Snapshots - Breeders' Cup 2017
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Profile - Mick Ruis
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Published in North American Trainer, Winter 2017 issue.
Trainers are nothing if not confident.
It’s rarely their fault when they lose a race.
It’s the track, the ride, the post position, the equipment, the weather.
Mick Ruis is a refreshingly standup guy in a game where the batter often receives a curve ball rather than a pitch right down the middle. He speaks with a child’s innocence, and he believes in the Golden Rule.
After he won three races at Santa Anita on opening day, September 29, he was humble, appreciative, and forthcoming when asked about the feat.
“Usually we’re lucky if we run one horse a day,” Ruis (pronounced ROO-is, as in Lewis) said, speaking of Ruis Racing, LLC, the ownership comprised of himself and his wife, Wendy.
“But we saved all the horses for that meet. I’m a believer that if someone helps you, like Santa Anita did by giving us stalls, you try to help them, so we wanted to save our horses for the short meet (19 days) since we were stabled there.”
Most magnanimous, but one would expect nothing less from a man whose philosophical foundation is based on curiosity and practicality. His esteemed business sense was developed through hands-on application, not surprising from a high school dropout who became a millionaire.
“I was penniless when I started, and to this day I work for everything I’ve got,” he said.
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The Art of Clocking Horses
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Published in North American Trainer, Winter 2017 issue.
Time, an old racetrack axiom holds, only counts in prison.
But that ain’t necessarily so to horse players and horsemen worldwide who depend diligently on mathematical mavens called clockers to provide thorough, accurate, and prompt figures that might help cash a bet or win a race.
Clockers, succinctly described as people who time workouts, ply their trade at tracks from Aqueduct to Zia Park, zeroing in on Thoroughbreds and their exercises from before sunup until the track closes for training, a span of some five hours.
There are private clockers, too, whose primary interest focuses on padding their wallets or making their valued information available to the public for the right price.
They all watch like hawks, displaying the close-up intensity of a movie directed by Sergio Leone, often adding a comment such as “breezing” or “handily,” the latter being the most accomplished workout.
Each track later in the morning sends its works to Equibase, which publishes distances and times of said workouts for all to see, a regimen that has been ongoing for decades...
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Trainer Profile - Dennis Collins
/Published in North American Trainer, Winter 2017 issue.
Accepting reality is a lot more difficult when you’re on your back in a hospital bed. When your whole world has crashed. When you realize the rest of your life will be spent in a wheelchair.
Asked when he was able to wrap his mind around that, Dennis Collins, a 53-year-old jockey with 2,287 victories who was paralyzed in an accident at The Downs at Albuquerque in 2016, said, “The third day. I said, ‘This is the way it’s going to be. Why bitch and moan about it? I’m not going to walk again. But I’ll always have my own chair in a restaurant.’”
Collins, who recently began training horses with his fiancée Heather Brock – his lifeline, his saint, and his best buddy – has already scored a victory by not letting an accident take him out of racing and away from his passion, one begun whenever his parents, who had no connections to racing, took him out for a drive from their home in Gloucester City, New Jersey. “When I was a kid, every time we’d drive by a farm, if I saw a horse, I’d scream and cry,” Collins said. “We’d stop, and I’d go pet him. They’re beautiful animals. I’ve always loved horses. It was in my blood. I knew if I was short enough” – and at five-feet tall, he was – “I wanted to get into horse racing.”
Brock is so glad he did.
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Better Owner-Trainer Relations
/Published in North American Trainer, Winter 2017 issue.
The owner-trainer relationship is the core of racing. The owner supplies the horses, and the trainer supplies the know-how to manage them. It's a simple concept, but sometimes things go awry.
Some owners go through a succession of trainers with barely time for the horses to settle into a new routine before moving them again. If the owner has more than a couple of horses, the move is disruptive for the trainer, also. And the owner may develop a reputation as a difficult client who could pull the horses at any time.
Racing Hall of Fame trainer Jack Van Berg had 220 horses snatched from him one day because he was charging $25 a day and a young trainer, whom Van Berg had mentored, offered owner W. O. Bridge a $20 day rate.
"I won 368 races for them in 1974 and on January 1, 1975, they took 220 horses away from me. My friend took them over," Van Berg said.
