In November 2022, the Irishmen bought three-year-old A Mo Ray for $400,000 in the Fasig-Tipton Sale. Trained by Brad Cox, she won a $97,000 stakes at the FairGrounds and the Gr.3 Bayakoa Stakes at Oaklawn Park.

A Mo Reay and jockey Flavien Prat (#5) dug in to edge out Fun to Dream to win the Gr.1 2023 Beholder Mile at Santa Anita Park.

Cox shipped her to Santa Anita to contest the Gr.1 Beholder Stakes March 11. The filly she had to beat was Bob Baffert’s Fun to Dream, who had won four straight and six of her seven lifetime starts. She went off at odds-on, A Mo Reay was the 7-1 third choice in the field of eight.

“It was funny going back to Santa Anita,” Regan said. “I did a short stint with Bob Baffert years ago.”

In deep stretch, Baffert’s favorite was desperately trying to hold off the rallying A Mo Reay and jockey Flavien Prat. They crossed the finish line in tandem. 

Hegarty and his wife, Sheila, were watching the race from their home. “We were screaming our heads off,” he said. “You’re screaming at the TV, egging her on, egging her on. I thought she got up.”

She did. 

Wade was asked if it occurred to him that the race was six days before St. Patrick’s Day. “It did not,” he said. “But we celebrated like it was St. Patrick’s Day.”

Andrew Warren

Article by Bill Heller

Raise Cain

Not selling a pair of two-year-olds turned out to be the best thing to ever happen to Andrew Warren. Both Raise Cain, the emphatic winner of the Gr.3 Gotham Stakes at Aqueduct, Warren’s first graded stakes victory, and Scoobie Quando, a trouble-plagued second in the John Battaglia Memorial Stakes at Turfway Park that same evening, are now live Kentucky Derby contenders off powerful performances hours apart. Earlier this year, Scoobie Quando gave Warren his first stakes victory, taking a $120,000 stakes at Turfway by a neck in his first career start. As if that wasn’t enough, Warren’s Wizard of Westwood finished second in the Baffle Stakes at Santa Anita the day after the Gotham and the Battaglia.

That’s quite a feat for Warren, who followed his dad into the business with the intent to buy one mare in 2019. “It’s amazing,” Warren said. “It’s hard to believe. To be in this position, it’s definitely rare and unusual—kind of a shock.”

A very happy shock for Warren and his wife, Rania and their adorable three-year-old daughter Valentina. “Having a young child at home, she likes it quite a bit,” Warren said. “She likes all animals. She loves to go to the zoo. She loves our two dogs. She likes the excitement of racing.”

Raise cain

She is the next generation of the Warren family, who have a legacy of continuing success in their Tulsa, Oklahoma-based Warren Petroleum Oil Company and a deep love of Thoroughbreds. 

“My grandfather got involved very early on,” Warren said. “He started the company. He was sort of a pioneer in the business. He wound up selling it to Gulf Oil.”

William Kelly Warren, who was born in 1897 and lived to 1990, was philanthropic. “He started a hospital—St. Francis,” Andrew said. “Now there’s a second hospital. It’s the largest healthcare system in Eastern Oklahoma. That was something he was passionate about.”

His grandfather also had a passion for horses. “He didn’t own horses, but my grandfather was a fan,” Warren said. “That’s how my dad got interested in it. They had a vacation house in La Jolla. My dad grew up going to Del Mar with his dad. He bought his first horse in 1983.”

Warren’s father William and his mom Suzanne had a slew of top horses, including 2005 Breeders’ Cup Classic winner and 2005 Horse of the Year Saint Liam and City of Light, who captured three Gr.1 stakes, the 2018 Triple Bend, the 2018 Breeders’ Cup Dirt Mile and the 2019 Pegasus World Cup.

Warren’s parents also had two Kentucky Derby starters, Knockadoon, who finished seventh in 1995, and Denis of Cork, who finished third in 2008. “We got to experience those thrills, those highs, as a family,” Andrew said. “I was 13 in 1995. It was a great time to be a kid and go to the Derby.”

He also saw other family horses who didn’t fare as well. “I saw a lot of the industry—a lot of ups and downs,” Warren said. “My takeaway was that it’s very difficult and very hard to do. The odds are not in your favor for success.”

Yet, he was intrigued about the breeding of Thoroughbreds. “I’d been to sales with my father,” Warren said. “I saw horses selling for quite a bit of money. I thought breeding was very interesting. He liked the racing and [was] not too excited about breeding.”

Specifically, he wondered who were the best mares to be bred to City of Light when he retired from racing. “He was getting some interest,” Warren said. “I thought this was intriguing. It’d be fun to breed a mare to him. I asked City of Light’s trainer, Michael McCarthy, what he thought, and said, `I think that makes sense.’”

They went to the OBS Sales and perused a list of potential mares. “We watched videos of breezes,” Warren said. “We picked one. Then we picked another. I had a lot of enjoyment of picking out the horses, the analysis of trying to find the right one. I wound up getting a colt. In 2019, I went through every sales catalog. I bought two mares in foal to City of Light. I went further down the rabbit hole.”

He had no idea. He currently has 23 horses racing.

At the 2021 Keeneland September Yearling Sale, Warren purchased Raise Cain, a son of Violence out of Lemon Belle by Lemon Drop Kid, for $180,000, and Scoobie Quando, a colt by Uncle Mo, for $160,000. 

Warren tried pinhooking both, but Raise Cain went through the sales ring unsold for $65,000, and Scoobie Quando failed to reach his reserve at $125,000. “I knew they had a lot of ability,” Warren said. “If you don’t get the price you want, you keep on going with them.”

For as far as they’ll take you, both horses have thrived under trainer Ben Colebrook, who had to sprint from Aqueduct to JFK International Airport after Raise Cain won the Gotham to get to Turfway Park that night for Scoobie Quando.

Warren watched the Gotham from home. “I was there with my mom and dad in front of a computer,” Warren said. “I was happy to get him into the race with a live chance. He came in at 30-1 on the morning line (he’d go off at 23-1).”

Raise Cain, ridden by Jose Lezcano, was far back early. “I lost track of him with the mud,” Warren said. “Then I saw him coming. I said, 'That's Raise Cain.’ He’s moving faster than the two horses in front of him. I’m thinking, `We’re going to win this! We’re going to win this! We were losing our minds.”

After not having a stakes winner in his first four years of racing, Warren had one. “After a long time wandering in the desert,” he laughed.  

Raise Cain

What's happened to Jerry Dixon Jr. since the Kentucky Derby?

Article by Ken Snyder

There is always someone absent from the post-Kentucky Derby press conference presenting the winning owner, trainer, and jockey to the media.  If you consider the missing person is the individual closest to the winning horse who spends the most time with them, it doesn’t make sense. It also carves away from reportage a beautiful dimension to horse racing. Absent this year, as is always the case, was the groom. Jerry Dixon, Jr. had work to do: lead Rich Strike to the test barn and then to the horse’s barn for a bath and feed. 

Today, four short months later, Dixon is absent from Derby-winning trainer Eric Reed’s barn. He mucks stalls now for trainer David Wilson, Jr. at Belterra Park in Cincinnati, 107 miles northeast of Louisville and Churchill Downs and eons away in terms of racing prestige. The last horse Dixon took to a paddock at the time of writing was for another Belterra trainer in a $5,000 claiming race. The reasons for Dixon’s departure from Reed are undisclosed, private, and depending on whom you ask, likely to be disputed.  

It’s the racetrack.  

The sport of racing demands resilience to disappointment and occasional heartbreak. Ask Steve Asmussen, maybe the hardest working trainer on the racetrack, who is the all-time leader in wins but winless with 24 Derby starters. The very best trainers like Asmussen see roughly only one out of five of their horses winning. Horses purchased for hundreds of thousands of dollars, and occasionally seven figures, flop as racehorses or worse—suffer an injury. Many never make it to the racetrack at all. As for horse owners, there’s an old joke that you can become a millionaire owning racehorses…if you start out as a billionaire. It’s a tough sport. But it has a soul.

That soul is manifested in people like Jerry Dixon, someone who, in less than half a year, has gone from the highest of highs to, well, Belterra Park. 

Whatever may have happened with Jerry, there’s no denying in the opinion of many that he gave Rich Strike all of himself. Lindsy Reed, Eric’s daughter, perhaps overstated it only minimally when she said in the wake of the Derby that “Jerry didn’t let that horse out of his sight” during the two weeks the horse was stabled at Churchill Downs before the big race. Horse and groom adopted the same rest schedule, and Jerry slept on bags of wood shavings with his head in Rich Strike’s stall. He would also lie down in the stall. Waking up was left to Rich Strike who, Dixon said, would drop hay or drip water on him to wake him up. 

In all sports, there are relationships between teammates, player and coach, and competitors—the best example being jockeys who are de facto guardians of each other’s lives. But horse racing, all by itself, offers animal and human relationships with discoveries that, if they don’t touch you someplace in your heart, they should. There is a unique bond not duplicated between humans. Grooms and horses develop their own language—a kind of telepathy that no other person shares. A good, if not great, groom like Dixon (and he falls more to the latter of those two adjectives) is the protector, caretaker and “interpreter” for the horse, reading the body, the behavior and most importantly the changes that tell a groom first, and subsequently a trainer and others, how the horse is doing and what might be expected. Dixon did all these things in the crucial two weeks leading up to the astounding triumph of an 80-to-one longshot. 

Breaking the bond has not been easy for Dixon.

“I think about Rich Strike every day. I go through my phone and look at pictures. I even look at the Derby still.”    

Dixon’s pairing with Rich Strike and the relationship that followed was not happenstance but one that was carefully considered and thought through by Eric Reed and others, given the already apparent talent of the horse well before the Derby. 

Lindsy Reed introduced Dixon to Rich Strike at her family’s training center after her dad claimed him out of a race at Ellis Park. “’I’m going to leave you and Richie alone,’” Lindsy told Dixon and, without another word, walked off, leaving Dixon befuddled and a tad fearful. He knew of the horse’s potential and his importance to the stable. Whether it was a test for Dixon isn’t known but likely. 

