Earle Mack - The Eclipse Award winning humanitarian philanthropist

By Bill Heller

Many people wonder what they can do to help people in need. Other people just do it. That’s how Earle Mack, who received an Eclipse Award of Merit earlier this year for his contributions to Thoroughbred racing, has fashioned his life. So, at the age of 83, he flew from his home in Palm Beach, Florida, to the Hungary/Ukraine border to deliver food and clothing to desperate Ukrainian refugees who fled their homes to escape the carnage of Vladmir Putin’s Russian thugs.

“I’m going to the front,” he declared in early March. “I woke up and said, `I have to do my part.’” 

He’s always done more than his part. Besides being an extremely successful businessman, he was the United States Ambassador to Finland. An Army veteran, he is helping veterans with PTSD through a unique equine program. He supports the arts. He is an active political advocate. And he has enjoyed international success with his Thoroughbreds—breeding and/or racing 25 stakes winners, including 1993 Canadian Triple Crown Winner and Canadian Horse of the Year Peteski, a horse he purchased from Barry Schwartz; $3.6 million winner Manighar, the first horse to win the Australian Cup, Ranvet Stakes and BMW Cup; and 2002 Brazilian Triple Crown winner Roxinho. Two of his major winners in the U.S. were November Snow and Mr. Light. And he founded the Man o’ War Project, which helps veterans with PTSD via equine-assisted therapy.

“I love my country,” he said. “I love the arts. And horse racing is in my blood.” 

Literally, Ukraine is in his blood. He discovered through Ancestry.com that he is two-thirds Ukrainian. “My great grandfather fled Ukraine to go to Poland,” he said.

So he had to go to Ukraine.

“He’s an extraordinary man,” owner-breeder Barry Schwartz, the former CEO of the New York Racing Association and the co-founder and CEO of Calvin Klein, Inc., said. “I’ve known [Earle] a very, very long time. He loves the horse business. He’s extremely philanthropic. I’ve been on the board with him for the Cardozo Law School at Yeshiva University [where Earle served as chairman for 14 years]. I get to see a different side of him. He’s smart. He’s articulate. He’s a class act.”

In early March, Mack, a trustee of the Appeal Conscience Foundation, called owner/breeder Peter Brant (a fellow member of that foundation) and former New York State Governor George Pataki (whose parents are Hungarian) to head to one of the most dangerous locations on the planet. Brant supplied the plane. His wife, Stephanie (Seymour), brought 40 big duffle bags of clothing, “She spent over $30,000 buying the clothes,” Mack said. “I took clothes off my racks. I brought all the fruit that we could find and a couple boxes of chocolate.”

The delegation landed on March 10th, two weeks after Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, and began an unforgettable experience. Displaying yet another talent, he wrote about his trip in an op-ed published by The Hill, an American newspaper and top political website, on March 16th:

“How would you feel, in this day and age, if you were fleeing your home with only the few things you could carry in freezing winds and winter temperatures? How would you feel sitting in your car for 17 hours, waiting to cross a border, all the while worried that the sound in the sky above might be a missile or bomb bringing certain death? How would you feel trapped in your basement or a public bomb shelter, food and water running out, afraid to leave and face death? How would you feel if your city was under attack and you watched as civilians were shot up close by Russian soldiers and neighborhoods were rubbled from faraway artillery? How would you feel leaving your fathers, husbands and brothers behind to fight against impossible odds?

“This is what I have wondered, listening to heartbreaking stories that have brought me to tears, told by Ukrainian refugees on my recent trip to the Hungarian border and into the Ukrainian city of Mukachevo, where hundreds of thousands have fled the war with Vladmir Putin’s Russia.”

Mack went on to share his experience of Ukraine, “Ukraine has cold winds. Thirty-five feels like 15. Lots of hills and farmland. Peter and his 17-year-old daughter stayed at the border. We went into Mukachevo, a city of about 20,000 to 25,000 people. At that point—two weeks into the war—there were more than 500,000 people in that area, hoping that there’s something to go back to.

“We went into a children’s hospital ward filled with children. We looked at a COVID ward with kids lying down. We went into a school converted into a dormitory. We saw all these kids, ages two to eight with their mothers. Men, 16 to 65, weren’t allowed to cross the border. The kids were crying. Not much to eat. We brought in the fruit. We brought in the chocolate.

“I started handing out the chocolates. These kids ate all the chocolate. I have the empty box. I put it on one of the six-year-old kid’s head and started singing, `No more chocolates; no more chocolates.’ That kid takes the empty box and puts it on another kid’s head. They’re all singing, ‘No more chocolates; no more chocolates.’ When I was leaving, the director of the center came running after me and said this is the first time they laughed in two weeks.” 

Mack wrote of this bittersweet moment in his story in The Hill: “As we prepared to leave, there was a 12-year-old girl who literally begged me to take her with us. I can’t describe how hard it was to walk away from this young girl whose life is forever changed.”

This from a man whose life is forever changing.

Terry Finley, the CEO of West Point Thoroughbreds, said, “Although we’ve never owned a horse together, we try to make a point to spend a couple of races at Saratoga, just the two of us in the box. I pick his brain. He’s such a good person. He’s got a world of knowledge. He’s a fun guy. He’s a caring guy—as cool a guy as there is in the industry.”

Peter Brant, Earle Mack, Lily Brant, Christopher Brant & Karen Dresbach (executive vice president of the appeal of Conscience Foundation) before boarding a plane loaded with medical supplies, food, clothing and other essentials for Ukrainian refugees arriving in Hungary

One of four boys born in New York City, Earle’s father, H. Bert Mack, founded The Mack Company, a real estate development company. Earle was a senior partner of The Mack Company and a founding board member of the merged Mack-Cali Realty Corporation. He has served as the chairman and CEO of the New York State Council on the Arts for three years and produced a number of plays and movies. His political action included an unsuccessful attempt to draft Paul Ryan as the 2016 GOP presidential candidate.

His entry into horse racing was rather circuitous. He learned to ride at the Sleepy Hollow Country Club in North Tarrytown, N.Y. “All the juniors and seniors were allowed to use the trails at Sleepy Hollow County Club,” he said. “I was 16, 17. I got to ride on the course. That’s how I learned to ride.”

Just after graduating college, he returned to Sleepy Hollow. “One day, I was dismounting; the riding master who taught me how to ride came over to me and said, `I’m very sorry to tell you this, but my wife has cancer and needs surgery. I need $2,500 to pay for surgery.’ He owned a horse who won a race up in Canada.”

Mack went inside with him to examine the horse’s papers. “I said, ‘I’m buying a $5,000 horse for $2,500’; I bought it on the spot. I thought this sounds like a good deal. The horse’s name was Secret Star. He stayed in Canada and raced at Bluebonnets and Greenwood. The horse won about $20,000.”

Flush with excitement, Mack bought four horses from George Kellow. “They did well. I said, ‘This game is easy.’”

He laughs now—well aware how difficult racing can be. That point was driven home in the late 1960s after Mack had graduated from Drexel University with a Bachelor’s Degree in Science and Fordham School of Law. He served in the U.S. Army Infantry as a second lieutenant in active duty in 1959 and as a first lieutenant of the Infantry and Military Police on reserve duty from 1960–1968.

In the late 1960s, he was struggling with his Thoroughbreds. “My horses weren’t doing that well,” he said. “I bought two seasons to Northern Dancer. His stud fee was $10,000 Canadian. When the stud fee came due, I didn’t have the money to pay for it. I walked over to my dad’s office. I said, ‘I need a loan.’ He said, `No, you’re in the wrong business. Get out of that business.’”

Mack walked back to his office. “I started to think, ‘How am I going to get this money?’ Twenty minutes later, my father threw a check on my desk. Then he got down on his knees, and he said, ‘Son, sell your horses. Get out of this business. You’re not going to make money in this business.’”

He might have had a good thought. “The two Northern Dancers never amounted to anything,” Mack said.

That seemed like the perfect time to follow his father’s advice and give up on racing. But Mack stayed. “I just loved the business; I loved being there. I loved the horse. I loved the people. I just loved it—that’s why. I still love the sport. I love to go to the track. I love to support the sport. I love to help any way I can. I’ve given my time and my efforts to our industry.”

That list is long: Board of Trustees member of the New York Racing Association 1990-2004; chairman of the New York State Racing Commission (1983–89); member of the New York State Thoroughbred Racing Commission (1983–1989); member of the Board of Directors of the New York State Thoroughbred Breeding and Development Corp (1983–89); and senior advisor on racing and breeding to Governor Mario Cuomo and Pataki. 

The Earle Mack Thoroughbred Champion Award has been presented annually since 2011 to an individual for outstanding efforts and influence on Thoroughbred racehorse welfare, safety and retirement.

He has been a long-time backer of The Thoroughbred Retirement Foundation and the Grayson Jockey Club Research Foundation.

In 2011, he established the Earle Mack Thoroughbred Retirement Foundation Award. The first three winners were Frank Stronach, Dinny Phipps and famed chef Bobby Flay.

His brother Bill, the past chairman of the Guggenheim Museum and Guggenheim Foundation, also owned horses, including $900,000 earner Grand Slam and $500,000 earner Strong Mandate. But he did better with investments in art. “He bought art; I bought horses,” Earle said. “Guess who did better? Much better.”

But who’s had more fun? Mack bought Peteski, a son of 1978 Triple Crown Champion Affirmed out of the Nureyev mare Vive for $150,000 from Barry Schwartz after the horse made his lone start as a two-year-old, finishing fifth in an Ontario-bred maiden race on November 14, 1992.

Earle Mack, Barry Irwin, jockey Jamie Soencer and Team Valor connections celebrate Spanish Mission winning the $1 million Jockey Club Derby Invitational Stakes at Belmont Park in 2019

After buying Peteski, Mack sent the horse to American and Canadian Hall of Famer Roger Attfield. Peteski and Attfield put together an unbelievable run: seven victories, two seconds and one third in 10 starts, finishing with career earnings of more than $1.2 million.

Mack told the Thoroughbred Times in October 1993, “Bloodstock agent Patrick Lawley-Wakelin originally called the horse to my attention. I’d always liked Affirmed as a stallion and together with my connections, we thoroughly checked the horse out before I bought him. I was lucky to get him. There were other people trying, too, but I had long standing Canadian relations and was able to move fast. They knew I was a serious player.”

All Peteski did was win the Canadian Triple Crown, taking the Queen’s Plate by six lengths; the Prince of Wales by four lengths and the Breeders by six. He followed that with a 4 ½ length victory in the Gr. 2 Molson Million. In his final start, Peteski finished third by a head as the 7-10 favorite in the Gr. 1 Super Derby at Louisiana Downs. 

 “The thrills he’s given me are something money can’t buy,” Mack told Thoroughbred Times. “One of the reasons for staying in Canada for the Triple Crown was because of the wonderful and nostalgic feelings of my youthful days spent racing there. This is the greatest horse I’ve ever owned.”

Earle with jockey Gerald Mosse at Newbury Racecourse in 2019

Mack would race many other good horses, but the ones who may have had the greatest impact are the anonymous ones he helped locate who participated in the Man o’ War Project—perhaps Mack’s greatest gift. In 2015, out of his concern about the mental health crisis facing veterans, he created and sponsored the Man o’ War Project at Columbia University’s Irving Medical Center to explore the use of  and scientifically evaluate equine-assisted therapy to help veterans suffering from PTSD or other mental health problems. Long-term goals are to test that treatment with other populations. Immediate results have been very promising.

There is a sad reality about veterans: more die from suicide than enemy fire. The project was the first university-led research study to examine the effectiveness of equine-assisted therapy in treating veterans with PTSD.

“My love for the horse and my great respect and empathy for our soldiers bravely fighting every day for our country and not getting the proper treatment led me to do this,” Mack said. “Soldiers come home with the strain of their service on the battlefield. The suicides are facts. There was no science or methodology proving that equine-assisted therapy (EAT) could actually and effectively treat veterans with PTSD. All reports were anecdotal.”

The project was led by co-directors Dr. Prudence Fisher, an associate professor of clinical psychiatric social work at Columbia University and an expert in PTSD in youth; and Dr. Yuval Veria, a veteran of the Israeli Armed Forces who is a professor of medical psychology at Columbia and director of trauma and PTSD at New York State Psychiatric Institute.

After a pilot study of eight veterans lasting eight weeks in 2016, 40 veterans participated in a 2017 study also lasting eight weeks. Each participant underwent interviews before, during and after the treatment period and received follow-up evaluations for three months post-treatment to determine if any structural changes were occurring in the brain. Each weekly session lasted 90 minutes with five horses, using the same two horses per each treatment group. The veterans started by observing the horses and slowly building on their interactions from hand-walking the horses, grooming them and doing group exercises.

“We take a team approach to the treatment,” Fisher said. “We have trained mental health professionals, social workers, equine specialists and a horse wrangler for an extra set of eyes to ensure safety during each session.”