The racing icon devotes an entire chapter to the incident in his book, Jack: From Grit to Glory.
Asked about owners who habitually change trainers, Van Berg said, "That's their prerogative to switch where they want to, and they'll see a trainer get hot and win a few races, and they'll want to put their horses over there."
Terry Finley, founder and president of the racing syndicate West Point Thoroughbreds, said owners have the right to manage their horses however they choose. Some changes are for the best, some are not.
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Social Media Horse Sense Part I: The Thoroughbred Trainer in the Digital Age
/Published in North American Trainer, Winter 2017.
This is the first article in a two-part series on social media for Thoroughbred trainers. It examines social media usage and issues faced by trainers who wish to promote their business online. Part II will focus on broader industry issues and how trainers may use social media to affect positive change and ensure the future of the sport.
In less than 15 years, social media has changed the way Americans meet, work, shop, communicate, consume news and entertainment, find romance, and more. Few aspects of our lives have been left untouched by this remarkable phenomenon. Social media has made a limited group of people incredibly wealthy, empowered others to create new businesses or expand existing ones, and made various individuals famous or infamous.
Simply defined, social media consists of online networks that allow users to connect, create, communicate, and share in virtual communities. And Americans cannot seem to get enough. The Pew Research Center’s annual Social Media Fact Sheet on 2016 includes the following sobering statistics.
• 69% of Americans use some type of social media.
• The number of Americans using social media increased 64% in the 11 years from 2005 to 2016.
• 68% of Americans use Facebook, the most popular social media platform.
• Many Americans, including three-quarters of Facebook users, log onto social media sites as part of their daily routine.
• Most American social media users utilize more than one social media platform.
• The growth of social media is likely to remain steady for years to come.
Meanwhile, Google reported that 58% of Americans had watched at least one video on YouTube in 2016. Though some refer to YouTube as a video delivery platform, it is also a social media entity that allows commentary and conversation.
As a trainer, you may be one of the hundreds of millions of Americans who is familiar with the ins and outs of social media. You may be an occasional, routine, or even heavy user. Alternatively, you may be a hold-out who is too busy or privacy-oriented. After all, the Handbook for Thoroughbred Owners of California has described many horse trainers as “secretive” individuals who “keep to themselves.” Regardless of your personal opinion of social media, it is worthwhile to step back and examine how social media may assist in expanding your training business or, alternatively, present potential risks including both civil liability and criminal violations.
As a trainer, unless you have a full roster of owners, it is wise to have a social media presence to promote your business. Consider the many positives:
Getting Found
Traditionally, personal recommendations and referrals have been the method that owners use to learn about and connect with trainers....
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Does nutrition factor in injury, repair and recovery?
/Published in North American Trainer, Winter 2017.
Lost training days through injury or infection are problematic for trainers, both practically and commercially. It is a stark fact that 50% of Thoroughbred foals, bred to race, may never reach the racecourse. In young Thoroughbreds, musculoskeletal problems have been cited as the most common reason for failure to race, and this appears to continue to be a major issue for horses in training.
An early study carried out in 1985 in the United Kingdom reported that lameness was the single biggest contributor to lost days of training, and subsequent research 20 years later found that this was still the case, with stress fractures, which involve normal bone being exposed to abnormal stress, being cited as a significant underlying cause. Perhaps not surprisingly, two-year-olds were more susceptible to injury than three-year-olds.
While there are of course many other reasons – including muscular issues such as tying up, respiratory problems, and viral infection – why horses may fail to train, in this survey medical issues accounted for only 5% of the total training days lost.
Balance between damage and repair processes are imperative
There are many factors that affect the chance of injury in Thoroughbreds in training, including genetic predisposition, conformation, and training surface. Style and type of training, in terms of frequency and intensity and how this is balanced through recovery protocols, is also likely to be a significant factor in the incidence of injury. The nature of training means that a balance between damage and repair processes are imperative. Physiological systems need to be put under stress to trigger a suitable training response, which inevitably involves a degree of micro-damage.
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Epiduroscopy: An exciting window into back pain in horses
/Published in North American Trainer, Winter 2017 issue.
