Alfredo Marquez: Raised at the Racetrack

Lions and Tigers and Bears, OH MY!

Being “raised at the racetrack” takes on the true meaning of the phrase when one is referring to trainer Alfredo Marquez. The California conditioner, now 75, was introduced to the backside of a racecourse when he was just a month old. 

Article by Annie Lambert

The old Agua Caliente Racetrack in Tijuana, Mexico, has tethered Alfredo Marquez to Thoroughbred racing and his roots in Mexico for a lifetime. He spends off days from his California training barns at his home in Tijuana, a gated community literally built in an area where Caliente’s old barns once stood.

“That’s where I still live,” Marquez affirmed. “I still live basically in the barn area. We have a gated community where they tore out like six barns; there is a fence between the other barns and our homes. Most of the old barns are still there. They got bears, lions, tigers, elephants and a few Andalusian horses…all the barns are occupied by different kinds of animals.”

The “old” Caliente hosted Thoroughbred horse racing between late 1929 until the early 1990s, a golden era for the racecourse. Greyhound racing seven nights a week now satisfies the live racing obligation needed to continue their simulcast signal.

But, how did wild animals come to replace racehorses in the old stable area?

Jorge Hank Rhon was raised in Mexico by his wealthy, powerful German immigrant parents. Before taking over the Agua Caliente track in 1984, he moved to Tijuana from Mexico City where he had been an exotic animal trader. Rhon owned nine pet shops, six veterinary clinics and a dolphin show.

Before moving, he sold his businesses—many of which were paid for in part with exotic animals: rhino, leopards, cougars, panthers, tigers and even the Andalusians. During the evening horse races, Caliente spectators were able to watch some of the menagerie roaming on the infield.

Rhon still owns Grupo Caliente, Mexico’s largest sports betting company.

What does Rhon do with the animals? “Feeds ‘em,” Marquez said with a laugh. “It’s like a small private zoo for the owner of the track. He’s an animal lover.”

Rearview Mirror

The Marquez family has been a part of Caliente’s storied history—as well as California tracks—for several generations; nearly every Marquez family member is or has been a racetracker. They worked at tracks like Santa Anita, Hollywood Park, Golden Gate, Bay Meadows and mostly Del Mar “because it’s only a jump from Tijuana.”

Marquez’s brother, Saul Marquez, is currently a jockey valet for Juan Hernandez (current leading rider at Santa Anita), Franklin Calles and Ricardo Gonzalez at Santa Anita. Saul’s son, Saul Jr., was a jockey agent for a long time and worked sales at horse auctions. He now runs his own business as an independent trucker. A nephew, Victor Garcia, is the son of former jockey Juan Garcia and is also a trainer at Santa Anita.

“A lot of my Tijuana family, most of them, worked at the track,” Marquez said. “They were grooms, trainers, assistant trainers, pony boys, exercise riders and jockeys.

From an early age, Marquez,  worked within the Thoroughbred racing industry in many capacities. His one wish from the beginning was to own a racehorse. 

“My main goal was to own horses,” Marquez said. “That was it from day one, since I was born. I had a horse when I was young. My dad bought me a horse for my birthday when I was seven. I sold it when I was eight. It was a riding horse, a filly. In those days [in Tijuana], there were no cars. You walked to school, which was not too far from home, and you walked to the racetrack.”

 Marquez claimed his first horse for $1,000 in 1964, at the age of 16. He took a horse named Social Book off Wes Cain and the owner, Mrs. Morton. Those connections claimed the horse back just three weeks later for $1,400.

“They sent him up north, and he made like $50,000,” Marquez said of Social Book.

His second claim was Cahill Kid, trained by then leading trainer, C.L. Clayton.

“That was a very, very nice horse—a stud,” Marquez recalled. “I ran him six times and had four wins, a second and a third. I lost him for $1,600. I think all together I made about $7,800 in three months, which was a lot of money then and a lot more nowadays.”

“I bought a Chevrolet Impala in Mexico with the money,” Marquez added. “I also bought property—a lot that I built apartments on later—like in 1968, I finished building.”

While he was claiming his first horses, Marquez worked for trainer L.J. Brooks until he was “17 or 18,” before going to work for a smaller trainer with only a couple of horses. Marquez remembers one really nice gray horse he handled, The Roan Clown—a two-time winner at Pomona.

Motivos & More

The English translation for motivo is “a reason for doing something, causing or being the reason for something.” Motivos was a horse perfectly named to become the young trainer’s favorite horse—a horse he owned himself.

“I had Motivos, a Mexican bred,” Marquez explained. “He ran twice in California, then I took him back to Mexico, to Tijuana. In one year, he was Sprinter of the Year, Miler of the Year and Horse of the Year. In the 1980s, he took everything—running from 5 ½ furlongs, a flat mile, a mile and an eighth and mile and a quarter.”

“What I admired about that horse was, when he goes short, he goes to the lead and they never catch him,” the trainer added. “And when you go a mile or more, he breaks on top, and he lays back second or third; he doesn’t go past, then he makes a run. He’s just like a human. I’ve never seen any horse like him, ever. He was amazing—amazing—and he was so smart.”