Marine Sergeant Mathew Ryba at the Bergen Equestrian Center

The results have been highly encouraging. A 2021 article in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry concluded “EAT-PTSD shows promise as a potential new intervention for veterans with PTSD. It appears safe, feasible and clinically viable. These preliminary results encourage examination of EAT-PTSD in larger, randomized controlled trials.”

Mack was ecstatic: “This is a scientific breakthrough. You could see the changes. It’s drug free. Before, you had to take more and more and more drugs. Before you know it, you’re hitting your family.”

The Man o’ War project works. It helps. It could possibly help a lot of people besides veterans. That would be the biggest victory of Mack’s remarkable life.

“That would be my Triple Crown,” he said.

Mack was asked how he does what he does in so many varied arenas. “Pure tenacity, drive and 24/7 devotion to the things that were important to me and public service,” he replied. “I’ve devoted my life to public service, my business, horses and the arts.”  

And now, to Ukraine. Lord bless him for that.

John Alexander Ortiz - the trainer of Barber Road - has plenty to look forward to.

MY WAY

By Ken Snyder

John Alexander Ortiz has two favorite memories from his first Oaklawn Park meet in 2017: listening to Frank Sinatra’s signature song, “My Way,” on the eight-hour drive back to Lexington from Hot Springs, Arkansas after the meet and getting some advice that he has never forgotten.

“Steve Asmussen and I were in a race together. He ran third and I ran fourth; and [as] we were walking back to check our horses after the race, we happened to walk side by side. Steve and I didn’t really know each other that well at the time, but I like to talk a lot, so I asked him, ‘What advice would you give a young trainer?’ He looked at me and said, ‘Stick to your guns. Nobody knows your horses better than you do. Don’t let anybody else tell you where to run them. Don’t change your system. Be who you are.’”

Ortiz may have also interspersed “My Way” with whistling a happy tune on the way home. He saddled eight winners in 46 starts at Oaklawn, for a 17%-win percentage. That’s very respectable for a trainer in only his first full year on the racetrack. He went on to earn $688,013 for the year—an enviable figure for any new trainer.

“His way” and the advice he got at Oaklawn also produced impressive results this past year: $2,614,398 compared to $1,094,092 in 2020. Surpassing even that accomplishment, perhaps, is an innovation in barn management that may have other trainers shaking their head in amazement, others pretending they didn’t hear about it, and still more near Ortiz’s barn keeping a close watch on their own barn help.

“I quit paying the help by the number of horses that grooms were taking care of. Instead, I gave everybody a yearly salary. If you’re doing six horses, or seven or eight, or four horses, you’re going to get a yearly salary—the same paycheck,” he said.

The salaried system solved a chronic short-term problem of finding barn help and the long-term problem--equally, if not more importantly—of keeping barn help.

The closure of Churchill Downs this past summer for the new turf track installation was the time for Ortiz to launch his system. He is based in Lexington and had stabled during summers at Churchill Downs. Barn help didn’t want to travel to Colonial Downs in Virginia where Ortiz and many other trainers had to locate. “We went there with 27 horses and only two grooms. We didn’t have any hotwalkers,” he said.  Aside from the horses, the barn was Ortiz, three exercise riders, an assistant trainer, a foreman and the two grooms.  

With all-hands-on-deck required, the traditional pay structure of pay-per-head went out the proverbial window followed by job descriptions. 

Ortiz described the new system as “a test run that was scary.  

“Nobody was assigned a specific horse. My brother [Daniel, Ortiz’s assistant trainer] and the grooms would walk down the line and muck stalls together. Daniel and the exercise riders would walk hots, help catch horses and fill the water buckets. 

“When everybody was secure in knowing they were going to get paid a certain amount, they were happy to do whatever it took to get the job done.”

The system continued for a variety of reasons, primarily among them that it worked. The barn workers loved it. It also solved issues and problems that have always existed in racetrack barns.

“Normally, a groom gets a job taking care of five, six, seven horses; and they get paid by the head.  Usually, it’s about $110, $120 per head per week. I realized that there was a lot of juggling keeping track of it—how many horses this guy did, how many horses that guy did—and you can get a little bit of jealousy: ‘Why is that guy grooming four horses, and he’s grooming seven?’” said Ortiz.

The same check for grooms eliminates all that,” he said. Likewise, all hotwalkers, exercise riders, foremen and assistant trainers are paid the same.    

John and Daniel Ortiz

Salaries also minimize one hiring obstacle: Ortiz has had to turn away people who have told him, “If I can’t groom seven horses, I can’t work for you.” 

Post-Colonial Downs, and with a full complement of help, the system and benefits from it continued.  “With a salary, they’re willing to help me do extra things they normally haven’t had time for or don’t want to do because ‘it’s not my job.’ Those words don’t exist in my barn,” said Ortiz.

He freely admits he is “over-paying” barn help. “I’ve had grooms make up to $1,200 a week in pay. If they want to do laundry, I’ll tack on $200, do night watch: $200, walk a horse over and back for a race: $40.  

Workers traveling with Ortiz from meet to meet can make the following annually: exercise riders: $40,000 to $42,000; grooms and foremen: $34,000 to $36,000; and hotwalkers: $24,000 to $26,000.

“Not only do they have a good yearly salary, but at the end of the year, I gave everybody a bonus. I know how hard everybody worked last year. I know how hard they worked for me.”  

The key question—Are you getting it back in win totals and earnings?--prompts an instant answer from Ortiz: “One-hundred percent, yes.”

The exact number, of course, is incalculable.  

“I want to believe we’re having a lot more success because everybody in my barn is a happy worker. Everybody wants to see us succeed. They support me because I support them. I think that’s where I get the biggest return.” 

“Success” in 2021 is understating it. The increase from 2020 was just short of a whopping 139 percent—more than enough to take on higher barn pay.

If any other trainer has paid salaries rather than weekly, by-the-head wages, the affable Ortiz hasn’t heard of it. “It makes more sense to me to have reliable help than a bunch of people randomly here, coming in to get a paycheck. When everybody is secure financially, people seem to concentrate on what they’re doing.”

The change in how he paid help also comes from experience. Since being on the racetrack, Ortiz (not related to jockeys José and Irad Ortiz, as he is often asked) has worked every job in the barn including exercise rider. He knows well the ups and downs of financial fortune and constant worry about finances. “Hard-working people—the ones that really put their blood, sweat and tears into this—deserve to be secure financially. They have families.” Losing horses from the barn through a claim, for example, and the pay that goes with it, he added, is the “one thing that scares the help on the ground.”

John Ortiz and Sandra Washington, barn foreman

Ortiz is the son of former jockey Carlos Ortiz, who rode in Colombia before moving with his family to the U.S. to ride here. Embarking on a career in 1988, Ortiz rode at New York and mid-Atlantic tracks. A spill that broke his femur ended his jockey career but led to exercise riding for Bill Mott for 15 years. Working for Mott brought his son John into contact with the legendary trainer. 

As a small boy, he would accompany his father to the racetrack. “I was introduced to racehorses through Bill’s barn,” Ortiz recalled. 

“One summer at my dad’s birthday barbecue with trainers, jockeys, agents, etc., we were sharing horse stories, and Bill Mott looked at me across a table and asked, ‘What are you doing this summer? Why don’t you come and work for me?’”

Ortiz was 15 years old and walked hots for Mott that summer as well as on weekends. He said he fell in love with racetrack barns that summer, but with “an itch to ride horses like my dad. Bill got me on my first racehorse.”

He also wanted to know everything about barn operations—the foundation for his career as a trainer.   Even though he did not groom horses, he talked to those who did to learn everything he could about it.  “I was always interested in becoming a trainer. Even if I was a jockey, I knew it wouldn’t be long term because of my weight.”

As a kind of “plan B” to a jockey career, Ortiz spent a year at a trade school learning to be an auto mechanic. Jobs, however, were scarce after his training.

“My family moved to Ocala in Florida. I stayed back, and I couldn’t find a job as a mechanic. My dad said, ‘I left the helmet. I left some boots and the vest. Put ‘em on and go freelance. If you want to stay in New York, find your way.’”

“I breezed my first horse for Dominic Galluscio. He taught me how to breeze and gave me an opportunity.”

When Mott returned to New York from a winter in Florida in 2006, Ortiz went to work for him as a foreman and exercise rider. “I loved working for him. I learned horsemanship, which is rare nowadays,” he said. 

As important as Mott was to him, his former assistant trainer, Leana Willaford, was the most important influence. “Being under Leana, I learned all the tricks of the trade. I still use techniques and knowledge she gave me, and I’m forever grateful for that.”

In 2008, Ortiz went to work for Graham Motion at Palm Meadows in Florida and Fair Hills in Maryland and got his assistant’s license under the British trainer. From Motion, he said “I learned organization…what it takes to run a barn.  

“Everybody had a task, and it was all charted. How he ran his barn was like a business. Everything I do is on the computer, on a chart.”

After a year-and-a-half with Motion, Ortiz went to work as an assistant for Kellyn Gorder. “I’ve worked for some really great trainers—Bill Mott and Graham Motion—but working for Kellyn was the best experience in my lifetime. 

David Vincente

“I got to experience a new side of horses: the yearlings, the two-year-olds, and working for farms like WinStar, Dixiana and Three Chimneys.  

“I was able to see horses coming off rehab and how to develop the babies. That was one of the key elements that I learned from Kellyn.”

The best thing he ever learned from Gorder, however, may have been something intangible that he carried into his own stable and that may have been a contributor to a switch to paying salaries to barn help. “We would disagree on stuff, but he told me one day, if we didn’t disagree, we weren’t working together. His ideas became my ideas and my ideas became his; and again, that’s where I developed a mentality that this is a team effort.  

“It’s not about my name on a big board across my barn.”  He means that literally.

“My logo isn’t letters of my name; it’s two lines, two slashes. My hotwalkers, my grooms, my riders, my foreman Sandra Washington, assistant trainers Lindsey Reynolds, Felipe Nichols, and Daniel Ortiz—we all work here in parallel with each other. We don’t cross each other. I’m one of the green stripes, they’re the other, and we’re always side by side.”

Five years after the advice from Steve Asmussen, Ortiz refers to it often. “In 2021, there was a little dry spell in the summertime. I’m walking with my head down kicking rocks and thinking, ‘What am I doing wrong? I gotta change the feed program? We gotta’ do something.’ And then that’s when Steve’s advice popped up in my head: ‘Don’t change anything; stick to your guns.’  

“I stuck to what we were doing. It wasn’t that we were having a slow summer. We were having a successful summer, hitting the board in $100,000 races. We weren’t winning that much, but we were in the right races.”  

Asmussen’s counsel came to mind again more recently. Mucho, who came to Ortiz’s barn in 2021, had never won at a distance over six furlongs and had never raced longer than seven. “I put him in a mile race [the Fifth Season Stakes at Oaklawn on January 15 of this year], and I had a lot of people ask me why I’m stretching him out. ‘You shouldn’t do that; he’s a sprinter.’ No, I’m sticking with my guns. ‘He’s going to go two turns.’ The horse got beat by a neck. I knew my horse. That’s where I was reminded of what Steve told me.”

Mucho, by the way, earned $335,090 in 2021 in 10 starts for Ortiz after earning $350,829 in three years over 19 starts.” The right races, indeed.

The goals? “This year at Oaklawn is to always win a couple more than the year before. We won 15 last year. This year, we’re looking at 20.

“We’re also going to focus on the Breeders’ Cup. That’s the main goal.”

Right now, Ortiz also has a horse on the Derby trail—Barber Road—who at time of writing, has now finished second in three straight stakes races, including an impressive late running performance in the Gr. 3 Southwest Stakes at Oaklawn Park in late January. “Pretty good for a $15,000 weanling,” said Ortiz. 

Could Ortiz be singing “My Way” again after this year’s Kentucky Derby or Breeders’ Cup? We shall see.

The Hirsch family legacy

by Annie Lambert

California’s Bo Hirsch has always relished horse racing, but winning last year’s Breeders’ Cup Filly & Mare Sprint (Gr. 1) with his homebred, Ce Ce, was “icing on the cake.” 

“My goodness, what a thrill,” Hirsch remarked about Ce Ce’s championship. “You talk to people that don’t know anything about horse racing, mention winning a Breeders’ Cup, and they ask what it is. I tell them the best comparison I could give was the Olympics. If you win a Breeders’ Cup race, you’ve pretty much won a gold medal. We won a gold medal last year, and I’m tickled pink.”

Ce Ce, a six-year-old by the late Elusive Quality, accelerated near the top of the Del Mar stretch, overcoming a trio of leaders, including defending champion Gamine, to garner the $1 million purse. Ridden by Victor Espinosa, it was trainer Michael McCarthy’s second Breeders’ Cup victory. 