Back pain is a well-known cause of lameness, gait alterations, and poor performance in sport horses. Up to 25% of dressage horse owners report back problems in their animals, but not only sport horses are affected.
Although racehorses compete at a younger age than other equine athletes, they might suffer from back pain more often than we think, as autopsy studies have identified pathological changes in the back of the majority of examined young Thoroughbreds.
Until recently, it has been very difficult to investigate back pain and it is easy to overlook this as a cause of disappointing performance. A novel surgical technique that has recently been reported in Equine Veterinary Journal may change all this....
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Training yearlings: Schools of thought around the world
/Published in North American Trainer, Winter 2017.
Consider throwing a 13-year-old school child into a university environment straight from prep school.
The child would be faced with sights, sounds, and influences that the young mind would struggle to compute, with physical rigors on the sports field that would either disappoint the mind or cause physical damage. I cannot think of any parent that would choose this for their adolescent. Yet we often do this to the young horse, plucking them straight from the sleepy pastures of their nursery into an environment that is measured upon its production of top-level runners. Perhaps we send them via the sales…an entrance examination of sorts.
When put like this it is clear that, as custodians of young bloodstock, we might consider a period of preparation during which the horse would be introduced to saddle and rider and taught the basic lessons that would allow it to fit into the program of the trainer that its owner chooses. These early lessons would also give each individual a careful conditioning of the physical stresses that will be tested further upon his or her graduation to the greater strains required to reach race fitness.
For the sake of this article pre-training will be considered to be the safe development of a horse towards its first joining a trainer or returning from a break not enforced by injury, as opposed to rehabilitation. The American racing industry has the perfect phrase for this: “legging up.”
While there has been a constant uptick in the number of commercial pre-training yards in Europe over the last 25 years to satisfy a growing demand for this service, this is something that has been a longstanding practice further afield, particularly in countries where there is stabling pressure at the racetrack or in metropolitan stables, not to mention numerous larger owners who employ a farm trainer or establish their own pre-training division.
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Isn't Training Thoroughbreds Hard Enough? - Overcoming Adversity
/Published in North American Trainer, Winter 2017 issue.
Nearly 30 years before paralyzed jockey Dennis Collins turned to training Thoroughbreds to continue his lifelong passion with horses, Donna Zook took that journey, one she’s still on. Racing primarily at Mountaineer Park and Charles Town Races in West Virginia, she has saddled 205 winners from 2,617 starts, with earnings of nearly $1.5 million, all after her terrifying riding accident nearly took her life.
Her journey – made even harder by prejudices against women trainers - gives hope that others can also train Thoroughbreds from a wheelchair. And others have, indeed, followed that incredibly difficult path.
Isn’t training Thoroughbreds hard enough? “I wouldn’t tell anybody to become a trainer,” said California trainer Dan Hendricks, whose successful career has continued despite a motorcycle accident that left him paralyzed in 2004. “It’s a tough way to make a living. It’s 24/7. And it’s become harder, much harder to start out than when I did.”
He had considerable success before his accident, but two of his best horses, Brother Derek and Om, came after Hendricks was forced to train from a wheelchair. “The one advantage I had is I had been training for a while,” he said. “I had owners who stood with me. I didn’t lose a single owner.”
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The importance of identifying lower and upper limb lameness
/Published in North American Trainer, Winter 2017 issue.
In Thoroughbred racing, injuries to the limbs are a major welfare and safety concern, the leading reason for horses to be taken out of training. Lameness causes a high turnover in racing stables and, as many trainers know, it has huge financial implications for the owner, trainer, and the racing industry in general. Previous investigators have found that just over 50% of horses in training in England and Germany experience lameness during training, and approximately 20% of horses in the U.K. suffer lameness that prevents them from returning to training. With this amount of horses on lay-up, it can be difficult to run a profitable racing stable.
In addition to having an impact on the horse’s welfare, severe musculoskeletal injury poses a serious danger for riders, who are at risk when a horse sustains a catastrophic injury or suffers sudden death. Researchers in the U.S. found that a jockey was 171 times more likely to be injured when a horse they were riding in a race died. In Thoroughbred racing, the most common life-threatening injury to horses involves fractures of bones in the fetlock. Therefore, the best way to improve safety and welfare of both horses and jockeys is to highlight risk factors for fractures in an attempt to prevent these catastrophic traumas.