“So, he didn’t eat you alive,” Lindsy said when she returned to Dixon and Rich Strike. The horse had stood quietly, allowing Dixon to pet him, prompting her to say, “He likes you.” She said nothing more.  That may have been when he won the job of the groom for Rich Strike. Before this introduction, trainer Eric Reed had seen what he called a “soft touch” with horses in Dixon that he felt might suit Rich Strike.

The choice of the relatively young Dixon, 31, who has worked on the racetrack for several trainers (including Shug McGaughey), proved to be a good one. Horse and groom established a bond that was relaxing to the energetic, if not high-strung, three-year-old.

Dixon laying down in the stall became Rich Strike’s cue to lay down as well. 

Some waking hours were not so easy, however.  

A few days before the Derby, Dixon needed to jog Rich Strike in front of the state veterinarian as required. “I was trying to jog Rich Strike, and he kind of just wanted to walk. Once I smooched to him a little bit to jog, he wanted to put his two front hooves in my pockets.” Rearing up in protest provided a clear message:  “I’d rather not jog—maybe another time.

“I was watching the way he was training every morning. He got better and better every day; that was the biggest indicator [of coming performance]. He would bow his neck every morning while he was going. It didn’t matter if it was the day after we breezed him.” Fast recovery from a prior-day breeze or timed workout seemed to have no effect. It was what impressed Dixon most about Rich Strike before the Derby. 

Watching a horse and knowing what you are seeing are two very different things. Dixon knew what he was seeing, and it pointed to everything coming up roses, as in the garland draped over Derby winners.  He was confident the horse could at least hit the board in the Derby, and the win was not a total shock.  “He loved the racetrack.” 

A win belongs first to the horse and jockey and, of course a team—starting with the owner who writes the checks, the trainer, the groom, down to the hotwalker.  

As for the post-Derby press conference, Dixon had a job to do, which he had done hundreds of times:  get his horse back to the barn after a race. It’s hard to imagine this quiet, extremely polite young man, who liberally sprinkles “sirs” or “ma’ams” in his conversation, seeking or enjoying the spotlight. He was where he wanted to be: with the horse.  

There were tears and a lot of them for Dixon in the wake of Rich Strike’s Derby victory.  

There were tears, too, when the relationship between Dixon and Rich Strike came to an end.  Psychologists might say Dixon is going through the stages of grief. Whatever the reason Dixon said, “it’s probably going to take a while to jump back in the stall and feel like I’m doing right for a horse.

“I know I still have the eye for it and the talent for it. It’s all about wanting to do it.”

In the meantime, he bides his time raking out soiled straw from stalls, pushing it in a wheelbarrow to a collection area, and spreading fresh straw. It is menial and mindless, but it keeps Dixon home in Cincinnati with his wife and daughter.

The Triple Crown trail, with its excitement and attention from the media and racing world, was “living the dream,” usually expressed sarcastically but true for Dixon. But it had a downside.  

“It’s hard to have a family. You have to be all the way in or not at all,” said Dixon. All is demanded of every racetracker who wants to succeed in racing, from trainer to hotwalker. “My wife and daughter missed the family time they wanted to have with me while I was chasing my dream.  

“Stepping away from grooming has given me downtime with my family.”

The racetrack itself is also family for Dixon. A lady in the racing office at Belterra has talked to him daily, telling him over and over, “’Don’t forget. You’re a part of that horse winning the Kentucky Derby.’ 

“She’s making sure I’m all right. I know where it’s coming from. It's not people just being kind.” 

History is unerasable no matter what is going on in the present or what may come in the future. Dixon obviously heeds the encouragement of the lady in the Belterra racing office. “He won the biggest race in America. That solidifies his greatness. I’m part of the history with the horse.”  

Jerry is a fourth-generation horseman, but he and he alone accomplished something no one in his family ever did or likely ever will do. Forevermore, he will be pointed out to generations of Dixons that follow: that Jerry Junior was a groom for a Derby winner.

On a recent muggy summer morning at Belterra as Jerry mucked stalls and spread new straw, an aged hotwalker passing by stopped to ask if I had ever interviewed a Derby-winning trainer (yes) or jockey (yes). “Have you ever interviewed a Derby-winning groom?” he asked with a smile and a twinkle in his eye, knowing the answer as he pointed to Jerry Dixon, Jr.  

Racing, again, has its ups and downs, but the triumphs are permanent.     

A Kentucky Derby is what people around the world see. What’s not seen is the day-to-day that gets a Derby starter and all other horses down to the cheapest claimer to the starting gate.  

For grooms, days can begin as early as 4:00 a.m. in pitch-black darkness, of course, with bathing horses, tacking them up, and readying them for workouts. In Jerry Dixon Jr.’s case, past roles in various barns included coating legs with medication, then applying bandages or wraps, and sending a horse out under an exercise rider. The process is repeated on a second horse while the first is out on the track. When horses return, they must be bathed, their legs medicated, or simply wrapped again and fed. The merry-go-round of horses going out and coming back in from workouts, and the work needed for each horse, is virtually non-stop through 10:30 or 11 a.m.

The day, however, isn’t over. There’s an afternoon feeding, and on race days, there’s taking a horse to the paddock before a race, getting them back to the barn, bathing and feeding. During racing at Turfway Park just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, which has night racing, the day begins at 5 a.m. for Dixon and can end as late as 10:45 or 11 p.m., if one of the horses in his care runs in the last race. “I don’t get home till midnight,” he said.

His hours during racing at Belterra are only marginally better. He has to be at the track at 4 a.m. and be there at least through feed time at 5:30 in the afternoon. A horse in the last race of the day means an extra hour at the track.  

The job is a tough one and getting tougher all the time as not just most, but all racetracks have a shortage of barn help. The shortages, according to Dixon, are going to mean “somebody is getting cheated.” Something as obvious as a missing horseshoe can be overlooked in the rapid-fire process of getting horses out for workouts in the morning. “There are so many horses and so few people with a limited amount of time to get things done.” 

There are other issues related to an individual trainer’s style and the regard with which they hold grooms. “Sometimes it feels like people look at the grooms as if they’re just workers and not in the aspect of being a part of the organization to have some knowledge to be able to give back to the trainer, the assistant, or whoever. Like I’ve said, we spend more time with the horse than anybody else does.  We’ll see something before the trainer will. I’ve been in barns where you don’t see the trainer. It’s more of a phone type of deal.”

It’s not uncommon for grooms to sometimes double as assistant trainers, managing the barn for stables—something Jerry did at Turfway. “If we had horses in, I’d make sure I was in contact with the vet. I’d get the Lasix, or, if we had any problems, make sure we got any medication needed for the horse, take them to the races, cool them out, load them on the trailer, unload them—everything,” he said. 

Races were, of course, after a full morning. “I would get there and do the stalls, do the groundwork, get the horses out with the exercise riders—find out how far we would train the horses each day. 

Days off are two Sundays a month…maybe. 

Dixon credits Eric Reed and his daughter Lindsy; other trainers; Reed’s groom Benito Luna, who now cares for Rich Strike; and members of his own family—his father and uncles he describes as “great horsemen”—for mentoring and helping him in his career.

It is a career that is not over. He plans to take the test for a trainer’s license and hang his own shingle perhaps as early as later this year.  

Brian Lynch - the Australian born trainer whose set to make a mark at Ellis Park this summer

By Ken Synder

“If you find something you love, you’ll never work a day in your life,” said trainer Brian Lynch. “I’ve been blessed to do a job that I have a passion for. I have fun with it.”

“Fun” is not a word often associated with training Thoroughbreds. The job, as everyone in racing knows and as Lynch noted, “is seven days a week, 365 days a year.”  The word, however, crops up often for those who know Lynch.

“He’s fun to be around,” said Richard Budge, general manager at Margaux Farm, where many of Lynch’s horses have begun careers as yearlings. 

Dermot Carty, a bloodstock agent who first met Lynch when he came to Canada in 2005, echoed Budge: “With Brian, he just makes it fun. He makes it enjoyable through the good times and the bad. He’s one of the few true characters in the business who actually puts enjoyment into horse racing.” 

Greg Blasi, Churchill Downs outrider who knows Lynch away from the racetrack “cowboying” with him, (more on this later), expressed it most succinctly: “He’s a hoot.”

Of course, the most fun is trips to the winner’s circle, and Lynch has made plenty of those: 720 at press time and earnings just short of $47 million.

A native of Wagga Wagga in New South Wales, Australia, Lynch fits, perhaps, the profile of a stereotypical and classic “Aussie.” 

“We have more of a laid-back attitude than Americans. It’s nothing to share a few beers with each other and have a good time…helps you make new friends, that’s for sure.”

What Lynch did before coming on the racetrack may explain also why racing is more fun to him than anything. He was a bull rider back home. In fact, he came to America in 1992 to join this country’s professional circuit with big purses after learning the trade locally. “They had a local rodeo back home, and it was a big thing. Not far from the racetrack was a horse trader who had some bucking horses and some bucking bulls; and I used to hang around his place a lot. That’s where I got the taste for jumping on bulls.”

The racetrack Lynch mentioned is an unusual triangular racecourse that was across the road from his home and where he got his start, filling water buckets and learning to ride as a boy. “I could ride from a young age. It wasn’t long before I graduated to galloping horses. 

“I was always a little bit too big to be a jockey. I sort of found a lot of work helping on the wilder horses.”  Apparently, it was experience sufficient to prepare him for something bigger and more dangerous…with horns.

Thoroughbreds sidetracked Lynch when he came to Southern California and a small farm near the border with Mexico. “There was a little Thoroughbred farm called Suncoast Thoroughbreds. I got a job breaking colts for them, and it wasn’t far from San Luis Rey.”  

Lynch said he “annoyed” the stewards there till they gave him a trainer’s license. His start was with two horses at San Luis Rey.

That led to training for the Mabee family’s Golden Eagle Farm in Ramona in San Diego County.

“I kicked around California for a lot of years just with small numbers, just scratching out a living—selling, and running horses, and flipping horses. I was bringing some from Australia and moving them.” 

His big break was training at Santa Anita and Del Mar where he met some important influences. “Most say they admire the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. For me, it’s Ron McAnally, Jack Van Berg, and Bobby Frankel,” he said with a laugh.

When Frankel learned the Mabee family was going to downsize their Thoroughbred operation, he approached Lynch about joining his stable as an assistant. “He was starting to get more two-year-olds than he’d ever had. That’s when Chad [Brown] and I teamed up with horses for Bobby. Chad went to California, and I went to South Florida and Palm Meadows in the first year that it opened,” said Lynch.