Motivos even ran second in the $250,000-added Clásico Internacional del Caribe (Caribbean Derby), the most important Thoroughbred black-type stakes race in the Caribbean for three-year-olds. The Caribe is for the best colts and fillies from the countries that are members of the Confederación Hipica del Caribe; the race rotates between those countries each year.

In 1988, the Caribe was held at Caliente. Marquez ran Don Gabriel (MEX) and Joseph (MEX), both colts owned by Cuadra San Gabriel. “Don Gabriel won it, and Joseph ran second,” Marquez said. “Nobody had ever run one-two before.”

With Equibase earnings of $8,384,323, Marquez has trained multiple graded-stakes winners over the years.

Melanyhasthepapers (Game Plan) was purchased as a yearling for $40,000 out of the Washington sale at Emerald Downs by owners Ron and Susie Anson. They named the colt after Melanie Stubblefield who handled all the registration papers at Santa Anita for decades.

Melanyhasthepapers

“I bought the colt off the Ansons for $40,000 when they retired from owning horses,” Marquez remembered. “He ended up being a stake horse.”

Melanyhasthepapers earned $311,152 between 2003 and 2006 including five wins; the horse won the Cougar II Stakes at Hollywood Park, ran second in the All-American Handicap (G3) at Golden Gate and third in Santa Anita’s Tokyo City Handicap (G3).

Tali’sluckybusride

The Ansons also purchased Tali’sluckybusride as a yearling out of the 2000 Washington sale for $23,000. The Delineator filly went on to win the Oak Leaf Stakes (G1) and was third in both the Hollywood Starlet Stakes (G1) and Las Virgenes Stakes (G1). She ultimately earned $245,160.

Ron Anson obviously had an eye for a runner. “Ron was pretty good at claiming horses and buying them privately,” Marquez said. “He died last year.” 

Marquez-trained stakes horses include: Martha and Ray Kuehn’s - Irish (Melyno (IRE)) that won the Bay Meadows Derby (G3); Anson’s - Irguns Angel (Irgun) topped the A Gleam Handicap (G2), ridden by Eddie Delahoussaye; and their gelding, Peach Flat (Cari Jill Hajji), was triumphant in the All-American Handicap (G3).  

 “We claimed Peach Flat up north at Bay Meadows for $20,000—his second start,” Marquez pointed out. “We won seven races with him.”

Tali’sluckybusride

The Border & Beyond

Marquez used to check on sales yearlings at Gillermo Elizondo Collard’s Rancho Natoches in Sinaloa, Mexico. In 1989, between inspecting sales yearlings, he spotted a mare with a baby at her side that caught his eye.

“It’s a big, beautiful farm,” Marquez pointed out. “I’m checking those horses, and I see this mare with a little baby—probably five months old. The owner bought the mare at Pomona in foal to La Natural; this is that baby.”

When Marquez inquired about buying the La Natural, the owner informed him that the colt was Mexican-bred, not Cal-bred. The trainer wrote a check for what had been paid for the mare – he thinks $6,000 – and asked that the baby be delivered to him at Caliente as a two-year-old.

“I waited almost two years,” Marquez said. “I got him and two other horses [for training] delivered to quarantine at Caliente Racetrack. I broke him at Caliente along with the other two.”

The La Natural colt, named Ocean Native, made his first start for Marquez at Del Mar in 1991 in a $50,000 maiden-claiming race with Kent Desormeaux riding. The dark bay gelding won going away first time out. Less than three weeks later, Desormeaux rode him back for a second win in the Saddleback Stakes at Los Alamitos.

After running up and down the claiming ranks, Marquez lost Ocean Native on a win for a $25,000 tag at Del Mar in 1993. The durable gelding was hardly finished, however. He ultimately ran fourth in his last race with a $3,000 tag in 1999 at Evangeline Downs. Ocean Native ran 77 times, won 12 races and earned $155,194.

One of the babies that arrived at Caliente with Ocean Native was a Pirate’s Bounty named Tajo. Marquez remembered the colt as “a really nice horse that broke his maiden at Del Mar; and he also won an allowance at Hollywood Park second time out.” 

The Anson’s Lord Sterling (Black Tie Affair [IRE]) took his connections on a two-week trip to Tokyo, Japan, for the very first running of the Japan Cup Dirt (G1).  

Lord Sterling

In late 1998, Marquez claimed Lord Sterling from Jerry Hollendorfer at Golden Gate, in just his second out for $50,000. The horse had run second his first out there in a $25,000 maiden claimer. 

Over the next two years, Lord Sterling won four additional races for Marquez including a listed stake at Santa Rosa. In October of 2000, the horse finished second in the Meadowlands Cup Handicap (Gr.2) as the longest shot on the board. That effort punched his ticket to Japan.

 “We were invited and almost won the race,” Marquez recalled with enthusiasm. “[Lord Sterling] ran a big, big third in a $2.5 million race. We went back the following year with another of Anson’s horses, Sign of Fire.”

Sign of Fire (Groomstick), a graded-stakes placed runner, unfortunately bled and ran out of the money. 