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Trainer of the Quarter - Tim Glyshaw
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By Bill Heller
Trainer Tim Glyshaw might still be pinching himself. On October 7th at Keeneland, the five-year-old horse Bucchero, owned by Ironhorse Racing Stable, LLC and trained by Glyshaw, captured the Grade 2 Woodford Stakes by a length and three-quarters at odds of 26-1. Eight days later in Toronto, he trained Wayne Spalding and Faron McCubbins’ five-year-old gelding Bullards Alley to a win in the Grade 1 Canadian International by 10¾ lengths at odds of 42-1.
“It was pretty incredible,” the former high school teacher and basketball coach said. “We always thought those horses were really nice horses, but it’s almost unimaginable.”
The kicker? Bullards Alley, who had given Glyshaw his first graded stakes victory by taking the Grade 3 Louisville Handicap at Churchill Downs on May 21st, 2016, hadn’t won another race since, losing 15 straight, including all nine starts this year, heading into the Canadian International. “He hadn’t won a race all year, but he sure picked a good time to do it,” Glyshaw laughed.
These are happy times for Glyshaw and his wife/assistant trainer Natalie, who race at Churchill Downs and Indiana Grand. Natalie, a daughter of jockey Ronald Ardoin, was working as a track photographer at Lone Star Park when she met Tim. She was also a track photographer at Churchill Downs.
He’s come a long way after deciding to re-direct his life. Unlike his wife, Glyshaw didn’t come from a racing background. “I am absolutely not from a racing family,” he said. He attended Indiana University and taught high school English, history, physical education, and driver’s education for three years while coaching basketball and soccer. “I really loved coaching, not so much the teaching,” he said.
Bucchero
He changed his life when he decided to attend the Taylor Made Farm internship program for one year. “The only time I’d been around horses was with Lipizzaner Stallions, picking feet and brushing them,” he said.
He loved working with Thoroughbreds and became a hotwalker for trainer Bob Holthus. “They took bets on how long I would last,” Glyshaw said. “I showed up in a polo shirt. They thought I was a little pretty boy.” He said the over-under was one week. He stayed seven years.
After working for trainer Cole Norman for two years, Glyshaw opened his own stable in 2004. “I just decided it was time,” he said.
He struggled the first four years, winning just 32 races. In 2008, his numbers jumped up with 22 wins and earnings of $468,610. He has already clinched his sixth consecutive year with more than $1 million in earnings after a rough patch when his horses were among those quarantined at Fair Grounds in the winter and spring following an outbreak of Equine Herpes Virus (EHV-1). “A lot of horsemen were affected,” he said. “It wasn’t just me.” His situation became worse when eight of his horses were claimed.
Now he’s back up to 27 horses, with 19 at Churchill Downs and eight at Indiana Grand. That includes two graded stakes winners. “I almost started crying when Bucchero won at Keeneland,” he said. “Now people can see we can win graded stakes at Keeneland and Woodbine. It would be nice if we get noticed.”
He was asked if he ever wonders what his life would have been had he remained a teacher and coach. “I really miss coaching basketball,” he said. “But getting to play and work with horses, it doesn’t get any better than that. And they don’t talk back.”
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Alan Balch - Achtung!
/Published in North American Trainer, Winter 2017 issue.
Now there’s a word to get your attention. For those of us of a certain age, it comes freighted with emotions from our parents, who fought World War II. As well as from countless movies and books whose characters would shout it at hapless suffering minions.
But it’s really a simple German word meaning just that, “attention,” although sometimes translated to carry “danger” along with it. Here, I mean it both ways.
During this championship season in America every year . . . and the northern hemisphere . . . we’re treated to such definitive racing, including the Arc and British Champions Day. Then the Breeders’ Cup, while still not really the “world championships” worthy of genuflecting, is a wonderful showcase of the sport. Ending the calendar year gives us a chance to take stock of where we stand, what has changed, what hasn’t, and where we’re going...
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PHBA: PA Day at the Races
/Published in North American Trainer, Winter 2017 issue.