“Bobby certainly wasn’t a textbook teacher,” Lynch said of the legendary New York trainer who died in 2009. “He wasn’t going to walk you through everything. He was a guy that if you were around him enough and you didn’t absorb anything from him or learn anything from him, then shame on you.”

Frankel, not known publicly as being chatty, was half of a truly odd couple with the amiable Aussie. Not just the experience, but the friendship is treasured by Lynch. “He had a heart of gold. He was a great guy to train horses for and just a wonderful human being.”

Lynch’s big break came when he moved to Canada to manage Frankel’s division at Woodbine in 2005. In 2006 he went out on his own, eventually becoming a private trainer for Frank Stronach. 

Canada was very much to his liking; in both 2006 and 2007, his earnings topped $1 million before jumping to over $3 million in 2008. That year began his string of consecutive top 100 earning trainers in North America that continued through last year.

He is quick to credit owners for his success and consistency: “I’ve been very blessed to have long-term owners who like to play the game and who have always tried to work on finding the better horses.  Fortunately enough, if you look back over the list, there’s been quite a few of them.”

Quite a few indeed. Lynch trained Clearly Now, who set the Belmont record for seven furlongs (1:19.96) in that track’s 2014 Sprint Championship, earning an Equibase speed figure of 122. (To give you an idea of how phenomenal the performance was, the next year’s Sprint Championship winner won in 1:22.57.)  Other top horses include Grand Arch, owned by Jim and Susan Hill of Margaux Farm and  winner of the Gr. 1 Shadwell Turf Mile Stakes at Keeneland in 2015; Oscar Performance, winner of the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Turf at Santa Anita in 2016; and Heart to Heart, winner of two consecutive back-to-back Gr. 1 stakes in 2018 at Keeneland and Gulfstream Park. Most notable outside the U.S. was a win in Canada’s 2015 Queen’s Plate Stakes with Shaman Ghost.

While many trainers get labels for being good with two-year-olds, sprinters, etc., there is an enviable trademark for Lynch’s horses: long careers. “I’ve raced two- and three-year-olds and still have them around running Gr. 1’s and winning at six or seven.” Grand Arch raced till the ripe old age of seven and in stakes company, finishing his career in the Forbidden Apple Stakes at Belmont. “Keep them in good form and you’ll have them still around when they’re older,” said Lynch who also points to “patient owners” like the Hills, willing to give their horses a break as a necessary ingredient in managing racing careers.  

If there is a label, Lynch is unaware of it. When it was pointed out that in the past five years he had started more horses on the turf than on dirt, his response elicited another Lynch trademark: humor.  “Probably because they were too slow for the dirt.

“I guess I primarily grew up training horses and riding horses to run on the turf down there [Australia], so I probably am influenced to run ‘em on the grass. I’m certainly not frightened by the dirt, by any means, but somehow, I ended up trying them on the grass. If they run well there, I’ll keep them on that surface.”

Brian Lynch with mentor D. Wayne Lucas

As intent as he is on enjoying himself and bringing enjoyment to others in the game, he is “no-nonsense” as a trainer—a euphemism not used by Carty to describe Lynch. “He can figure out in a very short period of time if a horse has or does not have any talent. He’s not one of those bull***t trainers who tells people that, ‘yes, yes, it’s going to get better’ and in his heart and soul, he knows it’s just for a day rate. He’s not interested in the day rate. He’s interested in developing and making great racehorses.”

Asked about his success and consistency, Lynch responded with characteristic modesty and self-deprecation: “One thing I’ve learned about training horses over the years is I’ve gotten very good at delivering bad news. That’s what you seem to do a lot.”

Unlike many high-profile trainers with multiple divisions and large strings of horses who are more business people than trainers, Lynch’s focus is the barn first, and then business. “It’s switch on, switch off,” said Carty. “Clients will feel good and enjoy themselves at the races with Lynch. But when he goes back to that barn and those horses, he switches to Brian Lynch who looks after the horses, making sure they’re ok. 

“He’s there first thing in the morning, and following the races, he goes over and checks every stall and goes through it. He’s not one who would just leave it to the help,” said Carty.

Richard Budge offered another perspective on Lynch. “I would say he’s unique in the fact he’s willing to roll the dice in a stakes race with a horse that may be an outsider.”

Brian Lynch with groom Juan Garcia

A case in point was a recent start by Phantom Currency (yet another Hills-owned horse) in the Gr. 3 Kitten’s Joy Appleton Stakes at Gulfstream in April. The horse was coming off a 13-month layoff. While most trainers may have looked for an allowance race tune-up, Lynch went for the gold. The horse won, earning a very impressive 114 Equibase speed figure.   

“If a horse is training well, he’ll ask, ‘Why not? Let’s give it a shot,’” added Budge.  

“That would be a huge positive. We can be a little tentative about where to place them or put them. You never know if you could have run a stakes race when you run in an allowance.

That very question faces Lynch with his first potential Kentucky Derby starter, in Classic Causeway.  

After two impressive wins—the first in the Gr. 3 Sam F. Davis Stakes in February and a month later in the Gr. 2 Lambholm South Tampa Bay Derby with identical and impressive Equibase speed figures of 104—the horse finished a mystifying last in the Florida Derby.

Classic Causeway, owned and bred by Clarke M. Cooper and Kentucky West Racing, is one of three foals from the final crop of Giant’s Causeway who died in 2018. 

He made his debut at Saratoga last September and blew away the competition from gate to wire over seven furlongs, winning by six-and-a-half lengths. The horse entered the Derby picture with a third-place finish in the Gr. 1 Breeders’ Futurity in October at Keeneland and followed that with a second-place finish in the Gr. 2 Kentucky Jockey Club Stakes in November at Churchill Downs. His two wins at Tampa Bay Downs earned him qualifying points for one of the 20 spots in the gate the first Saturday in May.

Before the Florida Derby, Lynch had this to say about the son of the great Giant’s Causeway, known as the “Iron Horse” after winning five Gp. 1 races in just 11 weeks as a three-year-old. “You always hope that you come across one in your career that you can have a ‘kick at the can’ in the Derby, but fortunately this horse came into our stable, and he’s done everything we’ve asked of him. I think he’s just getting better, and we’re really excited to have him.”

louis rushlow

Whatever lies ahead, Lynch said he will “stop and smell the roses,” whether they’re draped across the withers of Classic Causeway at Churchill Downs or the figurative kind. 

He embraces a positive attitude toward racing that most of us should emulate. “Racing is a game of ups and downs. You could be dodging missiles in Ukraine. You get over a loss, have a beer or soft drink, and move on.”  

His idea of relaxation may be an indication of the kind of person Brian Lynch is. When Greg Blasi mentioned one day he and other outriders were going up to a farm east of Louisville to work cattle, the 57-year-old Lynch was quick to say to Blasi, “If you ever need some help, just let me know.”  

He’s ridden with Blasi, and the others as many times as he’s had the opportunity, ever since. “He’s just a very good horseman, whether it’s on the back of a pony herding cows—just whatever,” said Blasi. “He used to gallop his own horses. He’s come up the hard way, and he tells stories about when he didn’t have a couple of nickels to rub together. Nothing was handed to him. I respect guys like that. There are a lot of people that didn’t have to struggle to get where they are.

“He’s also a lot of fun to be around.”  Ah, there’s that word. 

For a guy who’s ridden bucking broncos and bulls, you might expect a certain fearlessness. Not so: “I have one fear in life, and that is that there’s a good time going on somewhere and I’m not in the middle of it.”

Roadrunner Racing, Boat Racing and Bill Strauss, Jonathan and Leonard Green (D.J. Stable) and Mark, Stacy and Bob Krembil (Chiefswood Stables)

By Bill Heller

In this issue we profile the owners of three horses who have been major players in the key Triple Crown prep races.

Roadrunner Racing, Boat Racing and Bill Strauss – Hot Rod Charlie

Five football-playing fraternity brothers seeking a way to stay connected after graduating from Brown University in Providence, R.I., did just that by connecting with two veteran Thoroughbred owners in Southern California. Now all of them are having the ride of their lives with their Louisiana Derby winner Hot Rod Charlie.

“It’s astounding,” said Greg Helm, the managing partner of Roadrunner Racing, which owns 50% of Hot Rod Charlie after being convinced by bloodstock agent Dennis O’Neil to take a step away from claiming horses and take a shot with a yearling he liked. “Dennis has a good feel for the personnel groups that would fit together,” Greg said. “Thanks to him, we have a unique ownership.”

The world got a glimpse of this unique group immediately after Hot Rod Charlie won the Louisiana Derby. TVG’s Scott Hazelton was interviewing one of his owners, Bill Strauss, in the winner’s circle. Wildly enthusiastic and raspy after cheering his horse home, Bill fairly shouted, “This is what you get in the game for, to go to Kentucky on the first Saturday of May.” In the background, the brothers were jumping up and down on one another’s body as if they were, well, frat brothers playing boat racing—the beer chugging game they used to name their stable.

“We bring a youthful enthusiasm,” said Patrick O’Neil, the frat brother who is a nephew of Dennis and who bought Hot Rod Charlie as a yearling for $110,000, and his brother Doug, their trainer. 

What do the frat brothers get from their elder partners? “The best thing that happened from this is you get to meet a lot of great new people along the path,” Patrick said. “We are meeting so many amazing people in the world. We are attached to Greg and Bill, who have had very impressive careers. They became mentors to us.”

Working together? “We all have the same mindset about racing, about what’s important to us,” Greg said. “All the decisions that had to be made were unanimous and simple.”

Greg, a 73-year-old retired advertising agency owner, and his wife Glenna formed Roadrunner Racing with five other couples. At their golf club, they watched Hot Rod Charlie’s coming-out party in the 2020 Breeders’ Cup Juvenile, when he led late before finishing second by three-quarters to still unbeaten Essential Quality at 94-1. “They said they could hear the cheering miles away,” he said. “At 94-1, we were pretty pleased.”

His golf club, which had offered a special on its menu that afternoon—the Hot Rod Charlie (a spicy, crispy chicken sandwich)—made it a permanent lunch option. “They have a picture on the menu,” Greg said proudly.