“Tokyo is like five racetracks in one,” Marquez said. “They got turf, dirt, a bigger turf and steeplechase. They only ran Saturday and Sunday. But, like on Friday, you see hundreds of people sleeping on the sidewalk so they can go into the races. They limit it to, I think, 100,000 people. They gamble, and I mean they really gamble…

“You know what’s really amazing? When the horses come out of the gate, everybody gets quiet until the race is over; it is total silence.”

Love & Compassion 

Marquez commutes between his Tijuana home and Southern California tracks—roughly a three-hour drive to Santa Anita. He spends a few days each week in Mexico, depending on his schedule—a routine that has sustained him for 40 years.

He and his wife, Angela, a certified public accountant, have four children. His son and three daughters were not encouraged to pursue racetrack careers, according to their father. The kids are smart, educated and on the road to bright futures.

“I wanted them to buy property instead of horses,” Marquez explained. “Real estate—that’s where the money is. Horses are fun, and when you race, you enjoy as much as possible; but you can’t win every time.”

Marquez’s son Jonathon graduated from San Francisco State University. He and Angela  recently traveled to Boston to see Jonathon receive his Masters Degree in speech therapy. Their daughter Brenda graduated from Grand Canyon University of Phoenix with a Masters in Education and is teaching. Daughter Georgette teaches in San Diego and another daughter, Yvette, evaluates autistic children. 

Although Marquez encouraged his children to pursue education and positive careers, he loves “everything racetrack,” especially training and owning horses. He also takes compassionate aftercare of his trainees.

Marquez claimed Starting Bloc (More Than Ready) in the spring of 2018 for $50,000 out of the Richard Mandella barn. The colt ran 15 times for Marquez, picking up 11 checks, including three wins. 

When his horses show signs of being at the end of their careers, Marquez has a solution.

“We’ve still got Starting Bloc up at the ranch in Nevada,” Marquez said. “My owner, Robert Cannon’s son, Michael, has a big, 5,000 head cattle ranch up there. [Retired horses] have a whole big field. It’s their home for life.”

Lil Milo (Rocky Bar) is another of Marquez’s horses headed to the ranch for life. “He won the Clocker’s Corner Stakes the last time he ran,” the trainer pointed out. “His owner Dr. [Jack] Weinstein died right after the horse won, like a month later.”

Most of his career, Marquez trained a barn of 40 to 45 horses. Most of his owners became like family; and as they aged and drifted out of the horse business or passed on, Marquez also slowed down.

“When they retired, I retired,” he explained. “Right now, I’ve got the smallest barn as possible—only six to eight horses. But I’m going to stay in business until I drop. You have to have your mind working all the time. I don’t want to stop.”

Marquez recalls all of the many great horses he has trained with enthusiasm and can rattle off stories of every one. As he says, “I’ve been so lucky to own horses. They are still in my memory, in my heart.”

Fausto Gutierrez - The story behind the trainer of Letruska

By Frances J. Karon

“Now I need to start again,” Fausto Gutiérrez says.

Reinventing yourself 35 years into your career is no easy proposition, and not even the man whose name was firmly at the top of the trainers’ standings in Mexico for a decade gets a free pass when he sets up shop on the U.S. side of the border.

Over breakfast at the Keeneland track kitchen in Lexington, Kentucky, one morning in late July, Gutiérrez describes himself as “homeless.” Not, of course, in the literal sense, although these days he’s not been spending much time at home in Florida, where he lives with his wife María and their children Ana, 15, and Andrés, 13.

Instead, he’s traveling with his stable of 11, pointing his compass in whatever direction his star mare Letruska dictates.

This is a drastic change from his previous life in Mexico City, where he’d once maintained a stable of as many as 200 horses at the Hipodromo de las Americas, on a resume highlighted by two Triple Crown winners, both in 2018—Kukulkan and Kutzamala, who won the fillies’ version—and countless champions among countless Graded stakes wins. (To understand more about racing in the country, see sidebar, “A Brief Intro to Racing in Mexico.”)

 There’s no publicly available database in Mexico for accessing information or charts more than a month old, but Mexican racing authorities provided a complete record of 20 years’ worth of starts, from 1999 to 2018—which covers only part of Gutiérrez’s career—and in that timeframe, the trainer is credited with 2,261 wins. Add to that figure a cool 100 wins from the 2019 season, which Gutiérrez corroborated with the final standings that were printed in the racing program, and it takes him to 2,361 wins in Mexico. He won, if not all the Graded stakes races in the country, most of them, and he trained at least 19 champions.

Gutiérrez laughs at the suggestion that he’s the Mexican version of Aidan O’Brien. “Mas o menos,” he concedes. More or less. (It should be noted here that although he speaks English, most of the quotations attributed to him have been translated from Spanish.)

“In Mexico, I ran 12, 13, 15 horses in one day, or if there were stakes, 20,” he says. If that sounds exhausting, he agrees with the assessment. “And you know, you get to the day when it’s not about what you win anymore. It’s what you lose. If you win, it’s normal. If you lose, it’s ‘¡Perdió este!’” It’s, This one lost!

Gutiérrez didn’t deliberately leave his life in Mexico City permanently behind when he shipped some of his stable to Florida in late fall of 2019 for the Caribbean Series that December. This annual trek—most recently to Gulfstream Park, but previously to racetracks in Puerto Rico, Panama, and Venezuela—was the norm for Gutiérrez, who always sent a team to run in the black-type stakes restricted to horses trained in member Caribbean regions.