Pennsylvania’s Day at the Races 2017 kicked off Parx Racing’s fall season, and proved to be another exciting day in Pennsylvania racing. Despite the rain that threatened, then rolled in, before the first stakes race, over 80 PA-breds showed what they’re made of as they battled down the stretch in each of the card’s 10 races.
The Pennsylvania Horse Breeders Association (PHBA) treated Pennsylvania breeders and their guests, owners, and trainers to a buffet lunch, complete with a private third-floor view of the track. Keith Jones, retired NHL player, current hockey studio analyst for NBCSN, and member of competitive nature, as he has throughout his career, and never gave up. He took on his rivals in the stretch, grabbed the lead near the wire, and won with the determination that he’s known for.
Winning the Medal and his connections celebrated for the second year in a row as the six-year-old son of Medallist rallied to win his second $100,000 Marshall Jenney Stakes. Even with the race being forced off of the turf due to the nonstop rain, the gelding provided the biggest upset of the day, blasting from last at the half-mile pole and flying by his competitors to for the win. Bred by Rick Molineaux, owned by R and L Racing, and trained by Patricia Farro, he went off at 15-1, paying $32.
Ted Vanderlaan, brother to Dr. Teresa Garofalo, namesake of the fourth stakes race of the day, was in attendance to cheer on the winner and celebrate his sister. Garofalo was the treasurer of the PHBA board before she passed away in 2010 from acute myeloid leukemia. Her equine practice in West Chester, Smokey’s Run Farm, focused on equine reproduction, and the stakes in her name is a special one to the PHBA. The winner, three-year-old Grand Prix -- a half-sister to 2016 Breeders’ Cup Filly & Mare Sprint-G1 winner Finest City -- had her own cheering section with breeder and owner Hank Nothhaft and the crew that traveled to Pennsylvania to watch the filly run. Under jockey Jose Ferrer, the daughter of Tale of the Cat went to the front after the first sixteenth of a mile and never looked back to win by a length and a half. Grand Prix won the New Start Stakes at Penn National back in June, and the win in the Garofalo gives her a second black-type win.
As the rain continued to fall, the $100,000 Mrs. Penny Stakes for fillies and mares aged three and up, was also moved off the turf. Jockey Brian Pedroza and four-year-old filly Great Soul, by Great Notion, opened a three-length lead with an eighth of a mile to go and held off latecomer Imply for a close win. Great Soul was bred and is owned by Steve and Jane Long, and trained by Tom Proctor.
We extend a sincere thank you to all of our members and guests who attended, as well as the board members and special guests who presented the gifts in each race. We’re looking forward to a successful and productive 2018 breeding season and wish everyone the best of luck in the coming year. Visit www.pabred.com for a full gallery of the day’s photos!
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Sid Fernando - What have you done for me lately?
/Juddmonte Farms’ Arrogate, the champion three-year-old colt of 2016, has won seven of 11 starts and earned $17,302,600 – a record for a North American-trained racehorse – he entered the Breeders’ Cup Classic, but following two consecutive losses, in the Grade 2 San Diego Handicap on July 22 and the Grade 1 Pacific Classic on August 19, he did not go off as the favorite in the race.
It wasn’t that long ago, following emphatic wins in the Grade 1 Pegasus World Cup Invitational Stakes in January and the Grade 1 Dubai World Cup Sponsored by Emirates Airlines in March, that he was being heralded in the media as one of the all-time greats. But in a classic case of “What have you done for me lately?”, the big grey son of Unbridled’s Song’s stock has plummeted. His workouts leading up to the Classic had been put under the microscope by all types of “experts” on social media, and their consensus view is that Arrogate didn’t train as well as he did last year before he defeated California Chrome in a thriller of a Classic.
Some of these same folks, however, had said the same thing about Arrogate before the Pegasus – there’d been an issue with his right hind foot that required a three-quarter shoe – but Arrogate won that race in brilliant style.
Arrogate’s losses this year have all been at Del Mar, the site of the Breeders’ Cup, and the track’s surface has also been mentioned as a culprit. He’d run at Del Mar last year in an allowance race in early August that he’d won by “only” a length and a quarter, but in his next start, the Grade 1 Travers at Saratoga, he’d walloped a field by 13-and-a-half lengths at 11.70-1 in track-record time...