He said of the partnership with Boat Racing, “We’re a pretty lively group ourselves. When you get around the Boat Racing people, it’s hard not to get further energized. We met all of them in New Orleans. That was fantastic. We all sat together, partied together and had lunch together.”

Now he has a horse that deserves a start in a Triple Crown race. “I can almost sleep,” he laughed. “It’s tough to get to sleep.”

Maybe a few beers would help. He could ask any of the brothers—all 28 and in successful careers in California, far removed from those New England winters in college. “I was born and raised in Hawaii,” Patrick said. “Providence was a huge cultural change. I had no boots or a jacket when I went to Brown.”

At Brown, all five brothers played football. Patrick was a cornerback; Eric Armagots a safety; Dan Giovaccini, a linebacker and a senior captain; Reilly Higgins a wide receiver and Alex Quoyeser a tight end. All five joined Theta Delta Chi, where they proved themselves as normal college students by playing boat racing. “Reilly was the best at it,” Patrick said. “Now, after a long and tiring day, there’s nothing wrong with enjoying the great relationship we have over a beer or two.”

Patrick, who admitted watching TVG while he was in class, was drawn into racing by his uncles, especially after Doug won the 2012 Kentucky Derby and Preakness with I’ll Have Another and the 2016 Derby with Nyquist. “We talk every day,” Patrick said. “My dad passed away when I was 22.”

When Patrick took his frat brothers to Santa Anita and Del Mar, they were hooked. “Doug won a couple of races, and he allowed us to go to the winner’s circle,” Patrick said. “They were like, `Wow!’”

Patrick said of their college football days, “We were very, very competitive. We missed it a lot. We got into this game as an excuse to get together. We missed the competition. Horse racing has given that to us.”

Bill, a 62-year-old native of the Bronx who was raised in New Jersey, attended Syracuse University, which allowed him to frequent Vernon Downs, a harness track a half-hour drive away. “I was a trotter guy long before I did Thoroughbreds,” he said. “I’ve always been attracted to the animals. And I love the action. It’s over in two minutes, not three hours. And you can get money back. I loved handicapping. I really loved the puzzle. Am I smart or not?”

He was smart enough to have a successful career, doing high-tech software in California. He did well enough that he helped his brother Jeffrey, now a master chef who has cooked for five Presidents, to pursue his dream. He now runs The Pamplemousse Grille. “It’s one of the highest-rated restaurants in San Diego,” Bill said. “I’m a silent partner. I write the checks. It was a pleasure writing a check so he could chase his dream.”

At the Pamplemousse Grille, Bill met a frequent diner, bloodstock agent Alex Solis II. “He was always there with friends and owners celebrating,” Bill said. “I became friends with him. I approached him about getting my first Thoroughbred, and I was with him for years.”

   Bill and his wife Margie won back-to-back Breeders’ Cup Turf Sprints with Mizdirection in 2012 and 2013 with trainer Mike Puype.

Now he’s chasing victory in a Triple Crown race, with a lot of partners. “It’s an amazing experience,” he said. “In the beginning, you’re alone and get excited. Then you’re with these guys all the way. We discuss what to do—the next race. Patrick recommended the Louisiana Derby. We were completely on board with that because we have so much respect for each other—mutual respect—and we care about each other. Who’d have thought at 62, you’d make lifetime friends?”

    Jonathan and Leonard Green (D.J. Stable) – Helium

Jonathan Green’s priorities crystalized for him at an early age. “I was probably eight or nine years old,” he said. “Our neighbor had a $5,000 claimer. He was racing at Monmouth Park, just minutes from our home. My dad took me. The horse won. I cashed a $5 ticket, ate a hot dog and got to go to the winner’s circle.”

Hooked for life.

Fast forward to college. “I went to Lehigh because Comcast showed Philadelphia Park,” he said. “I’d set up my classes to see the races. I took night classes.”

Now, at the age of 51, he is living his dream as the general manager of his and his father’s D.J. Stable—one of the largest racing and breeding operations in the entire country with more than 100 racing stock, foals and broodmares in five states. “As a family, we’ve really enjoyed it,” Jonathan said. “You have to treat it as a business, but it’s such a thrill to win a big race or sell a big yearling and enjoy it with your family. We’ve won more than 2,400 races and over 150 stakes.”

There is one race they covet winning. They’ve had one starter in the Kentucky Derby—a horse they owned in partnership with former Duke University basketball star Bobby Hurley, Songandaprayer, who set the fastest pace in the Derby’s long history: a half-mile in :44 86 and three-quarters in 1:09.25 before tiring to finish 13th in 2001. But the race they want to win most is the Haskell at Monmouth Park July 17th. “Our Kentucky Derby is the Haskell,” Jonathan said. “We’ve always wanted to run a good horse in the Haskell. We’ve never started a horse in it. The Haskell is a million-dollar race in our backyard…. We’ve done unorthodox things before.”

If Helium were to win a Triple Crown race, that would be tough to resist. That’s what’s classified as a good problem to have. And Lenny and Johnny are good at solving problems. They both succeeded in financing. “My father is 84, and he still works 70-hour weeks and loves every minute of it,” Jonathan said. “My grandfather, Abe, lived to be in his late 90s. He said, `Your mind is a muscle, and you must exercise it daily.’

Lenny is an accountant and CPA who explored the business side of horse racing before getting involved. “He wanted to explore the tax laws to see if there was a benefit for owning horses,” Jonathan said. “He remembered something about the tax codes. He studied it for eight, nine months. Doing that was about as exciting as it sounds.”

Lenny survived and dived in. “He found an industry that he enjoyed that he wanted to be a part of—one that had tax benefits,” Jonathan continued. “He was an athlete. He was a tennis player. He loved competition. In the late 70s, he was a minority owner of the New Jersey Nets.”

The Nets, in the American Basketball Association before it merged with the National Basketball Association, had an outstanding guard named Super John Williamson, who helped the Nets wins two ABA titles. “He was the first actual star I met,” Jonathan said. “He was very gracious. We named a horse Super John.”

Jonathan & Leonard Green with jockey Joel Rosario after Jaywalk wins the 2018 Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Filies

Super John was not a superstar, but an allowance winner who is still racing. The Greens have had many major stakes winners and one champion, Jaywalk, as partners with Cash is King Stable. Jaywalk won the 2018 Gr1 Frizette and Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Filly on the way to the Two-Year-Old Filly Championship. 

In 1989, Jonathan went to his first sale by himself to check out the New Sire Showcase section of the Fasig-Tipton July Sale in Lexington. “I couldn’t take my eyes off a beautiful, steel gray filly across the walking ring,” he said. “She walked with a certain confidence, an aura around her, and had a long stride and peaceful walk. I spent 15 minutes watching her walk, graze and stand in the summer sun. Needless to say, I was in love.”

He got the filly, hip No. 11, a daughter of freshman sire Pancho Villa, for $23,000. “I ran back to the phone bank, made a collect call to my parents and excitedly reported the stunning news of our purchase,” he said. “I was almost 19.”

That filly, Do It With Style, broke a track record at Philadelphia Park in her first start, ran second to Meadow Star in the Comely and won the Gr1 Ashland as a three-year-old.”

Thank goodness for night classes at Lehigh. Actually, Jonathan did benefit from his college education, becoming a certified financial planner. “I started my own company and sold it,” he said. “My primary occupation is managing D.J. Stable.”

He is deeply involved in racing, regularly co-hosting the weekly Thoroughbred Daily News Writers’ Room Podcast, and is on the New York Thoroughbred Horsemen’s Association Board of Directors. He has been the guest lecturer at the University of Louisville Equine Studies Program.

Now Helium, who has made just three career starts, has them thinking about the Triple Crown races and the Haskell. When pinhooker Bo Hunt touted Helium, he told Jonathan he travels so well that his feet don’t hit the ground, that he floats over it. “I looked at the periodic table,” Jonathan said. “I wanted a name of gas to convey that, and helium was the one I picked.”

Helium had won two sprint starts on synthetic at Woodbine in his lone starts at two for trainer Mark Casse, then showed up for the mile-and-an-eighth Gr2 Tampa Bay Derby on March 6th to make both his distance and dirt debut off a 4 ½ month layoff.

Helium won the Tampa Bay Derby impressively. “It was a sensation I’ve only had a couple times,” Jonathan said. “My father called me after the race and said, `The only times I was this excited was when I got married and when your two sisters were born.’” Of course, Lenny could have told him when his three children were born. Jonathan laughed. “My father and I have formed a tremendous friendship over the horses,” Jonathan said.

The team decided not to give Helium another start before the Triple Crown series of races. “We don’t want to wear him out,” Johnathan said. 

Yeah, there’s the Haskell coming up.

 Mark, Stacy and Bob Krembil (Chiefswood Stables) – Weyburn

Weyburn (inside) fends off Crowded Trade to win the 2021 Gotham Stakes at Aqueduct

Some people talk about doing the right thing. The Krembil family, who breeds and races as Chiefswood Stables, has been doing the right thing for humans and horses for decades from their base in Schomberg, Ontario. Along the way, they have emerged as one of Canada’s most powerful stables, winning multiple owner titles at Woodbine and receiving two consecutive Sovereign Awards as Canada’s Outstand Owner in 2018 and 2019. 

Now their colt, Weyburn—named for a small town in Saskatchewan—has emerged as the early favorite for this year’s Queen’s Plate, (Woodbine on Saturday, August 22) following his extremely game victory in the Gr3 Gotham Stakes at Aqueduct March 6th for trainer Jimmy Jerkens.

Before his intended start in Ontario, Weyburn will likely make his next starts in the Gr3 Peter Pan Stakes at Belmont Park on May 8th and then onto the Gr1 Belmont Stakes in early June.

Bob Krembil, the 78-year-old patriarch of the family, founded a mutual-fund company and sold it in 2000. In 2001, he launched the Krembil Foundation. “It focuses on neurosciences,” his 54-year-old son Mark said. “One of my interests is biology. We’re trying to make a difference helping people solve their problems. We’re hoping to help people with Alzheimer’s.” The Foundation also deals with the immune system and arthritis. 