Hirsch’s love of the sport harkens back to his father, businessman Clement L. Hirsch, who left giant footprints across the racing industry before his death in 2000 at 85. The elder Hirsch was instrumental in co-founding the Oak Tree Racing Association at Santa Anita as well as the current Del Mar Turf Club organization. Ce Ce’s Breeders’ Cup success at Del Mar was homage to Clement.

Clement also invested in pedigree lines that continue to produce the likes of Ce Ce. And, Bo’s love of his father and appreciation for the sport to which he introduced him could not be clearer.

“I just love this business; there’s nothing like it, you know?” Bo, 73, asked rhetorically. “It’s a grownup toy store—a wonderful toy store.”

Founding Father

Clement Hirsch’s common sense, drive and dry sense of humor no doubt contributed to his success in business and racing. He attended Menlo College near San Francisco during the 1930s.

While still in college, Clement and some friends bought a washed-up Greyhound dog for very little money. The owner was going to euthanize the canine because it was too broken down to race. The boys brought the dog back to good health, ended up racing it and were excited the process culminated with winning some money. That may have been the future horse owner’s first taste of racing, but it was most certainly his catalyst into the business world.

It didn’t take long to figure out the “people person” with street smarts would choose business over school. Having learned about caring for dogs with the Greyhound, Clement—who served a stint in the Marines during World War II—realized people, mostly, fed their pets table scraps in that era. He began selling a meat-based dog food, door-to-door, out of the trunk of his car. The entrepreneur wound up building that effort into Kal Kan Pet Foods, which he ultimately sold to the Mars Corporation that now markets it under their Pedigree label.

By 1947, Clement decided to invest some of his success into Thoroughbred racing. He hired Robert H. “Red” McDaniel, an established trainer in Northern California. They claimed Blue Reading, a $6,500 outlay, which went on to win 11 stakes, including the 1951 Bing Crosby Handicap, San Diego Handicap and Del Mar Handicap, earning $185,000. From that introduction, Clement was hooked; he owned horses for the rest of his life.

Breeders Cup winner CeCe is a third generation homebred, and Hirsch plans on extending the pedigree line

More Horses, Same Trainer

Clement hired Warren Stute to train his horses in 1950—his second and final trainer. Stute remained his trainer until Clement’s death, 50 years later—a feat we may likely never see again.

“My father could be difficult, and Warren had a mind of his own,” Bo pointed out. “I remember someone asking my father, ‘How did you guys stay together so many years? How could you put up with Warren all those years?’ He said, ‘I just turned down my hearing aide.’” 

“It worked,” Bo added with a laugh.

The line of bloodstock that Ce Ce hails from began when Clement attended a sale at Hollywood Park in March 1989. Upon walking in, Mel Stute, Warren’s brother, was bidding on a horse. Mel told his brother’s owner the horse was going over his price range, but that it was worth the money. Clement did make one bid, which dropped the hammer at $50,000.

Hirsch could hardly believe he bought a horse with one wave of his arm, but the result was fortuitous. He had purchased the two-year-old, Magical Mile (J.O. Tobin – Gils Magic, by Magesterial). 

The colt won his first out, a maiden special weight, at Hollywood Park just two months later. He broke the track record that day, running the 5-furlongs in :56 2-5, while winning by 7 ½ lengths. He came back in July to win the Hollywood Juvenile Championship Stakes (G2), ultimately earning $131,000 (7-4-0-1) during his career.

“I remember my father being interviewed once when the horse was really doing well,” Bo recalled. “Someone said, ‘You must be getting Derby fever.’ My father said, ‘No, no, no, that’s not realistic; I wouldn’t think in that area, it’s such a long ways off.’ There was a hesitation, then he said to the guy, ‘But, for what it’s worth, we’re trying to get the name Magical Mile changed to Magical Mile and a Quarter.’”

The Howell S. Wynne family owned Magical Mile’s dam, Gils Magic, a mare with no money earned in only one start. Clement tried more than once to buy the mare, but to no avail. He did, however, show up at the sales every time one of her offspring was offered.

“The next great one was Magical Maiden,” Bo said. “He kept trying to buy Gils Magic, but they wouldn’t sell, so he bought what he could from that line. It built up.”

Magical Maiden (by Lord Avie) was a multiple graded stakes winner of $903,245. She is the second dam on Ce Ce’s pedigree. Magical Maiden foaled Ce Ce’s dam, Miss Houdini by Belong To Me in February 2000. 

Miss Houdini, trained by Warren Stute, only made a total of four starts at two and three, but managed to win the Del Mar Debutante Stakes (Gr. 1) just about six weeks after a successful maiden special weight debut. Her two wins and a second totaled lifetime earnings of $187,600.

Clement and Warren imported Figonero from Argentina in 1969. The four-year-old stallion was already a winner in his homeland, but he made waves in the United States. Figonero ran third to Ack Ack in both the American Handicap and the San Pasqual Stakes. He won the Hollywood Gold Cup with the late Alvaro Pineda riding. Rumor has it, Stute tore out a wooden deck in his backyard and replaced it with a swimming pool shortly after the Gold Cup. 

Pineda was also aboard when Figonero set a world record for 1 1/8 miles while winning the 1969 Del Mar Handicap at Del Mar.

“Figonero was a good one,” Bo remembered. “He ran multiple races in just a few weeks. He won an overnight race, ran third in the American Handicap and came back, ran against [1969 and 1970 co-champion handicap male] Nodouble in the Gold Cup and won the darn thing. They took him back to Chicago in the mud and he didn’t do well, came back here and broke the world record in the Del Mar Handicap.” 

“That record lasted about three years until this horse called Secretariat broke it,” he said, chuckling. 

Big Ideas

During the late 1940s, Clement got the idea to establish a racetrack in Las Vegas, Nevada.

After acquiring the land and finding investors, Hirsch ran into a multitude of setbacks, which slowed down his project. Eventually the frustrations ended and they had a racetrack. Hirsch brought in some of his own horses to encourage his friends and others to bring more livestock, according to Bo.

“They tried to get it going and it just didn’t work,” the younger Hirsch commented. “[Some local businessmen] offered to buy him out, and he was smart enough to sell. They were only in business for a very short time. I think it was a tough deal there with the heat in the summer and just getting the people to go to the races. They were gamblers, but not racetrackers—a different kind of gambler.”

Hirsch gave Las Vegas a shot and it didn’t work out, but it’s possible his vision was just a little ahead of its time.

By 1968, Clement was securely ensconced in the Thoroughbred industry as a breeder and owner. The businessman had a “never let an idea lay idle'' mindset; so when he noticed unused calendar dates between the summer meet at Del Mar and Santa Anita’s winter meet, the wheels began turning.

Hirsch organized a meeting with Robert Strub, owner of Santa Anita at the time, Lou Rowan, an owner/breeder; and equine insurance broker, veterinarian Jack Robbins and a few others to discuss options for utilizing Santa Anita on those dark dates. The organizers were able to get their dates approved, and the Oak Tree Racing Association at Santa Anita had their opening meet the following fall.

“Once they got approval for the dates, they came back to finalize things with Strub,” Bo said. “Jack Robbins told me the story that they’re in a room and Robert Strub looks up and says, ‘You know, if this thing doesn’t work out, it’s going to cost us, Santa Anita, a few million bucks.’ That was a lot of money in those days. My father said, ‘You’re covered.’ Strub looked at my father and said, ‘You’ve got a deal.’ Then they shook hands, which was the way they did it in those days.”

Pivotal in creating Oak Tree was Clement Hirsch’s concept that the organization be created as a non-profit.

Clement Hirsch (dark jacket), seated alongside his friend and Oak Tree racing association co-founder Dr Jack Robbins and surrounded by other oak tree board members

 “None of the board members or executives, which were all horsemen, got salaries,” Bo explained. “For the betterment of the horse racing business, they took all that money and put it back into the business and charitable organizations.”

Shortly after the Oak Tree negotiations, Del Mar (owned by the state of California) came up for an operational bid. Clement put together another group of horsemen figuring the non-profit structure would also work for Del Mar.

“My father put the [Del Mar Thoroughbred Club] group together and they bid for the track and the racing dates,” recalled Bo. “Nobody could compete with a non-profit organization. It was a great idea and, of course, they got it. The same group runs it today; it’s been a very successful organization. I’d like to see more of this happen in horse racing across the country.” 

Blended Family

The Hirsch family was an interesting blend of families as Bo was growing up. Clement was married four times, so Bo has full-siblings, half-siblings and step-siblings, which he jokingly calls “a motley group.” He was the only one of those eight kids to take an interest in the racehorses.

“The horse business either gets in your blood or it doesn’t,” Bo opined. “It got into mine; I just loved it the minute I saw it. My father never encouraged me; he thought I was stupid to get in it.”

“He told me I was going to lose my money,” he added with a laugh. “But he loved it, and he couldn’t defend himself for being in the horse business in a practical way. He was successful at it, and I know now why he was in it. I’m in it and I understand: It brings you such joy.”

During the mid-1950s, Clement built his CLH Farm in Chatsworth, outside of Los Angeles. He stood several stallions there over the years, with limited success. When he relocated his family to Newport Beach, he moved the farm to Poway in San Diego County.

Bo said he enjoyed the farm as a kid and did his share of shoveling manure and riding ponies, but he always preferred “to hang out on the front side” at the track.

Similar Guys

Like his father, Bo, who resides in Pacific Palisades, is a businessman. After graduating from the University of Southern California, he worked as a stockbroker until the market dropped in 1972; then he began looking for a different career path. 

His father had sold the pet food company but retained a pioneering company, Rocking K Foods, which provided portion-controlled meals for hospitals and the like. There was also a cannery there where the company canned foods for the government to send to the troops in Vietnam. 

Out of the blue, Bill Gray, president of the company who ran the operation for the retired Clement, asked Bo if he’d consider leaving the brokerage firm to work for him in sales and marketing. Bo replied, ”When do you want me to start?” 

Bo Hirsch

After a short scrimmage with his father over his qualifications regarding a job in the food industry, Bo settled into the job. He ultimately developed the Stagg Chili food lines, which he later sold to Hormel.

“My father always wanted to make sure you knew what you were doing,” Bo explained. “He wanted to make sure you heard both sides of a story, to be sure you were doing what you wanted to do and the right thing to do. He’d always challenge you, take the other side to challenge you and make sure you believed in what you were doing. 

“He did it at home with his kids, too. It was a wonderful lesson to learn to get all the facts before you start making decisions—get in there and figure it out. That was just the kind of guy he was and why he was so successful in all the things he ever did.”

Clement’s energy and unique personality lent itself to memorable stories remembered by those who knew him.

“Alan Balch [now executive director of California Thoroughbred Trainers Association] told me the story of Fred Ryan [an executive at Santa Anita at the time] being in a heated phone conversation,” Bo recalled with a chuckle. “Ryan slammed the phone down and, looking at Alan, said, ‘That damn Clement Hirsch—he’d kick a hornet’s nest open just to get a reaction!’”

When Clement passed away, his son stepped up to continue developing the pedigrees his father had been procuring. Miss Houdini, now 22, was foaled just prior to Clement’s death, but greatly enriched her family tree.

“I started with Warren Stute,” said Bo, regarding his racing stable. “When [Warren] passed, I went to his nephew, Gary Stute—Mel Stute’s son. I still have horses with him. Gary’s a good horseman and we’ve done well; plus, he’s a lot of fun. He’s my cigar smoking partner.”

 “I’ve had as many as four trainers at one time, just trying to feel things out. I liked them all, but I don’t think it’s the best way to go in the long run, at least not for me.”

Cece ridden by victor espinoza, wins the breeders’ cup filly and mare sprint at del mar 2021

Bo sent horses to Michael McCarthy on a recommendation from Michael Wellman, a long-time California owner/breeder.

“If there is a trainer that is a harder worker than Michael McCarthy, they’re living on a day that is longer than 24 hours,” Bo said. “He just works night and day; it’s his life.”

Anticipating Greatness

Miss Houdini has obviously been a wonderful producer for Hirsch. Her current honor roll offspring, Ce Ce, has won eight of her 16 starts, earning $1,753,100 through last year’s aforementioned Breeders’ Cup win. The mare has captured additional group races including the Beholder Mile (Gr. 1), Apple Blossom Handicap (Gr. 1), Princess Rooney (Gr. 2) and the Chillingsworth Stakes (Gr. 3).

Miss Houdini foaled a colt in 2006, Papa Clem—a Kentucky-bred by Smart Strike trained by Gary Stute, which also made his dam proud. Papa Clem broke his maiden at two on his third try. At three, he went on to win the Arkansas Derby (Gr, 2) and finished his career as a four-year-old by winning the San Fernando Stakes (Gr. 2). Between those Gr. 2 races, however, Papa Clem contested two legs of the Triple Crown.