It was his adventurous spirit that took him out of Mexico to begin with, but as the pandemic began to spread and Las Americas shut down for all of 2020, it turned out that there was no racing to go back to.

This wasn’t the first time that racing in the U.S. had provided a safety net for Gutiérrez.

Back in August of 1996, the Mexican government closed Las Americas, the only racetrack in the country, due to a permit dispute. “They kept saying, ‘It’ll open next week,’” he says, but “next week” turned into more than three years. It was a grim situation for the entire racing and breeding industry.

Gutiérrez’s horses were out of action for the second half of 1996 through almost the entirety of 1997 before he had an idea: he’d move his stable to Texas. A couple of other trainers, he says, did the same, but none with as many horses. He loaded up about two dozen, all of them Mexican-breds, and sent them to Laredo. Two didn’t pass quarantine requirements and were denied entry into the U.S., and the rest had to spend an extra three weeks in the middle of nowhere.

Once the horses allowed to cross the border arrived at Sam Houston Race Park, Gutiérrez saddled his first runner. That was in February 1998, when Cuadra Vivian’s Tere Mi Amor ran second in an allowance race off a 21-month layoff. She went on to earn black-type when third in the Tomball Stakes and set a five-furlong track record at Retama Park.

Gutiérrez stayed on the Texas circuit—Lone Star, Retama, and Sam Houston—for nearly two years, having his final runners there in October 1999. He ended the chapter with a win on his last day, when Boldini got to the winner’s circle for the fifth time in the U.S.

But a new-and-improved Las Americas was on the verge of reopening, so Gutiérrez returned home with his claim-depleted stable and prepped for Mexican racing to resume. There was a soft opening in November before a full resumption in March. 

Gutiérrez says of his spell in Texas, during which he sent out 11 Mexican-bred winners of 20 races: “It was very important for me because I learned many different things there. There’s no school for trainers. There aren’t written guidelines like with other professions. It’s day to day: what you can see, what you can learn, or what you can invent. It’s all about what you see and what you apply from the people you can watch, so we each have our own system. But in the end, the most important thing is that no two horses are the same. Each horse is different.”

Gutiérrez, 54, didn’t grow up working with horses. He was born in Madrid, where his father was a lawyer with business ties in Spain and Mexico. The family moved back and forth between the two countries several times until Gutiérrez was 13 or 14, when they settled in Mexico City. Although they weren’t involved in horse racing, they did attend the races, where Gutiérrez developed a taste for the sport at Hipodromo de la Zarzuela in Spain and Las Americas in Mexico.

“There’s something about horses that grabs your attention. You know what I’m talking about…the sights, the sounds, the colors, the smell. It calls you, and that’s what I liked most about the racetrack,” he says. When he was about 15, he started studying the form in the newspapers and programs, then he’d go to the track by himself in the afternoons.

One of the opportunities that set Gutiérrez’s career in motion from an early age came when he was in college at the Universidad Anahuac Mexico. He remembers bringing a Thoroughbred auction catalogue with him and placing it beneath his desk on his first day of classes. A professor who happened to have a horse in the sale spotted the catalogue and invited him to come along.

It was a foot in the door, an entrance to a world he’d already started to love. Of course, he went to the sale.

“From there I began to know more people from the horse industry,” Gutiérrez says. Soon afterwards, at 18, he claimed an inexpensive gelding in partnership.

“He was called George Henry. There was a famous John Henry, no?” He laughs. “Well, this was George Henry. So I was very excited. I was a horse owner now. I had a horse! But we ran him 15 days later and he was claimed. He didn’t win and we lost him.”

Nonetheless, Gutiérrez’s enthusiasm only grew from there.

He claimed another horse and, while continuing to attend university, took out his trainer’s license and began to spend more time on the backside of Las Americas. In 1993, a “very special horse arrived in my life,” Gutiérrez says of his acquisition of a four-year-old Bates Motel filly, Mactuta, with some friends. He trained her to win 19 races, 12 of them stakes—all with international black type—and she was his first champion.

It was during this period when, now a college graduate with a degree in communications, Gutiérrez was approached about becoming the racing correspondent for Reforma, a major new daily paper. He felt unqualified to be a writer, but he went ahead and took the job. “It was good money compared to other things, and I could do it from home,” he says. “I had one or two horses and I wrote, and you know what happens when you write for an important newspaper? You have power. It was important, and it helped me. I had a lot of clout at the racetrack.”

Fausto Gutiérrez, Germán Larrea (second from right), Jockey Jose Luis Campos and connections celebrate Igor winning the 2018 Longines Handicap de las Americas

Reforma gave Gutiérrez the best of everything. “It permitted me to continue to go on in racing because otherwise, I would have had to look for a job in communications or at an advertising agency. When you’re young and you have to decide what to do with your life, I could dedicate myself to my hobby, my passion. It was the perfect scenario for me because I wrote for a paper, I got money, and I had a superior horse. Sometimes I even got to write about my horse.”