Mark is in charge of the stable’s 125 horses with the help of general manager Rob Landy, a Hall of Fame jockey who rode the stable’s lone Queen’s Plate winner in 2004. “Rob makes the wheel go round,” Mark said. “He does the daily things. My dad really likes the breeding part of it, determining matches. I really enjoy the animal, and I’m competitive. There is nothing like winning a race. Stacy [Mark’s wife] works on after-care, and she follows up on them. My mom, Linda, keeps my dad going. She tolerates all of us, and she loves the animals. Everyone plays a role.” 

The family’s fascination with Thoroughbred racing stretches back to Mark’s grandfather, Jake. “He was an avid fan,” Mark said. “My grandfather would go every day if he could have. I’d go with him and my dad to the Queen’s Plate every year. Later in life, when my father was in a position to enter the business, we started in the mid-90s. Things changed for us when we sold the business, and we started escalating this hobby, and it grew. We have a broodmare farm, a yearling farm and a 7-8ths dirt track. Our goal has been to race at the top of this game.”

They have won at the top of the game, taking their cherished Queen’s Plate with Niigon, who was ridden by Landry in 2004. Niigon’s more than $1.1 million in earnings is Chiefswood Stables’ second-leading earner. Tiz a Slam, who captured the Gr2 Nijinsky Stakes, earned over $1.26 million. Chiefswood Stables now has 344 victories and more than $20.5 million in earnings.

In a February 25, 2020 story in the Canadian Thoroughbred, Bob talked about recreating a new brand for the sport he loves: “We need to build a brand that features honesty, integrity and fair competition so that we can grow the fan base. We need to create an atmosphere where people want to bring their families and groups can be part of the horse racing lifestyle. Part of building that brand is doing a better job showing our love for horses. In a good year, Chiefswood will breed 20 babies, and we will also transition 20 of our racehorses away from the track.”

Mark’s high school sweetheart, Stacy, administers the unique and highly effective Chiefswood Aftercare Program. “I started attending the Queen’s Plate when I was 16 with Mark,” she said. “That’s our Kentucky Derby.”

Asked why having a program transitioning racehorses after their career, she made it sound simple: “They race for our pleasure. We have to take care of them.”

On its website, Chiefswood Stables tells visitors, “Chiefswood Stables is a family owned and operated Thoroughbred racing farm. Our goal is to breed quality Thoroughbred horses to compete in the classic races. It is our belief that the responsibility of care for our horses extends beyond the finish line of their last career races. It is with this belief that we have developed the Chiefswood Aftercare Program (CAP). Our goal is to find lifelong adoptive homes for our horses. We do this by trying to match the right horse with the appropriate adapter.”

What sets the Chiefswood program apart is its follow-up. For the past 10 years, it has had eight to 12 horses adopted annually. “We only had six last year because of the pandemic,” Stacy said. “About five years ago, they finally built me a barn nearby. It works well because the horses can transition slowly. We list them on FaceBook. We follow the horses for a couple of years after their adoption. Then, people voluntarily keep in touch. We get lots of pictures.”

Mark is justifiably proud of his wife’s program. “For two years, the adopted horses can’t be sold,” he said. “They’re happy, and they have a home. Stacy is a fan just like I am.”

The entire Krembil family wants to see the sport they love prosper. “From an outsider’s perspective, the industry appears fragmented with many vested interests,” Bob told Canadian Thoroughbred. “The industry players need to be open minded and work together for the betterment of racing.”

Unraced since December 5th when he won a maiden race, Weyburn fought every step of the way to win the Gotham Stakes under Trevor McCarthy three months later. After the race, Landry said, “We’ve had high hopes for Weyburn all along. We thought he was the real deal, but until they meet those kind of horses you just never know. He ran a fantastic race. He looked like he really dug in hard in the stretch when it counted. He had every reason to give up.”

In return, whether he wins the Queen’s Plate or Belmont Stakes, or never wins another race, Chiefswood won’t give up on him, making sure he—as all of the Chiefswood horses—has a good home, long after his last race.

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Thomas Drury Jr. looking forward to the 2020 Preakness Stakes

By Bill Heller

Nudged into the Kentucky Derby spotlight by Art Collector’s commanding 3 ½-length victory in the Gr2 Blue Grass Stakes July 11 at Keeneland, Tommy Drury is an overnight sensation—30 years after he began training Thoroughbreds. Art Collector gave Drury his first graded stakes victory in the Blue Grass Stakes, earning enough points to start in the Kentucky Derby for owner/breeder Bruce Lunsford. 

On September 1 Churchill Downs reported that Art Collector, the son of Bernardini, nicked the bulb of his left front heel with a hind hoof while galloping Monday. Because of horse racing strict medication rules, the horse could not be treated with an anti-inflammatory this close to the race. 

“He grabbed himself yesterday morning training,” trainer Tommy Drury said. “It was still very sensitive this morning. When I took my thumbs to palpate the bulbs of his heels, you could still tell it was pinching him. I had to make a choice. Your horse has to always come first. To run in a race of this caliber and trying to compete against the best 3-year-olds in this country, you’ve got to be 110 percent.”

Art Collector was widely considered the biggest threat to Belmont (GI) and Travers Stakes (GI) winner Tiz the Law heading into Saturday’s 1 ¼-miles classic, coming into the race off a 3 ¼-length victory in the Ellis Park Derby on Aug. 9.

“We didn’t want to take any chances with a horse potentially this good,” Lunsford said. “The Derby means an awful lot to me so it’s been kind of a tough day and night. But the horse is always the most important thing in all these things. We’ll get another chance to have another day. We’ll try and make it to the Preakness and maybe from there, the Breeders’ Cup.”

“When you’re 28, you’re thinking about winning the Derby and Breeders’ Cup races,” said Drury, who took over Art Collector’s training at the beginning of his three-year-old season. “At 48, I didn’t even know I’d win a graded stakes. To win the Blue Grass is pretty special. I’m still trying to find the words.”

This success immediately went to his head. He celebrated his greatest victory with a cold beer and a frozen pizza when he finally got home after the Blue Grass. “I didn’t finish either,” he confessed.

Why? To be back at the barn at 5:30 a.m. the next day, a Sunday. His work ethic is just one of the elements of his highly successful, yet quiet, career. His career winning percentage is an outstanding 21 percent. He won at least 20 percent of his starts in 11 of his last 14 seasons heading into this year, including seven years when his victory clip was 25 percent or higher.

No wonder top horsemen, including Al Stall, Bill Mott, Steve Asmussen, Frankie Brothers and Seth Hancock, have sent many of their horses needing a layup after surgery or time off to Drury’s barn at the Skylight Training Center, 27 miles northeast of Churchill Downs.

Tom Drury's horses on track for morning exercise at Skylight Training Center

“As far as top horsemen, he’s been a top one for years, but he just hasn’t had the opportunity to win at the highest level,” Stall said. “I send him rehab cases. We’ve had a good working relationship for more than 10 years. I might have sent him, oh gosh, over 20 a year—a couple hundred for sure. Ninety-nine percent of the time, he’s spot on about their fitness level.”

Tom Drury inspects horses as they go out for morning exercise at Skylight Training Center

Brothers said of his time knowing Drury, “It started with Tommy galloping some horses for me at Churchill Downs. He’s a smart, conscientious young man—an excellent horseman.” 

So how did Drury amass just 55 victories in his first six years of training after getting his license at the age of 18? He had to gallop horses on the side to pay his bills. “It didn’t come easy, and it didn’t come quickly,” he said. “There were days I said, `This isn’t going the way it should be going.’ But I always had at least one horse I was training.”

There was another reason he persevered. “I didn’t know how to do anything else,” Drury said.

His biggest fan, his mother Patty, said, “He started with one horse, and to have a horse like this [Art Collector] is unbelievable. I’m so happy and proud of him because he worked so hard to get to this point.”

Drury’s father, Jerry, who galloped horses, passed away two years ago. “We were close,” Drury said. “I never had the privilege to work with him a lot because he had a lot of horses. He pushed me: if you work, you have to do it at the top level. He always pushed me to do that.”

Drury began hot-walking on weekends as a kid.

“I can remember walking horses when I was 10 or 11,” he said. “It’s all I wanted to do. On weekends, I’d go to the track. It’s just been in my blood. I could never see myself doing anything else.”

He wanted to be a jockey but grew too big to do that. So he focused on training. “I had a friend, a little older, who got his license at 19,” Drury said. “Once I saw he was able to do it, I felt comfortable in my horsemanship.” He passed the trainer test and applied for a license at the age of 18.

Racing steward Bernie Hettel didn’t believe he was 18. “I looked like I was 12,” Drury said. “I think I weighed 110 pounds. I showed him my driver’s license.”

In his first six years, his win totals were five, seven, nine, eighteen, eight and eight. “I was working a second job, always galloping to help pay the bills,” he said. “Eventually, it started going the way I wanted. So I stopped galloping a few years ago. When I was riding, I worried about too many details. I think better when my feet are on the ground rather than in the air.”

One of his most successful horses was Timeless Fashion, who won 11 of 34 starts, including six stakes, and earned more than $400,000. Unfortunately, Timeless Fashion’s first jockey, Justin Vitek, wound up with leukemia.

Vitek rode Timeless Fashion in his first two starts, finishing second by a neck in a maiden race at Turfway Park, December 7, 2007, then winning an allowance race there February 2, 2008, by 4 ¼ lengths.

“Justin had told me that whole day he was feeling bad,” Drury said. “He went to the hospital that night and was later diagnosed with leukemia. It went into remission and he worked for me and rode in races. Unfortunately, his leukemia came back, and he passed away. Justin was one of my closest friends. I flew to Texas and was with him the night before he passed. It was terrible.”

Vitek, a native of Wallace, Texas, died on January 28, 2010 at the age of 36. Vitek’s biggest victory came on Miss Pickums, who captured the 2000 Gr2 Golden Rod Stakes at Churchill Downs. He had won 763 races with earnings topping $9.8 million. 

Six weeks after Vitek died, Turfway Park held a night to celebrate Vitek’s life, with his mother to present the trophy to the winner of the Tejano Run Stakes. Drury, who entered Timeless Fashion in the stakes, wore one of Vitek’s University of Texas caps which Vitek’s sister had sent to him. “Justin was a big Texan football fan,” Drury explained. Drury wore the cap that night and never again.