“[Papa Clem] ran fourth in the Derby; he just got beat a head for second,” Bo recalled. “He was sandwiched between Pioneerof The Nile and Musket Man, and there was some bumping. We ran him in the Preakness and probably shouldn’t have. He just looked dead to me in the barn. He was usually jumping around, and he wasn’t. I think he ran sixth. We gave him some time off prior to the San Fernando and then retired him to stud.”

Bo has seven mares in his arsenal. Stradella Road (Elusive Quality) is a full sister to Ce Ce. She was a winner at three and four, ran third in the Lady Shamrock Stakes and has lifetime earnings of $130,169.

The stakes-placed Magical Victory (Victory Gallop), earner of $66,928, also resides in Bo’s broodmare band. She produced Hot Springs (Uncle Mo), a winner of five races and $272,343 including the Commonwealth Turf Stakes (Gr. 3).

Unraced Mama Maxine, named after Bo’s mother, is the dam of Ready Intaglio (Indygo Shiner) that won seven races, earning $197,418 while winning seven races, including the Canadian Derby (Gr. 3). She also foaled the stakes-placed Mama Said No (Exaggerator). Mama Maxine will be bred to California sire Grazen (Benchmark) this year.

“I always want to keep involved in California,” Bo said. “They have a good program to get you to breed here. I’m going to bring Mama Maxine out here; she’s a nice mare from the family. The other six will stay in Kentucky. I have a two-year-old now, four yearlings; and in the next couple of months, we’ll have a few more. They do add up.”

All the people involved with his racing operations are appreciated by Hirsch. Those in Kentucky include Kathy Berkey at Berkey Bloodstock. His mares reside at Columbiana Farm in Paris, while Rimroc Farm in Lexington starts his babies. Some go into advanced lessons with Bryan “Scooter” Hughes as they progress. When he has a layup or mares in California, they go to Rancho Temescal, north of Los Angeles.

Hirsch and connections celebrate CeCe’s Breeders’ Cup triumph

The Hirsch passion for the Thoroughbred racing and breeding industry is multigenerational. His wife Candy enjoys going to the races and spending time with the horses at the barns. Their daughter Hayley, 29, was excited when Dad named an auction purchase after her: Hayley Levade (Dialed In). The thus unraced three-year-old is training with Stute for her debut.

 “Horses are great animals, and this business makes you get up in the morning and keeps you going,” Bo said with a smile. “It’s a wonderful thing to be in the racing business and have this opportunity and the thrills you get. Anticipation is the name of the game. You look and you dream about this and that… I’ve been very lucky.”

Christopher Duncan - his transition from an Olympic athlete to training racehorses in Ocala

By Bill Heller

Unlike most Thoroughbred horsemen in Ocala, 46-year-old trainer Christopher Duncan isn’t deeply rooted in his profession. He is, however, deeply confident he will be. He even wrote a self-published book about it: Mind Shift.

Just in his second full year of training, Duncan is a former Jamaican Olympic track star and real estate dealer in Virginia, all the while never ignoring a passion for Thoroughbreds, which he’d experienced in his native Jamaica as a child. “I wanted to be a jockey in Jamaica, but I was too big,” he said.

A near fatal 1997 car accident in Washington, D.C., rearranged his thinking and his life. “A young lady ran a red light,” he said. “I needed emergency surgery. My left lung collapsed. They cut me out with no drugs. They stuck a tube in. The doctor said, ‘If you move, you die.’ I said, ‘God, if you bring me through this, I’m going to serve you.’ It hurt. There’s not a word to describe it. It burned like pepper. I said, ‘God, help me.’ I couldn’t do it myself. God brought me through that. I needed something bigger and stronger. I lost 50, 60 pounds. I couldn’t do a push-up when I got out. That’s when my journey began. That was the turning point of my life.”

He began writing down his ideas and thoughts. He moved from Virginia to Ocala. “For the good weather and the horses,” he said. He found a new career in the medical transportation business—a business his wife continues in. 

He published his book in 2011. Then, he finally confronted his passion for horses: “I said, `You know what, I’m going to train horses.’” 

He purchased a cheap mare, Adonai Bless, and won his first race in her first start for him when she captured an $8,000 claimer at Tampa Bay Downs on November 20, 2020. “It was a great moment,” he said.

She didn’t give him any more, losing two subsequent starts badly and was retired to become a broodmare.

He races 12 horses now at Tampa Bay Downs and at Gulfstream Park. Through early January, he has six wins, one second and one third from 54 starts with earnings of $86,425. “I love it,” he said. “It’s good, and it’s going to get better. It’s a passion. It’s something I want to do. If you do something and enjoy it, it’s not work.”

Drawing on his experience in track and field, he trains his horses for endurance. He has the full support of his wife and their four children.

His long-range goal is to win a Gr1 or Gr2 stakes. He is fully confident he will. “List is just to keep working,” he said. “It’s about the mind. You can’t do anything without thinking. I have to believe I’m going to be successful. If I don’t, it will never happen.”

When it does, he knows whom to thank. “It’s God,” he said. “He gets the credit for it. My goal is to be of service.” 

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.

Mike Trombetta - from demolishing buildings to constructing a racing stable with firm foundations

By Bill Heller

For the first 15 years of his 31-year training career, 55-year-old Mike Trombetta split every day between the racetrack and his brother Dino’s demolition company in White Marsh, Maryland. “He would train horses in the morning and knock down buildings in the afternoon,” his long-time friend and client R. Larry Johnson laughed. Dino added, “Then he’d go back to the track in the evenings just to check on things.”

Of course he did. That’s what he, Dino and their sister Laura learned from their parents. “Our dad worked extremely hard,” Dino said. “Both him and my mom were hard workers. That’s how we grew up. We worked hard in everything we did. That’s what it took to have success.”

Mike could still be working two jobs had he not had the good fortune to take over the training of a horse who had previously made just one start, finishing 12th by 24 lengths as a two-year-old in 2005. That horse, Sweetnorthernsaint, would go off the favorite in the 2006 Kentucky Derby, making a strong middle move under Kent Desormeaux before tiring to finish seventh. Sweetnorthernsaint then finished second in the Preakness Stakes. “That gave us national exposure,” Trombetta said. “That gave us a big push for sure.”

The following year, Trombetta’s starts increased from 312 to 422, his victories from 78 to 106 and his earnings from $2.7 million to $3.5 million. Trombetta abandoned his demolition career and began upward trending with his training. In 2019, he posted a career high in earnings—$4,614,509—helped by his three-year-old Win Win Win, who was ninth in the Kentucky Derby, and his two-year-old Independence Hall, who became a legitimate contender for the 2020 Kentucky Derby. Independence Hall ran into problems in 2020, but Trombetta still finished 24th in earnings with more than $4.1 million and a win percentage of 16.0. Trombetta has posted a win percentage of 20 or higher for an entire year 11 times.

But the past several months have been a bit rough. Through early June, he ranked 36th in the country in earnings with nearly $1.6 million. Yet he still is winning at a 16.4 percent rate. “We’re not doing that well,” he said on June 14.

“This year, it’s been an adjustment year coming off the COVID. We were hoping at the beginning of this year things would go back to normal. Then Woodbine got delayed. It got a little weird here. We had a herpes situation in Maryland. For several months, they wouldn’t let horses come in or leave. That was a bizarre situation. Then, at Laurel, they had to redo the track. We’re still not back to normal. It seems like something has been going on—something new to deal with. It’s hard for all of us.”

He feels the same way on the thorny issues of medication and whips. “I’m probably like a lot of other trainers,” he said. “What we’d like to have more than anything is a clear understanding of the dos and don’ts, especially in the Mid-Atlantic states. We just want to know what the rules are and how to play the game. When you turn on a football game, they all have fields of 100 yards and 15 minutes in a quarter. Horse racing is anything but that. It’s different in every state.”

That is about to change next summer when the Horse Racing Integrity Act comes to life. Will uniform rules become the norm? “We can hope,” Trombetta said. “Time will tell. It would be great just to get everybody knowing what the game looks like. Now, in every jurisdiction, there’s something different. We want to stay out of harm’s way. This Lasix thing is a great example. Two-year-olds can use it in one state, but not in another. I just hope the powers [that] be get something that works for the whole industry so that we can follow and understand. It’s the same thing with this whip rule. It’s different in other states. One state allows four times, one state says six; and in one state, they can’t use them at all. We’re getting further away from uniformity. Guys like us that are in this region race throughout the country for the most part. When you go through the stable gate somewhere else, it’s a different rule.”

Can the Horse Racing Integrity Act end that problem permanently? “In a perfect world, yes,” Trombetta said. “I don’t know if they’re capable of doing it.”

This summer, Trombetta’s horses—now between 80 to 90—are stabled at Far Hill, Timonium temporarily until Laurel’s renovations are complete and in
Delaware. His horses also race in Florida in the winter and in New York in the summer when they belong. His winter stable usually numbers 60 to 70 horses.

“We try to take the right horses to the right place,” Trombetta said. “We work off the condition books. There are little differences in each track. Obviously, when you go to New York, you have to know your horse is capable of competing in New York. We don’t get it right all the time, but we try. Surfaces come into play: dirt, synthetic, turf. You have to figure in all of the factors. I carry six, seven condition books with me.”

Is it like being back in school? “It can be at times, because it’s constantly changing,” Trombetta said. “I’m checking those things at 6 or 7 at night to make sure I can stay on top of it—make sure I’m not missing anything.”

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Claude ʻʻShugʼʼ McGaughey III, the legendary trainer of champions

Sustaining Excellence

By Bill Heller

Sustained excellence is a rare commodity in any endeavour, even more so in Thoroughbred racing when success is tied to 1,000-pound horses traveling 35 miles per hour, guided by jockeys making rapid strategic decisions one after another.

“For every good thing that happens, 20 bad things happen,” Hall of Fame trainer Frank Whiteley advised his young assistant, Shug McGaughey, decades ago.

McGaughey didn’t listen, made it into the Hall of Fame, and continues to succeed. He recently turned 70, and his horses have earned more than $2 million for 37 straight years, thanks to a win percentage of 21 at the highest level of racing.

Greatest Honour wins the Holy Bull Stakes, at Gulfstream Park, 2021.

• Greatest Honour

He won one Kentucky Derby with Orb in 2013—the best victory of all for a Lexington native. And he hoped to do it again this year with Courtlandt Farm’s Greatest Honour, who fired off consecutive victories in the Holy Bull Stakes and the Fountain of Youth Stakes before finishing third in the Florida Derby as the 4-5 favorite. Doing the right thing for your horse is easier when he’s doing well but much more difficult when he isn’t. McGaughey noticed something wrong with Greatest Honour and acted accordingly. “I wasn’t pleased with the way he galloped Saturday and Sunday,” Reported Shug on Thursday, April 8. “I said on Monday, ‘We have to get to the bottom of this.’” That meant X-rays, a bone scan and consulting with Dr. Larry Bramlage, who has always been close to Shug’s heart. Bramlage’s successful surgery on Personal Ensign when she suffered a broken pastern as a two-year-old allowed her to come back at three to resume her historic, unblemished career, culminating with her victory in the 1988 Breeders’ Cup Distaff.

McGaughey said Greatest Honour had a minor problem in his ankle which wouldn’t require surgery. So, just over 3 weeks out from the Kentucky Derby, McGaughey announced that Greatest Honour would get 30 days off at Courtlandt Farms and then be re-evaluated, hopefully in time for him to race in the midsummer Derby— the Travers at Saratoga. “We just need to give him a little time. I feel bad for Don Adam (the owner of Courtlandt Farms) and for the horse.” McGaughey had to make that difficult phone call to Adam to tell him the bad news. “It’s not easy, but I’ve made that call a lot of times,” As Shug put it. “It’s part of the game.”

Greatest Honour would have been one of the top contenders in the Triple Crown series. By doing the right thing, McGaughey is allowing Greatest Honour to reach his potential, no matter how much McGaughey wanted to win another 3yo classic race.

Shug with current stable star Greatest Honour.

The challenge of getting Greatest Honour back to the winner’s circle is one McGaughey has enjoyed his whole career. “I enjoy the horses, the competition, the clients; I don’t enjoy the politics in racing today. It makes it hard to keep focused on training: the visas, the cost of workman’s comp, knowing how far out you can give horses medication. Certain states have certain rules. Other states are different. I will be happy when we get some kind of uniformity.”

Thanks to the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act, that is about to happen. “I think the Horseracing Integrity Act is a good thing; it’s definitely a good thing. We weren’t going to do it ourselves. We tried policing ourselves, and it didn’t work.” What has worked for McGaughey is letting his horses earn their way into major stakes by their performances. Greatest Honour would have been only McGaughey’s ninth starter in the Kentucky Derby. “He doesn’t put a horse in a race just to have a horse in a race,” his 34-year-old son Chip, an administrator at Keeneland, said.