This idyllic setup was ended by the extended shutdown of Las Americas, when there was no racing to write about and Gutiérrez left Mexico for Texas. While he was in the States, though, he went to Kentucky and attended his first September yearling sale at Keeneland, where he bought a cheap yearling right before he was supposed to catch a flight from Blue Grass Airport across the street. But first he stopped off at the consignor’s barn to see his new purchase. “There was a horse with a lot of blood on his knees and they were hosing him down. I thought, ‘What’s going on here?’ I saw the hip number, and it was mine.”

W.B. Rogers Beasley, then the director of sales at Keeneland, told him in no uncertain terms that even though the horse had been injured while in the care of the consignor, he belonged to Gutiérrez. Beasley, however, offered to try to work something out if the injuries were severe enough. He told Gutiérrez, “All I want is for you to come back and buy another horse next year.”

Gutiérrez kept that promise to Beasley many times over, and then other Mexican connections began to attend the Kentucky sales, too, to bolster the small annual foal crops born in their country.

It was Gutiérrez’s custom of shopping for yearlings in the States that laid the groundwork for his next big break, albeit, as he acknowledges, one that originated in tragic circumstances after the 9/11 terrorist attacks 20 years ago.
“I got a phone call from Germán Larrea. ‘Can you go to Keeneland?’ he asked me. When the airports re-opened, I went on one of the first planes that left.”

Johnny Ortiz ponying Letruska on the Keeneland training track

Thus began Gutiérrez’s association with Larrea, the billionaire who, racing in Mexico under the stable names of both Cuadra San Jorge and Cuadra G L, is the country’s dominant owner. Their affiliation began small, with Gutiérrez getting the lesser horses, until Larrea’s main trainer retired and Gutiérrez took over the primary role, which set him firmly on the path to becoming the country’s preeminent trainer.

But Las Americas was too small to contain his big dreams.

On April 28, 2017—his 50th birthday—Gutiérrez fulfilled one of those dreams: saddling a runner at Keeneland.

He’d looked through the spring meet condition book as soon as it came out to see what races were scheduled on his birthday, found one to target with Grosco, and called Keeneland-based trainer Ignacio Correas IV—who’d had a lot of success training in Argentina before moving to the U.S.—and asked for his help.

Grosco was a Mexican-bred who had been claimed cheaply at Las Americas. The cost of travel, as Gutiérrez remembers it, was around $2,500 to get him to Kentucky, involving a 20-hour van ride from Mexico City to the border, three days of quarantine, and a 24-hour haul from Laredo to Lexington just to run in a $10,000 claiming race.

Why Grosco? It wasn’t so much that he was a particularly good horse but that the dark bay gelding held special meaning for his family. He’d been born at the farm where María Gutiérrez worked, and their son Andrés had helped foal Grosco. As far as Gutiérrez was concerned, it had to be that horse. “I wanted to see him in the Keeneland paddock,” he says.

Grosco ran fifth of six. “¡No importa!” Gutiérrez says. It doesn’t matter! “When you get to Keeneland and you stand in the paddock beneath the trees, you can say, ‘Here I am. I made it.’ It’s important.”

A second dream was fulfilled that same year when the Caribbean Series— alternatively known as the Serie Hipica del Caribe—was contested at Gulfstream instead of at one of the member jurisdiction racetracks where he’d already trained winners, including a Copa Velocidad in 2012 with Epifanio at Camarero in Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory. But Gutiérrez wanted to win on continental U.S. soil. In 2017 and 2018, the series’ first and second years at Gulfstream, he trained Jala Jala and Kukulkan, both Mexican-bred Horses of the Year, to win back-to-back Caribbean Classics for Larrea’s St. George Stable LLC (which is the English translation of Cuadra San Jorge). The same horses followed up with consecutive wins in the Copa Confraternidad del Caribe (recognized by The Jockey Club as the Confraternity Caribbean Cup the year Kukulkan won) for older horses in 2018 and 2019, respectively.

Until Letruska, Kukulkan, who in addition to being Horse of the Year was the divisional champion at two and three, was Gutiérrez’s best horse, and the trainer’s ambitious handling of that colt gives good insight into how he would go on to plan Letruska’s 2020 and 2021 campaigns.

After winning the Caribbean Classic, which was Kukulkan’s first-ever line of internationally recognized black-type, by 10¼ lengths three years ago this December to remain undefeated, connections opted to keep the dark bay in Florida, targeting the Gr. 1 Pegasus World Cup Invitational the following January.

“Kukulkan had done everything he needed to do in Mexico,” says Gutiérrez. “Then I had to face reality [in the U.S.], and reality is another thing. That’s why I felt that the Pegasus would be perfect for losing. I didn’t want to lose in a lesser race. I wanted to lose against the best.”

The son of Point Determined was 11th in the Pegasus but stayed in the States afterwards, eventually winning an allowance at Churchill, placing second in a Gr. 3 at Mountaineer, and third in a Listed race at Indiana Downs for Gutiérrez. Kukulkan closed out 2019 with the win in the Confraternity.

More importantly, the U.S. unveiling of St. George’s homebred Letruska, a winner of all six of her starts in Mexico, came in the Copa Invitacional del Caribe, a 10-furlong race for three-year-olds and up, two races after Kukulkan’s Confraternity. The only female entered, Letruska got out in front and never looked back, beating opponents, including older males, by 4¼ lengths.