Timeless Fashion hadn’t raced since the previous December 12th when he took the first of two consecutive runnings of the Prairie Bayou Stakes. Timeless Fashion won the Tejano Run Stakes by a half-length. “Justin’s mom presented the trophy to Judy Miller, the winning owner, and she gave it back to her,” Drury said. “Right before we went upstairs, we sprinkled some of Justin’s ashes in the winner’s circle. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house. It was insane. It was brutal, but we were fortunate to have had him in our lives. It was so special to win that race with his family there.”

Drury resumed his career, which may have already been redirected by his Blue Grass victory. “This is going to change Tommy’s life,” Lunsford said. If it does, he’ll share it with 15-year-old daughter Emma, who rides show horses, and his 19-year-old son Matt, who’s in the restaurant business. They live just outside Louisville. 

Art Collector, a home-bred colt by Bernardini out of Distorted Legacy by Distorted Humor, has special meaning for Lunsford—an attorney, businessman and politician who ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate as a Democrat in 2008, losing to incumbent Mitch McConnell. 

Bruce Lundsford

Lunsford’s Bunting was the dam of his Vision and Verse, who finished second to Lemon Drop Kid in both the 1999 Gr1 Belmont Stakes and Gr1 Travers. Vision and Verse won four of 21 starts and earned a tad more than $1 million. “Bunting was one of the first two horses we bought,” he said. “She had several useful horses, including Distorted Legacy, who finished fourth in the 2011 Gr1 Breeders’ Cup Filly and Mare Turf. “We kept her as a broodmare. Her first foal was a filly that didn’t race. Art Collector is her second foal.”

Lunsford routinely sends 10 of his yearlings to be broken and trained at Travis and Ashley Durr’s Webb Carroll Training Center in St. Matthews,S.C. Durr does the breaking and training, and Ashley is the Center’s business manager.

Travis’ family raced and trained Quarter Horses, and Travis rode them at bush tracks in Georgia, S.C. and N.C., starting at the age of 12. When both his grandfather and father began working with Thoroughbreds, Travis started breaking and training them. Travis was 15 when his father passed in 1995, and he took over the business. Travis joined Webb Carroll in 2007, and in 2016, he and his wife purchased the Center.

“We are known for our large sets—15 to 17 horses in the winter,” Travis said. “All we do is breaking, training and layups. We don’t have to have things being done by a specific time. We have a lot of turnouts. We individualize the horse’s training. We just try to produce racehorses.”

Art Collector is just the latest top horse the Training Center has developed, following Havre De Grace, Country House, Abel Tasman, Firenze Fire, Goldencents, Runhappy, Irish War Cry and Shackleford.

Art Collector arrived at the Training Center in July 2018. “He showed ability from day one,” Travis said. “He stood out. He handled the breaking very well, always did his job—an easy horse to be around. He started breezing in February. He was breezing a lot easier than others. As we went on with the horse, he kept progressing the right way. He was the best of Bruce’s bunch. He sends us around 10 yearlings a year.”

On May 9, Art Collector was sent home and then to trainer Joe Sharp to begin his career at Saratoga in July. Art Collector’s first three starts were on turf. He finished second in a maiden race at Saratoga August 15, first in a maiden at Kentucky Downs and then seventh in the Gr3 Bourbon Stakes at Keeneland.

Switched to dirt on November 30, he lost his action in a 6 ½ furlong allowance race under Brian Hernandez Jr., who has ridden Art Collector ever since. Hernandez was about to pull Art Collector up, but Art Collector wasn’t done, getting back in the race and finishing sixth by 8 ½ lengths in the first of four consecutive races at Churchill Downs.

Art Collector’s final start as a two-year-old last November 30 was a breakthrough 7 ½-length victory on a sloppy track.

That victory would be taken away months later. …

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Juan Carlos Avila - trainer of Kentucky Derby hopeful - King Guillermo - in profile

By Bill Heller

Too often, dreams are derailed, deferred or dismissed. That doesn’t mean they never come true. Even if they’re delayed.

Before he emigrated from Venezuela to America in 2018, trainer Juan Carlos Avila had one dream: “To watch the Kentucky Derby as a fan,” he said.

Now he’s in it.

So is another dreamer—retired five-time All-Star baseball player Victor Martinez, a Venezuelan who followed through on his discussions with his wife about what they might do when he retired: buy a Thoroughbred. When that moment arrived, he told his trainer Juan Carlos Avila, “I don’t want a horse that can run in the Kentucky Derby, I want a horse to win the Derby.”

Avila replied, “You’re crazy.”

Not that crazy. Martinez is in it, too.

Yet another Venezuelan, Jockey Samy Camacho, dreamed of riding in the United States in major races. “That’s the dream of every jockey—like a baseball player—to move to the big time.” he said. “Everybody wants to ride here.”

He’s in the Derby, too.

All three—Avila, Martinez and Camacho—will have to wait a bit to realize that accomplishment as they and the entire world pray that the coronavirus pandemic, which led to Churchill Downs delaying the Derby from the first Saturday in May (May 2) to the first Saturday in September (September 5), has subsided by then.

The horse that has led to this incredible confluence of Venezuelan dreamers is King Guillermo, named for Martinez’s father who died when Martinez was seven years old. King Guillermo’s dominant 4 ¾ length victory in the Gr2 Tampa Bay Derby at odds of 49-1 March 7 made him a legitimate Derby contender. His winning time was the third fastest in the Tampa Bay Derby’s 40-year-history.

He followed that performance with a strong second to undefeated Nadal in the second division of the rescheduled Gr1 Arkansas Derby at Oaklawn Park on May 5. King Guillermo finished three lengths behind Nadal while a length and a half ahead of Finnick the Fierce in third.

“He put his heart out,” Martinez said May 7. “He showed a lot of people what he did in Tampa wasn’t a fluke. He’s got a big heart. I was really happy.”

Martinez, who watched the Arkansas Derby with his family on their ranch in Okeechobee, Fla., says King Guillermo would likely get another start before the Derby. He’s also hoping the coronavirus pandemic won’t cause Churchill Downs to change the September date. “Right now, I don’t know what’s going to happen,” he said. “It’s still a lot of questions with this virus going around. There’s nothing you can do about it. You hope it goes back to normal.”

Having a starter in the Derby is his new normal, and he couldn’t be happier about that. Making King Guillermo’s ascension even more unbelievable is that Martinez might not have stayed in the U.S. to become a baseball star had his mother not advised him at a critical point at the beginning of his career to not abandon his dreams and continue to work hard. He did and he prospered. 

When he retired, Martinez bought two horses at the 2019 Ocala Breeders’ Sales Company’s April Two-Year-Olds in Training Sale and headed home to his family in Orlando. He purchased a colt, Tio Will, and a filly, Princess Coro, who have begun their careers while still seeking their first victory. That night, Martinez dreamt of owning a horse by Uncle Mo. The next morning, his wife gave him an okay to buy a third horse. When King Guillermo failed to reach his RNA, Martinez was able to purchase him for $150,000.

Camacho, who was the leading rider at Tampa Bay Downs in its 2018-2019 season and is currently second in the 2019-2020 jockey standings, only got the chance to ride King Guillermo—who he had never sat on in a race or workout—in the Tampa Bay Derby after Paco Lopez opted to ride Chance It (who went off the 5-2 second choice in the race and finished fifth).

Then there’s King Guillermo himself. In his only prior dirt race, he had finished sixth by 11 ¼ lengths in his maiden debut last September 29 at Gulfstream Park. He wouldn’t have been in the Tampa Bay Derby had Martinez not reminded Avila that he wanted a horse to win the Kentucky Derby; and he deserved a second chance to race on dirt. Avila caved and said okay. Then Martinez told his trainer he wanted that start to be in a race with qualifying points to get into the Derby. That was the Tampa Bay Derby. And King Guillermo delivered a sublime performance, prompting announcer Richard Grunder to call in the stretch, “Do you believe this?”

Minutes later in the winner’s circle, there were three delirious believers from Venezuela celebrating in utter joy—their ticket to the Kentucky Derby punched.

“We still don’t believe it,” Avila said.

Five days after the Tampa Bay Derby, Martinez said, “Man, we’re still talking about it. It’s 24/7 in my house, and we don’t get bored talking about it. We can’t believe it.”

They are hopefully headed to Louisville on the first Saturday in September—49 years after Canonero II (Venezuelan owned, trained and ridden) shocked the equine world by winning the Kentucky Derby and Preakness before finishing fourth in the 1971 Belmont Stakes.

Avila had decided to train King Guillermo up to the Derby without another prep race, before the news broke of the Derby Delay. He had given King Guillermo a week of R&R at Savannah Farms in Ocala after his extraordinary win in the Tampa Bay Derby. “He’s very intense in that every time he works out, he wants to make holes in the dirt,” Avila said. “He puts so much into his workouts. He works better than any horse I’ve trained in 30 years. We wanted him to relax for a week. At 6 a.m., he goes into the paddock. He’s just running around to 2 p.m. when they come out to get him.”

Avila, 56, was born in Caracas, Venezuela, without any family background in racing. He played baseball, then decided to go to the racetrack in Caracas, La Rinconada Hippodrome. “I never touched a horse before that,” he said. “I was looking. I was learning.” He began as a hotwalker, advanced to groom and ultimately to trainer—winning nine training titles, including seven straight, while compiling nearly 3,000 victories.

He thought long and hard about leaving troubled Venezuela for the United States and did so in 2018. “It was the situation in the country,” he said. “The insecurity we had over there. It was dangerous. It was tough to live there. If you went out of your house, you didn’t know if you’d come back.”

He showed up at Gulfstream Park in February 2018, and he began the arduous task of finding owners. It didn’t take him long to make an impression. On behalf of JCA Racing Stables, he purchased Trophy Chaser, a Twirling Candy colt out of European Union by Successful Appeal, for $42,000 at the March Ocala Breeders Two-Year-Olds-in Training Sale. Trophy Chaser made his debut on August 25 that year and won a maiden race by 15 ¾ lengths. He had one win, one second and one third from five starts in 2019, then won his four-year-old debut this year at Gulfstream Park in an allowance race at Gulfstream Park by 8 ¼ lengths. Then, on the Tampa Bay Derby undercard, he won the Gr3 Challenger Stakes by a head with Paco Lopez riding him for the first time.

Avila met Martinez a month before the 2019 Ocala Two-Year-Olds-in Training April Sale through Martinez’s baseball agent Wilfredo Polidor. Avila had trained Thoroughbreds for Polidor in Venezuela.