“He wakes up every morning and goes to sleep every night thinking about his horses. He wakes up in the middle of the night thinking about his horses. He has dedication to getting everything he can out of his horses by developing them. His training philosophy has always been doing what’s best for his horses. He’s always had that. He is a very patient trainer, allowing a horse to tell him what the next step is.”

Shug with Storm Flag Flying, 2002.

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From the ground up - Preakness Stakes winning trainer Michael McCarthy worked his way into the training ranks, forming a solid foundation of success along the way.

By Annie Lambert

Trainer Michael McCarthy felt an immediate connection to the racing industry after attending the races with a few high school buddies. Following graduation, he found his way to the backside, working a variety of jobs while attending college at night. His most prominent employment was spending more than a decade as assistant to Todd Pletcher, a seven-time Eclipse Award winning Trainer of the Year.

McCarthy, now 50, attained his trainer’s license in 2006 and began training his own stable of horses in 2014. Since then, the Southern California-based horseman has saddled 1,063 starters with 174 wins, 138 seconds and 172 thirds, earning $18,083,294—including multiple graded stakes.

Pletcher once called his former protégé “reliable, confident and capable.” McCarthy has also proven himself to be responsible and patient with perseverance.

• Racing intrigue

At the age of six, McCarthy moved to Arcadia, Calif., with his family. The family home was near enough to Santa Anita to hear the races being called. Although McCarthy’s parents were not horse racing enthusiasts, he became smitten by the industry. His father, a high-end office furniture dealer (now semi- retired), was always a big sports fan—“a basketball, football kind of guy,” who was not initially into racing but now closely follows his son’s career. Young McCarthy’s first job at Santa Anita was working for trainer John O’Hara. He was at the track during the day and attending his freshman year at Cal Poly Pomona with night classes in animal husbandry. He also worked for veterinarian Dr. Wade Byrd and got handy with a stopwatch with help from Santa Anita clocker Gary Young.

Michael with Proud Accolade at Hollywood Park, 2004.

In about 1994, McCarthy had the opportunity to spend four months at a training center in Japan as well as several months at The National Stud in England. He worked as an intern in a variety of jobs, including breeding to training aspects of the racing business. While still in college, McCarthy soaked up experience working for trainer Doug Peterson and was an assistant at Santa Anita for Ben Cecil.

• Upward mobility

Working for Cecil was his final job prior to heading east to work for Todd Pletcher. Jockey agent Ron Anderson negotiated a meeting between McCarthy and Pletcher, who was looking for an assistant trainer to replace George Weaver who was leaving to start his own public stable. After some phone calls back and forth, McCarthy headed to Belmont Park in July of 2002 for an introduction of sorts. He began his new job on August 25, 2002—a date he has no trouble recalling.

Michael with Friendly Island after winning the Palos Verdes Handicap at Santa Anita Park, 2007.

“Moving east was certainly an adjustment period,” McCarthy admitted. “But when you’re young and single, it’s easy to do.” There was a learning curve going to work in an expansive stable like Pletcher’s—a fast-moving organization with many horses and a lot of moving parts. McCarthy quickly caught up to speed, and by November of that year, he found himself traveling to Hong Kong with Texas Glitter.

Texas Glitter was a six-year-old when he headed to Southeast Asia with McCarthy. Their first stop was at California’s Hollywood Park, where the son of Glitterman won the Gr3 Hollywood Turf Express Handicap. Sixteen days later, the multiple graded stakes winner found no luck in the Gp1 Hong Kong Sprint at Sha Tin— the final race of his career. …

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Ron Moquett - trainer of Champion Sprinter Whitmore

By Bill Heller

Upon reaching the winner’s circle after the $2 million Gr1 Breeders’ Cup Sprint on November 7th at Keeneland, Laura Moquett hugged her seven-year-old gelding Whitmore, telling him, “You’re a total badass.”

Talking about that moment a week later, she added, “That applies to my husband, too.”

She says that with justifiable pride in both. She is the co-owner, assistant trainer and galloper of Whitmore, who was seeking his first victory in his fourth start in the Breeders’ Cup Sprint.

If there was an equine dictionary and you looked up the word “rogue,” Whitmore’s picture would probably be there. He is the poster horse of bad behavior.

ALL ABOUT MOQUETT

Laura’s 48-year-old husband Ron, co-owner and trainer of Whitmore, has survived three years with atypical sarcoidosis, an autoimmune disease affecting the lungs. Think you were scared about COVID? Ron hasn’t missed a step training his stable of 38 horses. “This ain’t nothing,” he said. “A lot of people got through worse than I got. I get to go to the barn. I get to do my job. I was wearing a mask before it became a fad.”

There’s a third member of this Whitmore team—former jockey Greta Kuntzweiler, now Whitmore’s breeze rider and an assistant trainer. Ron calls her a hippy. Greta laughs when asked about it. “He thinks I’m a hippy because I’m a Democrat,” she said.

Together, the Moquetts and Kuntzweiler reached that remarkable Breeders’ Cup moment when Whitmore won the Sprint by 3 ¼ lengths, thanks to a perfect ride by Irad Ortiz, Jr. Whitmore had peaked as a seven-year-old in his 38th career start—a testament to Ron’s conviction that doing right by the horse allows you to maximize success. Ron defers credit to his horse. “He tells me everything,” Ron said. “Every day. He’s honest, very honest. He’s very forthcoming with information on what he needs.”

That only matters if his trainer listens. Ron has been listening to animals his entire life. At a young age, he preferred the company of animals rather than people.

His mother died when he was four-years-old. “We went from place to place for a while,” he said. “We ended up with our grandparents. I gravitated to animals—any kind of animals. I didn’t care—dogs, cats, horses, chickens. An animal will never lead you astray. An animal is very honest. For whatever reason, they respected me, and I respected them. Without cats, dogs, horses and chickens, I would need a lot of therapy. That’s what I used for therapy. It’s where I got comfort. I like people, but I’d rather be with my animals.”

He built his life with horses. “A horse never lies to you,” he said. “If he’s afraid, he shows it. If he’s hungry, he shows it.”

And if that horse is Whitmore, he’ll kick you to hell if you touch him in the wrong place. Or at the wrong time. Or just for kicks. His specialty was a double-barrel kick. Ron can live with that because Whitmore also has an incredible amount of talent.

Ron was born near Blue Ribbons Downs, a Quarter Horse track in Sallisaw, Okla. Ron pursued his interest in horses at bush tracks. “We used to go on Sundays,” he said. “They would have racing on a 400-yard strip. We’d have big-name riders come in.”

Ron couldn’t get enough. “I worked at the gate,” he said. “I would get the horses ready to run. I’d help the trainers pony horses. My friend rode—that was my first introduction. They were gambling and riding. I just wanted to be with the horses. I thought that was cool as hell. I was probably 13.”

Then came a sobering realization. “There was nobody making money doing this,” he said.

So he began supplementing his income with toughman fighting. “It was kind of like a predecessor to Ultimate Fighting,” he said. “There are three one-minute rounds with 16-ounce gloves. The winner moves on. If you win five or six, you’d get up to a money fight. I did all right from 18 to 24. I didn’t do it all the time. It got to the point where other people were getting better. It got to where I was making money with horses; I didn’t have to do it anymore.”

That happened at Oaklawn Park, where he started training. “I was 22,” Ron said. “I lived in a tack room probably the first six months. That’s no different than a lot of people today. I was nobody special.”

Ron caught a huge break, landing a job working for trainer Bernie Flint. “Bernie was the perfect guy for me,” Ron said. “He allowed me to do everything and taught me a lot about handling different situations. He was always kind to the animals. For a claiming trainer, he was very kind. He’s 6-3, 300 pounds, an ex-cop. Bernie was a natural horseman. I was with him less than two years, and he showed me so much more than if I had gone to a big operation.”

Ron was about as far removed from a big operation as possible when he started his own stable, posting only one second and one third in seven starts in 1997. “How bad do you want it?” Ron asked. “Everybody loves it when you’re doing well with a barn full of great horses. Try doing it whenever you got a barn full of other people’s cast-offs. You don’t have a lot of money to fall back on. Mike Tyson said, `Everybody’s got a plan until you get punched in the face.’”

He had been literally punched in the face when he was a toughman fighting for years. He was able to abandon his second career when his numbers improved in his first full year of training in 1998 with five victories from 82 starters and $80,354 in earnings. In 1999, he had 12 wins from 141 starts with $259,385 in money. He was on his way.

“I just wanted it too bad to not keep doing it,” Ron said. “How are you going to make it? First, you have to have a love for the animal. Second, you have to have a hatred of money, because you’re not going to get it for a long time. I’ve been doing this for 20-something years, and I finally wound up winning a couple of them. The third thing is you got to be where you don’t require sleep. If you don’t love money, and you love horses, and you don’t sleep, then you’ve got a shot at becoming a trainer. It’s so hard. The game is frustrating and so hard.”

Having a partner helps navigate the tough times, and Ron has a 24-7 partner in Laura. Raised in Lawton, a small town in Iowa, she discovered her passion for horses as a child “I had my own horses at my house,” she said. “I was 16 when I started galloping. There’s a different way to look at the world through their eyes. I speak horse. It’s like a second language. They communicate with you through their body language.”

Ron was working for Bernie Flint when Laura got a job with him. She saw a kindred spirit. “He cares about horses,” she said. “He’s not in a hurry. He cares to get to the bottom. A team aspect comes into play.”

They married. “Roughly, it was in 2014,” Laura said. “I’m guessing. We’re both terrible about the anniversary.”

Breeze rider and assistant trainer Greta Kuntzweiler with Whitmore.

They weren’t too good at weddings either. They both arrived late separately for their ceremony. “We kind of live in the moment, which is great for horses,” Laura said.

Having a talented exercise rider is great for horses, too, and they have one in Greta, who won 555 races and $12,248,599 before stopping in 2015. “My business was slowing down, and Ron asked me if I would break and gallop,” she said. “Then Laura began teaching me assistant trainer stuff. It’s a great job. I love horses. I’m happy.”

She, too, was impressed with Ron’s horsemanship. “He’s a really smart guy with a good memory,” Greta said. “He can remember a horse. When he watches training in the morning, he knows his horses and other people’s horses. It’s a huge advantage. He’s a really good horseman.

“He likes to get horses, walk them around the shed row and take them to graze, and try to get into their heads. He wants to spend time with them. I’ve seen him load difficult horses on a trailer. He knows how to ask them to do something they don’t want to do. His wife is really good at that, too. They’re great horse people that I want to be around.”

But suddenly, in the spring of 2018, there was a question if Ron could ever be around his horses. He was diagnosed with atypical sarcoidosis. “What happens is, it attacks your lungs,” Ron said. “My breathing is compromised by one lung, which is working at 40 percent. But I feel great now, between active spurts. I have to be very careful with the COVID. If somebody with my condition gets it, then it’s a big deal.”

For a while, he worked exclusively from home. Now he trains partially from home, subject to the pandemic numbers. “That takes a lot of up-to-the-minute tedious information,” he said. “I get a text from the night watchman at 4 a.m. on how everyone ate and if they’re doing all right. I get leg charts. My assistants tell me how the horses feel after racing. I get charts rating horses’ works, 1, 2 or 3. If there is a checkmark on the rider, it means there’s something I need to talk to him about.

“I’m able to go to the barn, just not be around people. I check legs. There’s nothing like hands-on. You have to have horsemen at every station with hands-on. I want a groom who knows the difference. And my exercise riders know the difference. We figured out how to get everything done.”

Asked if it gets wearing, Ron said, “It seems like I’ve been doing it forever.”

ALL ABOUT WHITMORE

Whitmore challenged him before he got sick. The son of Pleasantly Perfect out of Melody’s Spirit by Scat Daddy was bred by John Liviakis in Kentucky. Liviakis sold Whitmore to the Moquetts’ Southern Spring Stables.

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Barbara Banke - cover profile - Strength, stamina & class - three attributes that describe not just Stonestreet Farm’s vibrant owner but also her farm’s mission to produce winning racehorses

By Denise Steffanus

Stonestreet Farm's mission is to produce winning racehorses with "strength, stamina, and class"—three attributes that also describe Barbara Banke, Stonestreet’s vibrant owner. 

In 2011, Banke took over Stonestreet's reins when her husband, Jess Stonestreet Jackson, died at age 81 from cancer. A worthy successor, Banke had worked shoulder to shoulder with Jackson as the two built their empire of fine wines and fast horses, including Horses of the Year Curlin (twice) and Rachel Alexandra, who together earned a combined six Eclipse Awards.

Barbara with husband Jess (with trophy) celebrating after Rachel Alexandra won the Woodward Stakes in 2009.

Under her leadership, Stonestreet has won 35 graded stakes as Stonestreet Stables and has shared 15 graded stakes wins with 45 partnerships through the end of September. Stonestreet has been the leading breeder of yearlings at auction for the past five years.