Gutiérrez was in the process of establishing a small experimental U.S. division, anchored by Kukulkan, who’d already been in the country to begin with, and the up-and-comer Letruska at Palm Meadows Training Center. But as had happened with Kukulkan after the Pegasus 11 months earlier, some of the shine wore off the previously undefeated Letruska when she ran last of 13 in Gulfstream’s Tropical Park Oaks, her only try on grass, at the end of December in her next outing.

Soon thereafter, in February 2020, the first cases of COVID-19 were confirmed in Mexico. The emerging pandemic made a return home difficult when Las Americas stayed closed, and Gutiérrez was lucky to have the small stable he’d brought to Palm Meadows, although he hadn’t yet had a winner on the year. The trainer himself continued to travel between Florida and Mexico until March, when he brought Andrés with him on what was supposed to be a five-day trip. They never went back to Mexico again.

By summer, with racing at Las Americas at a standstill—the racetrack never did open at all that year—and Gutiérrez beginning to fear that the pandemic would close the border between the countries, his wife and daughter followed him and Andrés to the States. María and Ana arrived in time to go from the airport to Gulfstream to see Letruska win the Added Elegance Stakes on June 27th, the trainer’s eighth win of 2020 and the mare’s first stakes win since December.

It was only just beginning to sink in that perhaps his life as a trainer in Mexico was behind him. The coronavirus changed the trajectory of Gutiérrez’s life, and he hates to consider how different things would be for him today if the “reality” that had shown him that Kukulkan wasn’t good enough to compete at the top level in the U.S. applied to Letruska, too. Or had it applied to Gutiérrez himself.

Reflecting on his career at Las Americas, he says, “When you’re leading trainer and you win between 100 and 200 races per year, you’re in a comfort zone, but at the end, I think my cycle there was over because nobody wants to see you there. They want you to go, especially in a country where there’s not much money to go around. It was like that: the giant against everybody else.”

It was markedly different for Gutiérrez in the States. He’d gone from being a giant in one country to almost unrecognizable in the other. The exploits of Letruska, though, have returned him to “giant” status.

After the Added Elegance, the Kentucky-bred daughter of Super Saver whom Larrea had bought in utero for $100,000, went on to win a pair of Gr. 3s: the Shuvee at Belmont in August and the Rampart at Gulfstream in December.

Going into her five-year-old season this past January, Letruska shipped to Sam Houston for the Gr. 3 Houston Ladies Classic. It was a homecoming of sorts for her trainer, who was disappointed to learn that only the bookkeeper remained from his first time there in the late 1990s. Still, it felt good to be back, especially with a high-caliber horse like Letruska, who won the race.

Her trainer, however, had his eye on a bigger prize.

“When you come from the minor leagues and reach the major league, you want an autograph. I wanted a photo with Monomoy Girl,” he says, speaking of the 2018 champion three-year-old filly and 2020 champion older dirt female trained by Brad Cox.

With a matchup in the Gr. 1 Apple Blossom Handicap in his sights, Gutiérrez sent Letruska to Oaklawn, where she’d won an allowance optional claimer in April the previous year, to use the Gr. 2 Azeri Stakes as a prep for the Apple Blossom. In the Azeri, Letruska met with her only loss of 2021, finishing second, a head behind last year’s Kentucky Oaks winner Shedaresthedevil, Monomoy Girl’s stablemate.

Then it was on for his Mexican champion to face two reigning Eclipse Award winners, Monomoy Girl and Preakness winner Swiss Skydiver, trained by Kenny McPeek, in the Apple Blossom. Monomoy Girl was favored by the betting public, followed by Swiss Skydiver and Letruska. At the half-mile pole, announcer Vic Stauffer’s race call described the trio, led by Letruska, as “the interloper and two champions” as Gutiérrez’s dream major league matchup unfolded.

“For me, it was perfect,” Gutiérrez says of the stretch run battle, where Monomoy Girl put her head in front of his mare—the “interloper,” despite being a champion herself—and he thought Letruska would be second. “I knew that I was not going to lose absolutely anything. Second was a great result, and when I saw that we were going to get second, few times in my life have I enjoyed so much a race I was losing. When I saw Monomoy Girl winning, I said, ‘It’s okay. It’s a very good result. We’re not coming second or third by 20, and we’re up against the best mares.’ So I sat like this, watching.” He leans back in his chair and stretches his arms out, the posture of a relaxed man savoring his achievement.

“My whole history in Mexico ran through my mind, everything I had done to get there to that race,” he continues. “And that was when the announcer said, ‘And Letruska…!’”

Gutiérrez waves his hand dismissively as he recreates the scene. He was fully not expecting to get the win and refused to get his hopes up...second to Monomoy Girl? He’d take it. But Stauffer’s call was right. The margin in the Apple Blossom was a nose, with another 6½ lengths back to Swiss Skydiver in third.

“It was incredible. I had dreamed of winning, but not like this. That race is going to be one of the moments of the year, because both of them ran strong. It wasn’t that Monomoy Girl stopped and Letruska came along and won.”