Born in Bolivar, Venezuela, on December 23, 1978, Martinez is forever grateful for how hard his mother worked, especially after his father died. “My mom was a nurse,” he said. “She used to make $100 a month to support four kids in Venezuela.”

The Cleveland Indians signed him as an amateur free agent in 1996. “I came to this country in 1997 with zero dollars in my pocket,” he said. …

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Kentucky Derby - the road takes a detour - impact of the delayed Derby - horse preparations

By Bill Heller

Who could have imagined that the road to the Kentucky Derby would have a detour? Or that the order of the Triple Crown Classics would be reshuffled? Or that major stakes would be contested without fans? Or that three undefeated colts who might have been vying for favoritism in the Derby would be injured or retired? 

The first Saturday in May, the Run for the Roses in the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs, became the first Saturday in September—September 5. That will be the second  leg of the Triple Crown, not the usual first.

The Preakness Stakes, regularly the second leg of the Triple Crown, was rescheduled for October 3 as the final leg of the Triple Crown.

And the Belmont Stakes, reduced from a mile-and-a-half to a mile and-an-eighth, will begin the Triple Crown instead of ending it on June 20.

Horses who had already earned enough points to start for the Kentucky Derby may now be joined by late-developing three-year-olds arriving on the scene. The top 20 point leaders to get into the Derby on the original date for the Kentucky Derby (May 4) could look much different than the top 20, four months later.   

It’s never been more challenging for trainers entrusted with the difficult goal of getting their horses to peak on the first Saturday of May than being able to do the same four months later.

Barclay Tagg

“I’m just glad they’re having the Triple Crown,” Baffert said. “They could have canceled them all.”

Now? “Everybody out there is in the same boat,” trainer Barclay Tagg said. Tagg’s boat carries his outstanding three-year-old Tiz the Law, whose four-for-five record stamps him as one of the Kentucky Derby’s major contenders. “Of all the horses out there, Tiz the Law is right there with my guys,” Baffert said in late May before fate intervened. At the time, his guys were three undefeated colts: Nadal, Charlatan and Authentic.

Unfortunately, after working a half-mile at Santa Anita on May 28, Nadal suffered a colyndar fracture of his left front knee. Surgery was done and two screws were inserted, and Nadal was retired and will be able to impact future generations of Thoroughbreds as a stallion. Then Charlatan suffered an ankle injury which means he’ll miss the Belmont Stakes and Kentucky Derby. Finally, Authentic finished second to Honor A.P. in the Santa Anita Derby on June 6th. 

Tiz the Law

That left Tiz the Law as a likely heavy favorite in the Belmont Stakes, and, if he wins, clearly the horse to beat in the Kentucky Derby. His top threat could be Honor A.P., who impressed winning the Santa Anita Derby for trainer John Shirreffs.

Churchill Downs reopened without fans on May 14. Santa Anita, where Baffert is based, began spectator-less racing the very next day. “The whole world is going through this,” Baffert said. “I’m just thankful that Los Angeles County let us open back up. It’s the safest environment. We keep the barns disinfected. We don’t want viruses spreading from barn to barn. Everybody is wearing masks. We treat it very seriously. What I was worried about was the backstretch workers. I’m responsible for a lot of families back there. If we didn’t open up, there wouldn’t have been jobs for them. I kept people on that had worked for me.”

Tagg had a heck of a problem just figuring out when he could ship Tiz the Law from his barn at Palm Meadows to his barn at Belmont Park, which will begin spectator-free racing on June 3 after a planned opening day on April 24. “I made a couple calls to New York and I asked, `Should we stay in Florida longer? There’s somebody in my barn in New York,’” Tagg said. “They said they’ll get back to me. They called me back. They said it looks like this: we’ll have the horses out of your barn in a day and a half, and then you can move in. Three weeks later, I called the guy in my barn in New York, and he said, `I’m still here. And so are my horses.’”

Finally, Belmont Park got the clearance to announce it would reopen on June 3 and that the Belmont Stakes would be held June 20 at a shorter distance. “They shortened the distance of the Belmont,” Tagg said. “How is it still a Classic if they shorten the distance?”

Maxfield wins the Matt Winn for trainer Brendan Walsh.

But really, there will be asterisks for all the legs of this year’s Triple Crown, especially if one horse sweeps all three. “If a horse wins the first two, if there is a horse going for the Triple Crown, it’ll be great for the Preakness,” Baffert said.

But he’s not thinking that far away. “I don’t think I have to think about it now,” he said. “Every day things change. These are very challenging times right now. You have to be able to change paths.”

He had no idea how many path changes were coming up for his Derby contenders. …

Nadal beats King Guillermo in the 2020 Arkansas Derby.

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George Bolton - Chris Mara - Jack Knowlton

By Bill Heller

George Bolton (Nadal)

George Bolton

Having campaigned such stars as two-time Horse of the Year Curlin, Lady Aurelia, My Miss Aurelia and The Factor did absolutely nothing to diminish George Bolton’s excitement for his latest home-run hitter, the undefeated three-year-old colt Nadal, whom he owns in partnership with Barry Lipman, Mark Mathiesen and Arthur Hoyeau.

Unfortunately, on May 28, after working a half-mile at Santa Anita, Nadal suffered a colyndar fracture of his left front knee. Surgery was done with two screws were inserted, and Nadal will be able to start a new career as a stallion.

Bolton is thankful that he saw all of Nadal’s four victories. Bolton sneaked into Oaklawn Park May 5 to watch Nadal improve his record to four-for-four by taking the second division of the rescheduled Gr1 Arkansas Derby for trainer Bob Baffert.

“If they can really run, you get your ass there,” Bolton said. “I went to see every one of his races: his maiden, his San Vincente, Rebel and the Arkansas Derby. I was the only owner allowed in at Oaklawn. I snuck in. I had a mask on, but I wasn’t near anyone. I wanted to be with the horse. This is a special horse. I spent as much time at the barn after his race as before. I never missed Curlin, Lady Aurelia, The Factor and My Miss Aurelia. For me, you get the one that’s good, you go see him.”

He was perfectly happy sharing the experience with his partners. “Celebrating by yourself isn’t much fun,” Bolton said. “You spread the risk. At the level I play at, when you’re buying, you have to do it as a partnership.”

Bolton, who is the chief investment officer, portfolio manager and partner of WestEnd Capital Management in San Francisco, currently lives in Key Largo, Fla. He was born near Pimlico Race Course in Baltimore. “I grew up on a farm that my great, great aunt owned,” he said. “It was left to my father. He had a lot of jumpers. I grew up around it.”

He graduated with honors from the University of Virginia in 1985 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics. He’s been an avid supporter of the Cavaliers, and rode the roller coaster of seeing Virginia become the first basketball No. 1 seed to lose to a No. 16 seed—the University of Maryland-Baltimore-County—in the NCAA Tournament, and winning the national championship the following season. “I’ve been swinging with the Cavaliers for a long time,” he said. “Virginia is a great place.”

In college, Bolton had the good fortune of becoming friends with Bill Farish, whose father, Will, a former United States Ambassador to the United Kingdom, was building Lane’s End Farm in Kentucky. 

“Bill asked me to get involved in the business in 1989,” Bolton said. “I just got off to a good start. I didn’t have anybody marking up horses for me.”

 By 1989, Bolton had moved to San Francisco after working for Alex Brown & Sons in Baltimore. He continued to work for them in San Francisco, becoming the firm’s youngest managing partner in 1991. While leading institutional equity sales on the West Coast, he also separately managed accounts for high net-worth individuals. In 2004, Bolton left Alex Brown to become a partner and chief investment officer at WestEnd Capital Management.

His ongoing success has allowed him to pursue his passion, where he’s become a major player. The Farishes brought Bolton in on a Miswaki filly named Exotic Moves. “We sold her after she won three races for a clean `double,’ and I was hooked,” he told the Paulick Report in a March 26, 2018 story.

Curlin—the 2007 and 2008 Horse of the Year—took him to a whole new level, winning 11 of 16 starts and earning more than $10.5 million. No victory was more meaningful to him than Curlin’s come-again victory in the Preakness in Pimlico. “He got passed, and he came again,” Bolton said. “It was crazy. Most of the stretch, I thought he would lose.”

Bolton’s My Miss Aurelia, the 2011 Champion Two-Year-Old Filly won the first six starts of her career and never finished out of the money in 11 starts, earning more than $2.5 million. The Factor, who continues a marvelous stallion career at Lane’s End, won six of 13 starts and more than $900,000. And Lady Aurelia, who won five of 10 starts and more than $800,00, captured the 2017 Gp1 King’s Stand Stakes at Royal Ascot, defeating 17 colts and three fillies.

The international bloodstock agent Kerri Radcliffe hooked up with Bolton in 2018, buying yearlings for him in Australia, Europe and the United States. “George got in touch with me, and he said `I want you to buy for me,’” she said in a phone interview from Newmarket May 15.

She purchased Nadal—a massive, muscular colt by Blame out of the Pulpit mare Ascending Angel bred by Sierra Farm—for $700,000 at the 2019 Gulfstream Park Two-Year-Olds-in-Training Sale that March for Bolton and another investor. The second investor bailed, and Bolton reached out to Lipman, Mathiesen and Hoyeau. Trainer Randy Bradshaw had originally purchased Nadal for $65,000 as a yearling. “When I was looking at him, Randy told me, `Kerri, this is a special horse,’” Radcliffe said. “He breezed like a monster, and when you saw his breeze and saw how big he was, you couldn’t quite figure out how that horse did that.”

She named him for tennis star Rafael Nadal. Previously, she had named a colt Gronkowski for Ron Gronkowski, the All-Pro tight end of the New England Patriots. 

The equine Nadal had a rough time getting to the races. After beginning training at Los Alamitos, Baffert shipped Nadal to his barn at Santa Anita. On the van trip there, he kicked out of his stall and got his hind leg caught over the partition. “He flipped over,” Bolton said. “He cut himself on the back of his legs and had lacerations on his hocks. When we finally got him back, he wasn’t working well. We examined him again and gave him three months off. Sometimes, missing a two-year-old year helps as a three-year-old.”