Banke also became chairman and proprietor of Kendall-Jackson Wines (now Jackson Family Wines)—an international domain of wineries based largely in California and extending to Oregon, Chile, Australia, France, Italy, and South Africa. Jackson wines graced tables in the White House during the Reagan administration when Nancy Reagan offered her favorite wine, Vintner's Reserve Chardonnay, to distinguished guests from around the world.

Banke wasn't the typical horse-crazy girl while growing up. She remembers going on a few trail rides, but her involvement with horses began in 2005 when she suggested Jackson find something to absorb his boundless energy.

"I just felt that he needed some hobby because he was sort of driving us all crazy around the winery from being a micromanager. (Banke laughs.) He had been in the horse business with his uncle a while before that. He really wanted to get back into it," she said.

The two founded Stonestreet and purchased an Unbridled's Song filly, Forest Music, in the summer of 2005 and turned her over to trainer Steve Asmussen. In her first start for Stonestreet, she went gate to wire in the Gr2 Honorable Miss Handicap at Saratoga, giving Stonestreet its first graded stakes winner. After the race, Asmussen prophetically told the media that it was "a sign of things to come.

Asmussen certainly was right about that. 

Plunging head first into the racing industry, Stonestreet purchased Buckram Oaks Farm—450 acres of prime bluegrass land outside of Lexington—for $17.5 million that same year and renamed it Stonestreet Farm. Months later, Stonestreet purchased 650 acres in Versailles, Ky., and established a yearling division there.

When asked why the Buckram Oaks parcel appealed to her, Banke, who litigated land-use cases before the United States Supreme Court and Court of Appeals in her former profession, did not give the expected answer citing investment strategies, the spring-fed limestone ponds coveted for raising horses with good bone, and other legal points. 

"It’s a beautiful, beautiful place," she said. "And it’s really convenient because it’s close to Keeneland (Racecourse and Sales) and close to town; and it’s very scenic. The barns were beautiful. The ponds were beautiful. So it had a lot of improvements, and it was something that we thought would be a good home in Kentucky. I’m really glad now that we went there."

Broodmare Band

Stonestreet started to populate its broodmare band, with an eye to transition its fine racemares into outstanding breeding stock of future Stonestreet runners and sale prospects. Banke called her strategy "mare-centric" and said, "That’s our focus, and that’s really fun. It’s fun to raise fillies for me because I know that they have a great career when they’re finished. It’s a nice thing to do." 

Retired from racing at the end of 2005, Forest Music became the cornerstone of Stonestreet's breeding operation, producing graded stakes winners Kentuckian, Electric Forest, and Uncle Chuck, plus winner Maclean's Music—who sired 2017 Gr1 Preakness Stakes winner Cloud Computing in his first crop—plus three other graded stakes winners. 

Banke called Stonestreet's broodmare band "unparalleled," and the names on the roster are a stellar list: homebreds My Miss Aurelia, 2011 champion two-year-old filly; Lady Aurelia, 2016 Cartier Two-Year-Old Filly of the Year in Europe; and Gr1 winners Dreaming of Julia, Tara's Tango, and Rachel's Valentina (daughter of now-pensioned Rachel Alexandra). 

Among the other broodmares: Bounding (Aus), New Zealand’s champion sprinter and champion three-year-old filly in 2013; D' Wildcat Speed, Puerto Rican Horse of the Year and champion imported three-year-old filly in 2003 and the dam of Lady Aurelia; Dayatthespa, 2014 champion female turf horse; Hillaby, 2014 Canadian champion female sprinter; and eight other Gr1 or Gp1 winners. 

Seventeen of Stonestreet's broodmares have produced graded-stakes winners. The latest starlet is Gamine, the three-year-old Into Mischief filly out of Banke's mare Peggy Jane. Conditioned by two-time Triple Crown-winning trainer Bob Baffert, Gamine won the Gr1 Acorn Stakes by an incredible 18-3/4 lengths in 1:32.55, slashing the stakes record time of 1:33.58 and just a fifth of a second slower than the track record of 1:32.24 for the mile. Next she took the Gr1 Test Stakes by seven lengths, installing her as the 7-to-10 favorite going into the Gr1 Kentucky Oaks, where she finished third after a tough stretch duel with winner Shedaresthedevil. The Oaks was Gamine's first two-turn race.

Ready to Repeat, a More Than Ready gelding produced by Stonestreet's Christine Daae, placed in the Gr1 Summer Stakes over the turf at Woodbine in Canada on September 20. After maintaining a comfortable lead all the way to the stretch, eventual winner Gretsky the Great cut in front of Ready to Repeat, causing the gelding to change course. Stewards disallowed a claim of foul. Banke sold Ready to Repeat for $60,000 at the 2019 Keeneland September Yearling sale.

Undefeated Campanelle ridden by Frankie Dettori wins The Queen Mary Stakes on day five of Royal Ascot 2020.

Banke is excited about Stonestreet's Irish filly, Campanelle, who is expected to join the band at the end of her racing career. Banke gave $243,773 for the Kodiac (GB) filly at the 2019 Tattersalls October Yearling Sale. 

"[Barbara Banke] loves coming to Royal Ascot every year, and she wanted to buy two or three fillies who could run there," said Ben McElroy (who purchased the filly). "Campanelle looked like she'd fit the bill, and she did."

Undefeated in three starts, Campanelle earned a Breeders' Cup "Win and You're In" berth when in August she won the Gr1 Darley Prix Morny—Finale des Darley Series in France. She is expected to start in the Gr1 Breeders' Cup Juvenile Fillies Turf on November 6 at Keeneland, her home track.

"We bought her as a yearling, and she’s now a Gp1 winner in Europe," Banke said. "And she’s going to be a great broodmare in her future, hopefully a long way from now."

Banke's philosophy is simple: "We try to get the best mares, or if we don’t buy the best mares, we try to buy the best fillies and race them and go from there. And, of course, then we breed them to great stallions,"

Although Stonestreet does not maintain a stallion division, it holds interests in eight stallions: leading sire Curlin and his sons Jess's Dream, out of Rachel Alexandra, Union Jackson, out of Hot Dixie Chic, and 2017 champion two-year-old Good Magic, out of Glinda the Good; Racing Hall of Fame member Ghostzapper, 2004's Horse of the Year and champion older horse; Gr1 winners Carpe Diem (2015 Blue Grass Stakes) and The Factor (2011 Malibu Stakes); and multiple-graded stakes winner Kantharos.

Banke said that, at present, she has no interest in standing stallions. But she added, "Maybe. Never say never." … 

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Trainer Robert Tiller and Canadian sprint legend Pink Lloyd both reached momentous milestones this year - Alex Campbell shares all.

By Alex Campbell

By now, you’ve likely heard of Pink Lloyd, one of the greatest Canadian sprinters of all time. He has won 26 of his 31 starts—23 of which have come in stakes events. He was named Canadian Horse of the Year for his 2017 campaign that saw him win all eight of his starts. In addition, he’s been the Canadian champion male sprinter the last three years from 2017 to 2019, and appears to be well on his way to earning that honor for a fourth time in 2020. This year, Pink Lloyd also hit a major earnings milestone, crossing C$2 million in career earnings with his victory in the Gr3 Vigil Stakes on September 5. Pink Lloyd’s trainer, 2008 Canadian Horse Racing Hall of Fame inductee, Robert Tiller, also recorded a personal milestone of his own back on June 19, when he captured his 2,000th career training victory.

Tiller didn’t come from a horse racing background but has devoted his life to the sport. Born in Amsterdam, Holland, 70-year-old Tiller immigrated to Canada with his family in 1960 when he was 11 years old. At 16, he found his way to the racetrack, responding to an ad in a newspaper from the Horsemen’s Benevolent and Protective Association of Ontario looking for grooms and hot walkers at Woodbine. Tiller took a summer job with John Calhoun walking hots in 1966, and never left the racetrack.

“I went straight from grade school to the University of Woodbine,” Tiller said. “I stuck after the summer was over. I basically got the upbringing on the racetrack, living in tack rooms. I always had a desire to be a horse trainer and started very young.” After a couple of years working for Calhoun, Tiller then went on to become a groom for trainer Glenn Magnusson. While working for Magnusson, Tiller had the opportunity to travel with horses to Blue Bonnets Raceway in Montreal, and while he was not officially a trainer at that time, Tiller said he was doing most of the training himself. He returned to Toronto at 21 to obtain his trainer’s license and quickly found success. He recorded 21 wins in his first year as a trainer in 1972, and 48 wins during the 1974 season after just a few years of being out on his own. In 1975, Tiller had his first Queen’s Plate starter, sending out long-shot Near the High Sea to a runner-up finish behind future Canadian Horse Racing Hall of Fame inductee L’Enjoleur.

Tiller has been Woodbine’s leading trainer four times (1994, 1997, 2001, and 2003), and has won three Sovereign Awards as Canada’s outstanding trainer in 2001, 2003, and 2004. Tiller has trained a number of Canadian champions over the years. Along with Pink Lloyd, Tiller also trained 2001 Canadian Horse of the Year and Canadian champion three-year-old, Win City, who won the Prince of Wales Stakes and finished second in the Queen’s Plate. Rare Friends was also named Canadian champion two-year-old male in 2001, and Simply Lovely was named Canadian champion two-year-old filly in 2004. Tiller has also trained a pair of Canadian champion female sprinters, including Indian Apple Is in 2010 and River Maid in 2016.

“I went through all of the stages that trainers go through,” Tiller said. “I was ‘wonder boy’ for a while. We got into the claiming game with some clients. I was leading trainer a few times or close to it. We’ve won a lot of races.

You’re only as good as your horses in this game. It’s like a good hockey coach if they have a bunch of bad players. I don’t care what anyone says: without talented horses, we have nothing.”

If a trainer is only as good as his or her horses, as Tiller says, then it must take a good eye to select those good horses. Tiller has done that, not only at the sales but in the claiming game as well. Tiller said his experience with different horses throughout his career has helped refine his horse selection process. “You learn from your mistakes,” he said. “I’ve bought a lot of good horses over the years. I enjoy going to the sales. I like to think of myself as an all-around horseman.”

Pink Lloyd was a $30,000 purchase at the 2013 Canadian Thoroughbred Horse Society’s Canadian Premier Yearling Sale. Tiller said he and his clients, including Frank Di Giulio, Jr., went into the sale with a short list of horses and ended up purchasing six horses out of the sale. “We had a list of horses that year, as every other horseman does,” he said. “We liked the way [Pink Lloyd] walked and we liked the sire, Old Forester. We took a shot on him, and it’s all turned out great. Three of them ended up winning races, and two of them never made the races. This happens all of the time.” Tiller said there’s one piece of advice he learned early on in his career that he’s always remembered, and that advice has played a key role in Pink Lloyd’s achievements.

“There was a trainer, Lou Cavalaris Jr., who was well-respected,” he said. “He said to me ‘everybody trains horses son, but it’s a game of details.’

I never forgot that. It is a real game of details. Everything from shoes to feed, to how you train a horse. That to me is the most important thing—trying to figure out how to get that horse to that race happy and fit and wanting to run.”

Tiller’s attention to the details has helped the eight-year-old son of Old Forester stay at the top of his game over multiple campaigns. Pink Lloyd’s career even got off to a late start, as he didn’t make it to the races until his four-year-old year due to a number of issues along the way. Pink Lloyd won the first three starts of his career in 2016, but Tiller noticed that he seemed to be over-exerting himself in the mornings.

“In the early years, we used to take him out on the track when there were a lot of horses, and he just kept getting tougher and tougher,” he said. “He got to the point where he was in a very strong gallop all of the time. He was just burning himself out in the morning.” To help Pink Lloyd relax, Tiller decided that he would take the horse to the track very close to the end of training hours, around 10:30 a.m., when almost every other horse on the grounds had completed their training for the day. “In my past experience, it’s worked with a few horses, so I said ‘let’s take this guy out there when there’s nobody out there,’” he said. “Every day, he got more relaxed; and then we got to the point where we could actually hack him and do a slow, slow gallop. It was just a shot I took with him, and it worked with him.” Shortly after Tiller made that adjustment, Pink Lloyd went on to reel off a streak of 11 consecutive wins over a 13-month span between April 2017 and June 2018. He also went on another double-digit win streak between May 2019 and October 2020, and Tiller is hoping to run him twice more before the end of the 2020 season. In between, Tiller said Pink Lloyd has had his share of close calls.

“It’s amazing he’s still running as good as he is now as he was as a four-year-old,” he said. “He had incidents at the starting gate where he broke through the gate a few times. He had one major bleeding incident at the end of his 2018. …

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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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Karl Broberg - Profile

By Bill Heller

On his way to becoming the nation’s leading trainer in victories for the third straight year, Karl Broberg was living his dream—one begun when his dad pried him out of elementary school to go to the track—until he received a phone call the night of May 13, 2016. Then a second call. And the third—the worst one, telling him his wife had fallen overboard on a cruise she was on...a Mother’s Day gift with some of her gal pals...and was never seen again. She had drowned.