In the aftermath of the Apple Blossom, Gutiérrez sensed a change in his mare. “From then on, she understood that she was big. The horse that won the Shuvee, it is not this horse.”

By the time he arrived at Keeneland in early May with his small stable, Gutiérrez was as recognizable there as he had been at Las Americas, with strangers walking up to talk to him about Letruska. “I just love your mare,” they’d say. Or, “When is she coming out to train?” It’s almost always “la yegua,” “she,” or “her”; very rarely do they use her name, which is superfluous by now.

Gutiérrez, a quiet man, doesn’t often say much, but he smiles, nods, and thanks them all.

Before long, every time she’d come out to train, the bay mare with three white legs, a small star, and a regal bearing was being pointed out and discussed by other trainers, owners, grooms, EMTs, bloodstock agents, and random folks standing on the rail. At first, riders would turn their heads as they jogged past on their mounts to ask her rider, “¿Esa es la yegua?” Is that the mare?

It’s not just that she’s the best older filly or mare in the country; there’s more to it than that. Backstretches across the country are heavily fueled by a Hispanic workforce, including many from Mexico, so there’s an added element of pride in seeing one of their own, even though she’s not a Mexican-bred, emerge as a championship contender, with the architect and owner two more of their own. Gutiérrez feels that pride, too.

It’s fair to say that regardless of the future, the Apple Blossom was a defining moment—or perhaps the defining moment—for Gutiérrez. But Letruska has taken him from defining moment to defining moment, and she may not be done yet. With the top race mare in the country in his care, Gutiérrez feels the gravity of his responsibility.

“When you have a horse like this, you can’t make any mistakes. I have to be very careful and give her special care, while knowing at the same time that she’s a horse,” he says. “I can’t do more than I can do, and it can make your head spin. I don’t think about how much she’s worth. I just try to keep her well and get her to the next race.”

Letruska’s campaign has been a fearless one. After the Apple Blossom, she trained at Keeneland and shipped to New York to win the Gr. 1 Ogden Phipps Stakes at Belmont. Brad Cox, the trainer who had defeated Letruska once with Shedaresthedevil, tried to beat her again, but his pair of Bonny South and Shedaresthedevil were second and third in the Phipps. Then, in a move that surprised many, Gutiérrez wheeled Letruska back in the Gr. 2 Fleur de Lis at Churchill, 21 days after the Phipps.

Letruska is a keg of dynamite on four legs. She can detonate one minute and docilely allow a toddler to pet her nose the next. When Gutiérrez noticed that the Phipps hadn’t taken much out of her, he felt it would be better to run than leave her in the stall with no outlet for her explosive energy. In what was essentially a paid workout, she won the Fleur de Lis by 5¾ lengths on his daughter Ana’s 15th birthday.

Groom José Díaz Jiménez has a special bond with stable star Letruska

Gutiérrez credits groom José Díaz Jiménez for his bond with Letruska. “José is very important. He has a lot of passion for what he does, and he knows her. This mare is very difficult. And we know each other very well, the three of us. When she feels better, she’s more aggressive. José tells me to be careful because she’s no longer playing, and she’ll get you. She’ll put her ears back, and she’ll turn around and fire. That’s why I don’t put her on Regumate, because she’d get even more aggressive.”

His target for Letruska after the Fleur de Lis was the Gr. 1 Personal Ensign Stakes at Saratoga. “It’s a Grade 1 race. We can’t leave it. Don’t you agree? Do I sit here and keep fighting her, or not? If you’re number one, you have to defend that and you have to keep winning. You take the risk. You can’t defend it at home. That’s my opinion. After 30 years of doing this, you need to know how to lose. If you know how to lose, one day you’re going to win. And she wants to run. She’s more of a problem for me if she doesn’t run. Like I said about Kukulkan, we’ll lose a Grade 1. I don’t want to lose in a Grade 3.”

You already know that she won the Personal Ensign, despite pressure on the front end and talented fillies and mares coming at her in waves. Old foes Bonny South and Swiss Skydiver were second and fifth, respectively, split by Chad Brown’s two: Royal Flag and Dunbar Road.

After returning to Keeneland, her adopted home track, in September, Letruska trained up to the Gr. 1 Spinster Stakes on Fall Stars Weekend in October with two bullet works. Cox and Brown tried again to beat her, but Letruska was in front at every call, with Dunbar Road and Bonny South again filling the minor places. It was her fourth Breeders’ Cup Challenge automatic berth “Win & You’re In” victory.

Only one more start, the November 6th Breeders’ Cup Distaff at Del Mar, remains to close out the five-year-old mare’s season. Rogers Beasley, who is now executive vice president and chief strategy officer of Breeders’ Cup Limited, is happy to see his old friend coming in with the favorite for the Distaff, saying, “It’s fantastic. He’s just a genuine, unassuming person. Fausto feels very honored and very blessed to have a wonderful mare like Letruska, and I think he’s doing an excellent job managing her.”

It’s true; it’s a heckuva campaign Gutiérrez laid out for Letruska, an Eclipse-worthy campaign—not only for his mare, but as the architect behind her every move, potentially for him as well. In seven 2021 starts, Letruska has a record of six wins and one narrow second, all in Graded stakes races, including four Grade 1s, with one more Grade 1 on the schedule. It speaks to Gutiérrez’s appreciation for racing as it should be as well as his confidence in Letruska, who is better than she’s ever been.