Nadal, who weighs in at 1,325 pounds, hasn’t done a thing wrong since returning to Baffert. “He’s a monster,” said Bolton, who compared him to former New York Giants tight end Jeremy Shockey and legendary Hall of Fame Buffalo Bills’ defensive end Bruce Smith. “It takes him a little while to get going, but his gait versus the other horses is exciting.”

So are the results. “I had 68 texts right after the Arkansas Derby,” Bolton said. “Twenty-eight were from racing people; 40 of them were from Virginia and business people. All of them watched the Derby. It was great for the sport because it’s great that people know him.”

And the tennis star he’s named for? “I’ve talked to his agent,” Bolton said. “He’s aware of the horse. I am a big fan of him as a person and as an athlete. I hope he’s enjoying the horse.”

Bolton sure did. So did Nadal’s other owners: Lipman, whose family runs Lipman Family Farms—North America’s largest tomato grower with headquarters in Florida; Mathiesen, who owns a medical service company and was introduced to racing by his daughter Hannah; and Hoyeau, a French-based bloodstock agent. “These guys are guys you want to work with,” Bolton said.

Chris Mara (Charlatan)

New York Giants Senior Vice President Chris Mara’s passion for Thoroughbred racing goes back a long way. After purchasing a football franchise—which ultimately became the New York Giants—for all of $500 in 1925, his grandfather, Tim Mara, was a legal bookmaker at Belmont Park in the 1930’s. Tim passed both his Giants’ legacy and his love of Thoroughbreds onto his son Wellington, who in turn passed it onto Chris and his brothers.

“He influenced my dad, and my dad influenced me,” Chris said in a phone interview. “The first Saturday in May, you couldn’t find my dad. He and my mom were at the Derby.”

His father took him to Belmont Park for the first time when he was 10. 

Chris’ first trip to the Kentucky Derby was in 1982 when he, his parents and their dear friends the Rooneys watched Gato del Sol take the first leg of the Triple Crown. Chris would marry Kathleen Rooney, NFL pioneer Art Rooney’s granddaughter. 

Chris spent one summer, while in college at Boston College after transferring from Springfield, parking cars at one of the Rooneys’ racetracks, Yonkers Raceway. “I loved it,” Chris said. “It was a very interesting job to say the least. The guys were teaching me how to park cars. I parked one, and when I returned the car, the guy gave me a $20 tip. That was like 1977 or 1978. It was a lot of money. I told the guys, `They gave me $20.’ They said, “You [bleep, bleep].’”

He came a long way from parking cars at that harness track. Some 35 years ago, he owned his first Thoroughbred, Itchy Hooves, with his mom. Fast forward a lot of years. After meeting Starlight Racing’s managing partner Jack Wolf in a Saratoga golf tournament hosted by basketball coach, Thoroughbred owner and long-time friend of the Mara family Rick Pitino in August 2012, Chris decided to make a serious commitment to Thoroughbred ownership by joining Starlight Racing.

“I had been looking into it,” Chris said. “I sought out a couple different people and asked them what they thought I should do. They suggested various syndicates. I looked at all of them. Then I sat down with Donna Brothers (who works for Starlight Racing) at the Saratoga Sale. Then I met Jack Wolf on the golf course at Saratoga National.”

That did it. Maybe Chris was feeling giddy—the after effect of a memorable year, which featured the New York Giants beating the previously unbeaten New England Patriots in the Super Bowl; and his daughter, Rooney Mara, for being nominated for an Academy Award for her title role in “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.”

In a May 3rd Newsday story, Chris told Ed McNamara, “I sat down with Jack, and he asked me what I was going to bring to the table; and I answered, `Luck! We just won a Super Bowl, and my daughter is up for an Academy Award!’”

That very afternoon, Chris and Starlight Racing’s two starters in the 2014 Kentucky Derby—General Rod and Intense Holiday—finished 11th and 12th, respectively, to California Chrome.

In 2018, two months before the Kentucky Derby, Chris, through Starlight Racing, became a partner on both Justify and Audible, who finished first and third in the Run for the Roses. Then Justify became racing’s 13th Triple Crown champion and retired as the only undefeated Triple Crown champion.

This summer, Chris and Starlight are back again as partners on undefeated Charlatan, who injured his ankle in early June and will be pointed to the Preakness Stakes, now the final leg of the Triple Crown this year. Charlatan’s ownership includes a bunch of other partners and partnership groups. “It’s a lot of people,” Wolf said May 14. “They’re really fine partners to have.”

Charlatan was scheduled to test his three-for-three record in the rescheduled Belmont Stakes on June 20 as the first leg of an entirely rescheduled Triple Crown, to be cut back from a mile-and-a-half to a mile-and-an-eighth in this chaotic year defined by the coronavirus pandemic plaguing the entire globe.

“Ever since I got involved with Starlight, the ultimate goal was to get a horse to the Derby,” Chris said. “With Charlatan, it’s just fun to have a horse like this.”

Hearing that would make his grandfather smile.

“I just love this sport,” Chris said. “I loved reading about my grandfather.”

It’s hard for Chris to not think of his grandfather. “I walked into Belmont Park one day and there was a picture of my grandfather taking bets on the second floor,” Chris said.

In the picture, Tim Mara is wearing a large, silver button stating he was a legal bookmaker. The button has been passed on to Chris. “I kept it in my pocket before the 2018 Kentucky Derby,” Chris said. “I didn’t wear it, but it worked. I will bring it with me for Charlatan.”

Asked what he thought as Justify crossed the finish line to win the 2018 Kentucky Derby, Chris said, “I hope I didn’t lose all the winning tickets. I had a lot of them. My grandfather would have been proud, but he wouldn’t have been happy because he was the bookie.”

Jack Knowlton (Tiz the Law)

Can it be 17 years since Sackatoga Stable partners rolled into Churchill Downs on a rented yellow school bus and left with all the roses when Funny Cide became the first New York-bred to win the Kentucky Derby? …

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A jockey's life: The true tall tales of gatebreakin' Ray Adair

By Peter J. Sacopulos

Like many baby boomers who entered their teens in the mid-1960s, Raymond Adair Jr. had an issue with his father. But it wasn’t a disagreement over long hair, rock music, or his choice of friends. The problem, in young Ray Adair’s eyes, was his father’s appalling ability to stretch the truth.

Ray Sr. claimed he began life as a foundling, left under a pinion tree by a band of Crow Indians before being adopted by a couple who ran a ranch in New Mexico. That was bad enough, but it was Ray Adair’s endless exaggerations about his horseracing career that really embarrassed his son.

In the elder Adair’s accounts, he won his first Thoroughbred race at age six. He lost a match race against the legendary Seabiscuit by a nose. He won the Bluegrass Stakes, finished second in the Preakness, and rode in the Kentucky Derby twice. He stood down gangsters and befriended greats like Eddie Arcaro. It was all too much.

“Growing up, I thought Dad was just a bullshitter. Or a horseshitter, anyway,” Ray Jr. says with a soft chuckle. “Imagine how I felt when I figured out all those horseracing stories were true.”

Throughout his childhood, Ray Jr. had been aware that his father was a jockey and horse trainer. His family, including his mother Evelyn and his older sister Rayette, had tagged along on the racing circuit for years. But Ray Sr.’s racing days and the Adair family’s nomadic ways came to an end in 1961. Evelyn had been diagnosed with cancer and could no longer travel. The family settled in Phoenix, and Ray Sr. hung up his silks and worked for a fruit distributor. Evelyn died in 1963, and Ray moved the family to Window Rock to work for his brother-in-law, who taught him how to operate construction equipment.

In Colorado for an unrelated job interview in 1964, Ray decided to call Thoroughbred breeder Conyer (“Connie”) Stewart. Connie Stewart had first seen Ray ride at the Jamaica Race Course in New York around 1950 (Ray Sr. sometimes said he first met Conyer Stewart in 1943. However, the Centennial Track did not open until 1950, making the late 1940s more likely). Deeply impressed, Stewart offered Adair a job as his jockey at the newly built Centennial Track near Littleton, Colorado. Adair and Stewart hit it off, but Ray, a top rider on the prestigious east coast circuit, passed on the offer. After he left the east coast in the mid-1950s, Ray did do some riding for Stewart at Centennial.

The day Ray called him, Connie Stewart answered the phone at his new Stewart Thoroughbred Farm. He immediately offered Ray the job of manager. Adair and his children came to live at the ranch, and Rayette and Ray Jr. attended school in Rye and helped out with the chores. Ray Jr. worked alongside his dad for four years, seeing firsthand how good his father was with horses. Ray Sr. seemed to have found the ideal life after racing—until he and Connie Stewart abruptly fell out.

Ray Adair after winning the Blue Grass Stakes at Keeneland on Mameluke

“I never really knew why,” Ray Jr. says, but he believes it was likely due to a quirk of his dad’s personality. Raymond Adair Sr. could be as sweet as soda pop or as stubborn as a mule. “The same thing had happened with my uncle in Window Rock. Dad was a little guy, only five feet three,” his oldest son recalls. “He was sensitive about it, and I think it made him quick to jump to the conclusion that someone was trying to push him around.”

Ray Sr. left and took a job maintaining roads for the county. Not wanting to change high schools, Ray Jr. stayed on. It was while working for Connie Stewart that Ray Jr. began to realize his father’s fantastic racing tales were true. Ray Jr. would bring one of them up as an example of his dad’s penchant for telling whoppers, only to have Stewart say, “Actually, your dad did do that.” It would take many years and some research to get the full picture, but eventually, Ray Jr. and his relatives would marvel at the true adventures of the jockey known as Gatebreakin’ Ray Adair.

Those adventures began in the summer of 1928, when a Texan named Louie Kirk arrived in the town of Blanco, New Mexico, and entered a Thoroughbred stallion named Static in a match race at the San Juan County Fair. Kirk stabled the horse at the track, and found an eager, if unlikely, caretaker in six-year-old Raymond Adair. Small for his age but full of energy, Ray was growing up on a nearby ranch and had a remarkable knack with horses. The boy not only loved them, he seemed to understand and communicate with them in that special way that only a few people can. Little Ray Adair earned a half-dollar a day feeding Static, cleaning his stall and riding the horse to the river for water.

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The ultimate challenge - Entering the winner’s circle in a Triple Crown race

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This article appeared in North American Trainer - issue 40 (May to July 2016)

Meet Doug O'Neill and his team - with their 2016 Kentucky Derby winner Nyquist

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