“I was at Prairie Meadows,” Broberg said. “I got a call from one of her friends on the trip. `We can’t find Samantha.’ Your mind goes crazy. You say, `She’s on a cruise ship. She’s fine.’ And then I got another call a couple hours later. They still can’t find her. Later that night, they gave me a call that they reviewed a video that showed her falling off. She was never seen again.”

How did he go on?

“You don’t have a choice,” he said. “The first thing you have to do is hold the family together. It was the toughest thing in my life. I came home and had to share what happened. My girls were seven, eight and 11. You grieve. Life is short. You never know. You have to enjoy every day.”

Two days later at Lone Star Park, less than seven miles from his home in Arlington, Texas, Broberg took his three daughters with him to saddle one of his horses. “There were some people who were critical to me—that I took my daughters to the track two days after it happened,” he said. “I wasn’t going to sit home with them and cry. We won with the very first horse that night. The girls were in the winner’s circle. They’re crying. The jockey, C.J. McMahon, was crying. Everybody was crying. Me, too.”

Asked if work was a welcome diversion from his tragedy, he said, “One hundred percent.”

But suddenly, the number of calls he’d get from owners wanting to claim horses diminished. “It’s understandable,” Broberg said. “Everybody knew I had primary custody of all my girls. After my wife passed, I could immediately tell the client personnel was shrinking. There’s natural trepidation that he’s not going to be able to keep this going.”

He kept it going. In 2019, he led trainers for the sixth consecutive year with the unworldly total of 547 victories from 2,130 starts, 79 less than Hall of Famer Steve Asmussen needed to finish second with 433 victories. Broberg’s win percentage, 25.7, is outstanding by any measure.

Broberg also cracked the Top Ten in earnings for the second consecutive year, finishing 10th with a career-best $9.2 million, evidence that he’s improving the quality of his stable while he races primarily at tracks in Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Arkansas.

“He works harder than anybody I’ve ever met in my life, and I’m a hard worker,” his friend and occasional horse partner Mike Franklin, said. “His mind never shuts off. He never stops handicapping. It’s phenomenal. He sees things in the Racing Form others don’t see. I don’t know how he does it. He never sleeps. He’s a workaholic. He loves it.”

Franklin, who owns a car dealership in Houston, Texas, was a trainer for 10 years before giving it up five years ago. He met Broberg when Broberg claimed one of his horses. “That’s the first time we met, at Delta Downs in 2010,” Franklin said. “Then one day, we both had horses in a $5,000 claimer two stalls apart. I think mine ran third; his horse was second. Neither got claimed.”

After the race, Broberg said to Franklin, “I’ll sell you mine for $3,000.” Franklin said, “Okay.” Anxious to see his new horse, Franklin immediately went to Broberg’s barn, where Broberg’s assistant, Christie, unaware of their deal, “ran me out of the barn,” Franklin said. He called Broberg, and they laughed. Franklin took the horse anyway, and later they owned several horses together. “They did well,” Franklin said.

Broberg’s stable has grown to 180. He owns roughly half of them, racing in the name of End Zone Athletics, the same name as the advertising firm he started in 2003, as he continues to claim hundreds of horses a year. “When you have a stable this size, you always have your phone on,” Karl said.

His ambition has grown, too.

“The goal was to be king of the cheap stuff,” he said, but he added, “New York is a dream. I don’t know how realistic it is. Kentucky is the next viable option. I’d like to get a small foothold there. Florida has year-round racing. It’s on the radar as well. I’m going to go wherever the clients want me.”

He’s happy sharing his life now with Breezy, the woman he’s been living with the past two years.

Here’s the fun part. At the age of 49, he’s only been training since 2009, when he won with two of his first three starts. The following year, he won 197 races from 916 starts, earning just under $2.5 million. Not bad for a guy who worked at a factory manufacturing grocery carts, as a gas retailer running convenience stores and as a district manager of a dozen ice cream stores. “I had a bunch of bad jobs,” he said.

There’s only one job he ever wanted—the one he has now. He’s been in love with horses his entire life. He was born just outside Chicago, where his dad, Lloyd, worked a multitude of jobs, including one at a water treatment plant, and remains an avid horse racing fan. Broberg’s mom, Jean, was a skilled artisan, making jewelry. They’re both retired and living in Springfield, Mo., where his lone brother, Kirk, is a detective. “He did everything right,” Karl said. “Went into the military. Graduated college. Somehow, we’re like polar opposites.”

Karl didn’t graduate from high school. He preferred the track. “I’d go along with my dad to Arlington,” Karl said. “We’d go there fairly regularly. I remember him taking me out of school a multitude of times. I was young—five or six. I’d get a double dip: skip classes and go to the track. Everything about it I loved: the pageantry of it, the horses. We would just go up there and sit on the rail. You could hear the thundering hooves coming down the stretch. The call from Phil Georgeff.”

Georgeff was a broadcasting legend, with his signature call, “Here they come spinning out of the turn.” 

When Karl was 14, he won a contest by draw to call a race at Remington Park. “I used, `Here they come spinning out of the turn,’” Karl said. “That was the only thing I got right. I enjoyed it immensely.”

He continued, “My love for horses was always there. My entire youth was spent wondering how an outsider can get into the sport. I loved handicapping. I thought I was better than anyone at it.”…

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Kevin Attard - Profile

By Charlie McCarthy

As a boy growing up in Ontario, Kevin Attard yearned to make his own mark in the family business. The son and nephew of trainers hoped to follow another uncle’s path. “My initial dream was to be a jockey,” said Kevin, whose uncle Larry became a Canadian Hall of Fame jockey. “But I quickly ate my way out of that.” Enjoying a good meal didn’t stop Attard from carving out his own place in Thoroughbred racing.

That’s evidenced by the fact he was the second-leading trainer in earnings at Woodbine Racetrack in 2019 and enjoyed the best year in his nineteen seasons as a trainer. When 2020 began, Attard owned a 475-485-380 record in 3,067 career starts and $20,687,570 (USD) in earnings according to Equibase.

“I’m happy. We’re headed in the right direction,” Attard said recently after arriving in South Florida for Gulfstream Park’s winter meet. “I have a good crew with a lot of guys who have been with me a long time, and I think that’s very important. I couldn’t do it without them.”

In all likelihood, he wouldn’t be where he is without his forebearers, either. Joseph Attard and wife Connie emigrated to Canada from Malta in the 1950s. They later were followed by Joe’s brothers Larry, Tino and Sid. Joe, Tino and Sid all became trainers. Larry also began training after his tremendous riding career. At 68, Joe died from cancer in 2001. Tino, Kevin’s father, still has a few horses but also assists his son. Sid has compiled more than 2,000 career wins and remains a strong presence at Woodbine, where he often trains horses that compete against those of his nephew. “It’s hard to walk around Woodbine without bumping into someone who’s an Attard or related to an Attard,” Kevin says with a smile. Kevin began helping his father as a youngster on the family farm in Tottenham, Ont., about 35-40 minutes north of Woodbine. It was there Tino first took notice of his son’s ability with horses. “When he was nine years old, he used to walk a tough horse named Fozzie Bear,” 72-year-old Tino recalled. “It showed me Kevin had a lot of heart and loved to work. ”It was while working for his father years later that Kevin, then 24, was injured seriously in the stall of a horse named Undue Influence. The bay gelding kicked the right side of Attard’s face, causing major facial damage and a concussion. “He just spun around and double-barreled me in the face,” said Attard, now 44. “I was lucky. A doctor told me, ‘If he kicked you a little more in the center of your face, you might not even be here.”

After recuperating for several months, Kevin Attard returned to the stable. While working as an assistant trainer for his father in 2001, Frank Stronach called to offer him the job of farm trainer for young horses at Adena Springs North in Ontario. “My first year of training actually was just a barn full of two-year-olds for the Stronach Group,” he said. “...training off the farm, shipping into Woodbine, working and prepping them that way. ”Kevin Attard’s first career win came courtesy of a two-year-old bay named Jade Eyed in a $42,000 maiden claiming race at Woodbine on July 12, 2001. Little more than two weeks later, the filly won the Nandi Stakes at the same track. El Soprano, a two-year-old son of El Prado (IRE), gave Attard his first graded stakes win in the Gr2 Summer Stakes at Woodbine that September under Gary Stevens.

“The horse had a horrendous trip, and he still won the race,” Attard said. “If you watch the replay, you’re in awe. For a young horse to have that kind of trip and win… that’s a race I remember really well.”

Attard’s success in 2001 would prove to be hard to build on. “The next year, I went to Fort Erie for (Stronach), the B track,” he said. “I didn’t want to be labeled a ’B track trainer,’ but obviously it was a good outfit, so I decided to give it a crack. I was sent there, had a great year. As the year went on, we were kind of getting down in numbers; I took outside clients.“It was a strong year, but my heart wasn’t at Fort Erie—I wanted to be at the A circuit.” Fire Rock Stable’s Megan's Appeal won the Shady Well Stakes for Attard at Woodbine in July 2003.

Then things got really tough. “It was hard to get horses,” he said. “In Canada that year, there’s only a select pool of owners. It’s not like in the U.S. where you have horses coming from everywhere. ”Attard’s earnings surpassed $600,000 in 2001 but then decreased each year until 2005, when his runners earned just $55,757 and won just four races. Clearly, being part of a Canadian horse racing dynasty didn’t make Kevin Attard immune to the struggles many trainers face. As a husband with a wife, a toddler, a baby and a mortgage, Attard took steps to secure an income. He had a degree in accounting from Humber College— coincidentally located five minutes from Woodbine.

“I was ready to pack it in,” he said. “I actually had sent out resumes ... for anything.”

That’s when Larry called to offer his nephew a training lifeline saying that Knob Hill Farms owner and Toronto businessman Steve Stavro desired to get back into racing in a strong way and wanted a private trainer. “He said, ‘Kev, are you interested?’ Kevin said, ‘For sure!’”…

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Taylor Cambra - Tall in the Saddle

By Annie Lambert

Exercise rider Taylor Cambra has set his sights on training horses; natural talent, professionalism and a quirky personality will likely help him attain that goal.

When he was very young, exercise rider Taylor Cambra wanted to be a jockey. Growing up around the racing industry and riding horses, Cambra soon changed his career goal to training racehorses. That was due, in part, because he just kept growing and growing. The well-spoken, 22-year-old now towers at 6’2” and realized early on that a training career better suited his physique. 

Cambra has galloped horses since he was a teenager and hopes to keep his weight down a bit longer. Along the way, he aspires to get more experience as an assistant trainer before establishing his own training business. He has worked for Hall of Fame trainer Richard Mandella since the fall of 2018 and has the honor of galloping Omaha Beach (War Front x Charming by Seeking The Gold, LTE $1,651,800), winner of the Rebel Stakes (G2), Arkansas Derby (G1), Santa Anita Sprint Championship (G1) and Malibu Stakes (G1).

 “I’m very happy to gallop horses right now,” Cambra said. “I know it won’t last too much longer, with me filling out and stuff, but I’m enjoying it while I can.”

Breezing Track Ponies

Cambra’s father, Billy Cambra, was an outrider in Northern California for 35 years. Being a rambunctious kid, with a lot of nervous energy in school, made it hard for Taylor to sit still in class. Billy’s solution was to take him to the track before school and let him ride off his excess spunk.

“When Taylor was about seven years old he was riding all my outriding horses,” Billy recalled. “One day he asked to ride ‘Snoozer’ in the Pavilion. About 45 minutes later the track man called me and said Taylor was breezing that pony.”

“He was breezing him, getting down low, switching sticks and everything,” he added with a laugh. “He was still young and small and always could ride a horse. He had real good balance and everything.”

Taylor started riding the ponies of Billy’s good friend, trainer Michael Larson, when he was just three. It was also Larson that gave him his first job, where he worked until he was about 17 and began to participate in high school rodeo events. 

“[Larson] was the guy who taught me a lot of patience, taught me to give and take,” Cambra noted. “You can’t learn everything overnight, and you can’t teach everything overnight. Mike was a big influence on me, not only with the horses, but in life too. He and my dad together made a huge impact on my life. I’m very grateful for both of them.”

The Rodeo Life

Diana Cambra, Taylor’s mother, was never thrilled with his rodeo aspirations, but like her husband, was ever supporting. Her son was a good enough cowboy to be offered a rodeo scholarship to Colorado State University. Taylor chose to turn it down as he wasn’t sure about which major to pursue and knew deep down a racetrack career was his ultimate destination.

“When I turned 18 I went ahead and got my [Professional Rodeo Cowboy Association] card, which was pretty neat,” explained Cambra. “I rode saddle broncs and got to go and travel with some of those big guys. I mostly rode on the West Coast—all over in California, Arizona and Utah.”