“I don’t know how high she can go. She’s more horse than before.”

She’s won seven of eight races since Gutiérrez removed her blinkers after a fourth-place effort of four runners in last year’s Beldame at Belmont.

“Before, with the blinkers, she ran with the clock, not against the other horses. Now, she sees them.” Is that partially responsible for a big change in her? “Oh, absolutely,” says Gutiérrez. “She has more control of the situation now.”

His handling of this special but not easy mare is perhaps the biggest reminder that Gutiérrez is already a champion trainer. He’s always watching and reading Letruska, adapting to her changing moods, and he likes to shake up her routine occasionally.

“I try to keep her distracted,” Gutiérrez says.

One morning, he stopped her rider as they were coming off at the gap. “Take her around one more time,” he told him. “She needs to do more.” Another time, he handed her off to trainer John Ortiz, in whose barn she’d been at Oaklawn, to pony without a rider on the training track at Keeneland.

Gutiérrez doesn’t adhere to a strict breeze schedule with Letruska, who comes out of her races looking as though she’s ready to go right back into the starting gate. “Sometimes I think she’s going to come up short on training, but no,” Gutiérrez laughs. “All she needs to do is conserve herself. She doesn’t need to work every six or seven days.” 

When she does breeze, she goes alone, and she’s gotten the bullet 18 times in 36 works in the U.S., at Saratoga, Keeneland, Oaklawn, Belmont, and Palm Meadows—everywhere she’s ever worked bar Gulfstream, where she had just one breeze before her first start in the country.

Letruska broke well from the gate before she made the early lead in the Personal Ensign

She has her quirks. “She was very nervous, so we taught her to stand on the track,” Gutiérrez says. Before training, she relaxes and watches everything around her, which she enjoys doing so much that doesn’t always want to move when it’s time to get going. Díaz has been known to slide underneath the rail to grab her reins or wave his arms to coax her into motion, or an outrider or one of the pony riders will try to get her to budge. It’s not unusual for it to take five minutes or more to get her going. “It’s just part of her personality now.” The longer she’s been at Keeneland, though, the more cooperative she seems to have gotten.

Larrea designates a different first letter of the alphabet for each of his foal crops. All of his 2016s have L-names, the 2017s are “M”s, the 2018s “N”s, and the 2019s “O”s. So when it came time to name Letruska, who has a stakes-placed older half-sister named American Doll, he wanted to name her for the Russian matryoshka doll—a wooden doll that opens and contains a series of smaller dolls, each of which opens to reveal more dolls, in decreasing size increments, until the innermost doll is revealed. “Letruska” is a play on the Spanish word for the matryoshka, and in the mare’s case, no one has gotten down to the bottom of her to know how deep the layers go.

It’s similar with her trainer, who’s shown with each adversity that he has more layers beneath the surface. And while the success of this—the reincarnation of Gutiérrez’s training career—is largely down to one horse, he’s no one-trick pony, having won three races this year with Vegas Weekend and two with Dramatic Kitten to contribute to his 15-win total so far in 2021. From three starters at Saratoga over the summer, he had three winners.

“I don’t have the horses of Brad Cox, Steve Asmussen, Todd Pletcher, Tom Amoss,” he says. But he has a Letruska, and he’s placing his other horses well and grinding out wins. Vegas Weekend was claimed from him for $50,000 at Saratoga, but he quickly filled her stall with a horse he claimed for $25,000. That gelding, Quick Return, proved to be well-named: a month after the claim, he won an allowance at Belmont for Gutiérrez and owner St. George, earning $44,000.

Still, Gutiérrez knows that his will be a very different story when the big mare eventually retires, which he hopes won’t be for a while, as he’s got designs on taking on the boys in the Saudi Cup or the Dubai World Cup in 2022. But looking ahead to a future without Letruska, he bought close to 20 yearlings on behalf of Larrea at the recent Keeneland September sale. Among his purchases was one that seemed meant to be as soon as the catalogue came out: a Super Saver filly, like Letruska, out of Mexican champion Pachangera.

As we wait to see if any of next year’s two-year-olds will be as good as Letruska, Gutiérrez is prepared to weather whatever fate throws his way. When his rider comes back from galloping a three-year-old More Than Ready colt carrying a broken stirrup strap in his hand, the trainer just shakes his head and laughs. “Sometimes I want to sit and cry, really. But I get back up and I say, ‘Let’s see what happens next.’”

It’s the getting up to see what happens next that’s gotten him this far, and he doesn’t let the thought of himself ‘starting over’ faze him.

“Sometimes in life, you have to let things be,” he says. All the obstacles Fausto Gutiérrez has had to overcome in his career show him to be a master of converting ‘let’s see what happens next’ into a big leap forward.

“Pero bueno,” he says optimistically. “This is my first crop!”

In the span of less than five years, the man who once said to himself, “Here I am. I made it,” as he stood in the enclosure at Keeneland to tighten the girth on a horse who ran unplaced in a $10,000 claiming race, saddled the favorite for a $500,000 Grade 1 in the very same paddock—and he won.