The rodeo road was not pain free for Cambra, but his wrecks could have been worse. Diana recalled his first injury and one of the worst at the Clovis Rodeo in California.

“He had his head cracked open,” Diana said with a grimace. “The ambulance offered to take him to the hospital, and he didn’t want to pay a lot of money. I told him he had insurance and to go to the hospital. I still worry when he does [rodeo]; it is just so hard for me to watch.”

Cambra remembers that bronc ride well.

“I got bucked off over the front of the horse, landed on my hands and knees, then the horse jumped over in front of me,” he said. “When he double barrel kicked, he got a hold of me pretty good. I think I got 13 staples in the top of my head.”

Back on Track

As much as he loves the rodeo world, Cambra was drawn back to where his future career loomed. He had been working for trainer Ari Herbertson at Golden Gate Fields on and off. After he was injured he began working for him as a full-time assistant and exercise rider. It was the first time Cambra was more than just an employee; Herbertson gave the then 19-year-old more responsibilities and the ability to make decisions on his own.

“One of the biggest things I took away from working from Ari was his giving me the opportunity to kind of help run the barn and run my own organization,” Cambra noted. “That helped me realize where I needed to get stronger and make improvements.

“You can watch it every day, but when the reins are actually handed over to you it is kind of different. You have more responsibilities, not just the work you’re assigned to, but making sure all the employees are good, making sure all the horses are getting the right medication and making sure that everything goes smoothly every day.”

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Jimmy Jerkens

By Bill Heller

How do you measure patience...in months waiting on a talented horse...in years waiting to go out on your own?

How about perseverance? Overcoming the loss of key clients? Fighting through heart surgery and a hip replacement? 

Trainer Jimmy Jerkens, who has enjoyed the most successful run in an already successful career the past five years, sees no other way to function. Rushing horses is anathema to him. So he does the right thing with his. “You’re forced to,” he said. “You have no choice.”

Giving into lost business or personal health issues would be unnatural to him. So he fought through both. “It’s all I know how to do,” he said. “I kept working and tried hard not to lose faith. It was hard not to. I figured I’d best buckle down.”

Green Light Go winning the Gr.2 Saratoga Special

He buckled down so well that he set personal highs in earnings in 2014, topping $4 million for the first time, and he did it again in 2015 and in 2017, when his horses earned more than $5.5 million. He’s already over $3 million this year thanks to his lightly-raced six-year-old Preservationist, owned by his long-time client Centennial Farm, and his precocious two-year-old Green Light Go, owned by Stronach Stables.

It’s hard to believe that Jerkens didn’t win a single stakes in 2011 and 2012 and went through 2011, 2012 and 2013 without a graded stakes victory. Or that his stable shrunk from 40 to 12.  

Looking forward to Preservationist and Green Light Go’s next starts in high-profile Gr1 stakes at Belmont Park—Preservationist in the Jockey Club Gold Cup on Sept. 28 and Green Light Go in the Champagne the following Saturday— helped him get through hip replacement surgery on Sept. 23. A year earlier, he had heart surgery when stents were inserted.

Jimmy and Shirley Jerkens

Of course, his wife Shirley (they were high school sweethearts who grew apart then reconnected 25 years later) helped him get back on his feet and tried to prevent him from doing too much too soon, which of course, he tried to do.

“You want to do right for your owners,” Jerkens said. “You want to do things right. It’s seven days a week. There’s a lot of stress. That’s what’s hard about this business. There’s no downtime unless you make time for it.”

Shirley is a physical therapist for the New York State Department of Education, with a small private practice treating 8- to 18-year-old athletes. She is an accomplished rider and gallops horses for her husband every summer.

She knows and appreciates how hard he works: “He takes no vacations. He goes back to the barn three times a day. He sees how the horses are doing at that particular moment.”

Close your eyes and you can almost see his departed father—Hall of Fame trainer Allen Jerkens—nodding in approval that his two training sons, Steve, 63, and Jimmy, 60, learned the right way to take care of their horses and the commitment and work ethic that is required before success can follow.

“I’m very proud of Jimmy,” Steve said. “He puts everything into it and he deserves any success he gets. Like my father used to say, `You got to fight it hard. You got to keep at it.’”

It’s a family trait. Jimmy and Steve have two other siblings: Jimmy’s twin sister Julie, a school teacher and author of children’s books; and their older 67-year-old brother Alan, a recently retired sportscaster for the NBC affiliate in Tulsa, Okla. “They’re all a bunch of hard workers,” Shirley said.

Jimmy didn’t spend a lot of time figuring out where he wanted to work. He knew what he wanted to do with his life at the age of 11, when he began working weekends and summers with his father and older brother. “I was a barn rat,” he said. “It was unbelievable. We worked all day. Went to the track kitchen with the other help. We worked from dawn to dusk and never gave it a second thought.”

Steve said, “We were going to the barn with my father for as long as I can remember, on weekends and summers. Always to the barn. We’ve been doing it all our lives. At an early age, we learned to take care of the horses and we enjoyed it. We loved getting horses ready for the races. It was a great life. It kept us out of trouble.”

They’d play basketball on a wooden hoop at a small farm in Huntington, Long Island, where their father kept a couple horses. “My older brother [Alan] was a pretty good player,” Steve said. My father was very competitive. We’d have touch football games after feeding behind his barn at Belmont in the parking lot. That was very competitive. Stable hands from other outfits would show up and we’d choose sides. And we all played polo at West Hills Stable. I met my wife Joan at polo.”

The first time Shirley talked with Jimmy (they both went to Walt Whitman High School in Huntington—he was two years ahead of her) was at a polo farm where she had her horse stabled. “He was there with his dad and Steve,” Shirley said. “I was 13.” They dated for five years before going separate paths. “I wanted to get out and see the world,” she said.

Twenty-five years later, they bumped into each other at a polo event in Miami. “We just got talking,” Shirley said. “I found he was split up from his wife. I was getting divorced from my husband. That was it. We had dinner at Joe’s Stone Crab. We walked through the rain. It was romantic. From then on we’ve been together.”

They married and went on a delayed honeymoon to Napa Valley, arriving on Christmas Day in 2008. “We stayed for one week,” Jimmy said. “Believe it or not, it was a little bit of downtime. The horses had shipped to Florida. It was actually a good time to go.”

He had a good time during what may be the only real vacation he’s ever taken. Shirley testified, “He did relax,” knowing how unusual that is for him.  

Shirley was surprised to see a side of Jimmy that he and his father shared: “Even with all their skills and their success, they’re very humble.”

Jimmy, though, idolized his father. “Growing up and seeing my father—he was at the pinnacle of his career. WOR-TV had horse racing on the weekends. He was on almost every weekend. I was so proud of him, seeing his horses run on television. You get so proud of it, you wanted to be a bigger part of it. My father had such devotion to his horses. He was my hero. I guess it just kind of rubbed off. I wanted him to be proud of me. I knew I wanted to do it.”

Steve saw his younger brother’s passion for horses at an early age. “He was always a student of the game,” Steve said. “He read books about breeding. He had a great memory about horses. Worked hard at it. Even galloped horses.”

One Saturday afternoon at Saratoga was one of the highlights of both Jimmy and Steve’s lives. They watched from the backstretch as their horse Onion stepped into the starting gate to tackle Secretariat in the 1973 Whitney Stakes. “That was like a fantasy,” Jimmy said. “We just didn’t know what to expect. He (Onion) was super sharp. He broke the track record four days earlier. We were hoping he’d get a check.”

But there was an obstacle for Steve and Jimmy. The toteboard blocked their view of part of the stretch. “We saw him in front, then we were blocked by the toteboard a little bit,” Steve said. “Sure enough, he was still in front. It was great—some thrill.”

Jimmy said, “We just couldn’t believe that. I’ll remember that for the rest of my life. We jumped up and down like idiots. We just beat one of the best horses to ever live with a homebred gelding. That wasn’t supposed to happen.”

They celebrated…(ready for this?) By playing touch football!

Jimmy’s hoop days are long gone, but his passion for his horses continues unabated. And it served him well while working for his father and then finally, he went on his own in December 1997, two months before his 39th birthday. “It was my father’s idea,” Jimmy said. “I had just gotten divorced, and I was pretty down. He was trying to pull me out of a little funk. He said, `Why don’t you go out on your own?’ He had an owner, Peter Blum, who started my brother out. He said, `Take his six horses that I have. Maybe Mrs. DuPont will have a couple. Earl Mack possibly.’ I said, ‘Yeah, it sounds good.’ That’s what we did.”

Jimmy’s success was immediate. In his first full year on his own in 1998, he won 35 of 186 starts and his horses earned $1.4 million. Not bad for a 39-year-old rookie. He topped $1 million for 13 straight years before his stable took a mighty hit. Actually two hits.

With Jimmy as his trainer, Edward Evans’ Quality Road won the 2009 Gr2 Fountain of Youth and the Gr1 Florida Derby. That made Evans’ decision to take all his horses from Jimmy hard to fathom. Then another long-time client, Susan Moore, took her horses from him. “He went from 40 horses to 12,” Shirley said.

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Backstretch Forward

By Annie Lambert

CHRB member Oscar Gonzales, Jr, possesses the backside credentials to confidently tackle his new position.

He may have come from humble beginnings, but recently appointed California Horse Racing Board appointee Oscar Gonzales, Jr, drew from family values on and off the racetrack in pursuit of success.

Gonzales is proud of his large racetrack family, including National Museum of Racing Hall of Famer Ishmael ‘Milo’ Valenzuela. Almost every one of his relations, in fact, has worked on the backside at California racetracks.

The 51-year-old former groom worked his way through college and into corporate business and public service. Gonzales has a passion for people, which his career goals have embraced.

“I grew up in East Los Angeles where poverty rates are high, but dreams and hopes are alive and well,” acknowledged Gonzales. “That, coupled with my experience on the backstretch where the work ethic and commitment to a bigger picture, is really what got me started into public service.”

On Track

Gonzales is the penultimate of four children born to Oscar, Sr, and Yolanda Gonzales as a young couple living in East Los Angeles. 

His extended family is a complex blend of the Gonzales and Valenzuela families. Jockey Milo Valenzuela is Gonzales Sr’s uncle, making rider Patrick Valenzuela Oscar Jr’s second cousin. Milo had 21 siblings, so, plenty of family worked on the backside. A four-generation pedigree could seem daunting.

“My dad’s mom, Maria Gonzales, is the sister of the Valenzuela brothers,” Oscar pointed out. “The boys were all jockeys or trainers; the women worked a combination of jobs.”  

At 6’1” Oscar chuckled that he never had a shot at making a rider.

Oscar, Sr, was an exercise rider in his younger (lighter) years before grooming and working as a barn foreman. Grandpa Jose (Joe) Gonzales, fondly nicknamed Chelo, was a groom for Lou Carno and others. Grandmother Gonzales, Maria, sold her homemade burritos barn-to-barn on the backside.

Oscar and his brother, Alfred, followed in the shadow of their father and grandfather. Alfred spent three years grooming horses for Tom Blinco, before sadly passing away at a young age. 

Oscar, Jr, truly grew up on the backstretch; in his early teens he helped his father and grandfather whenever school afforded him the time. He often ate in the track kitchen where his mom worked. Once he secured his first license he stepped out from under the family umbrella.

Gonzales enjoyed his school days era. He was a Student Body President in high school, as well as in college - his first two leadership positions. His initial, official boss on the backside was his uncle, Albino Valenzuela in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

“You always kind of start off with the family and then you find people outside the family pay just a little bit better and they don’t work you so hard,” Gonzales said with a laugh. 

Gonzales is confident he can be a bridge between individuals and groups to help resolve some of racing’s bigger challenges.

“When I first got my license in 1984 at Hollywood Park, my dad was a barn foreman for Martin Valenzuela, Sr, who had some really good horses back then,” said Gonzales. “I was able to work for some big outfits and learn the ropes. My first two full-time hot walking jobs were during the summers of 1984 and 1985 working for Joe Manzi and Dick Mulhall respectively. Those were really good experiences, great horsemen, well rounded, quality horses with good people around them all the time.”

Once graduated from Rosemead High School, just four miles from Santa Anita, he attended East Los Angeles College in nearby Monterey Park, California, before transferring to University of California San Diego three years later. 

While attending ELAC, Gonzales went to work full-time at the racetrack rubbing horses in Darrell Vienna’s barn for three years. When he transferred to UCSD he spent two years working for D Wayne Lukas and his assistant, Randy Bradshaw, at San Diego Chargers owner Gene Klein’s training facility in Rancho Santa Fe near Del Mar.

During his school years Gonzales never quibbled about the size of his paychecks. 

“I always asked for flexibility because of my class schedule and extra curricular activities,” Gonzales offered. “Everywhere I worked people were always supportive. I never asked for any other favors except to hang my tubs early so I could go take an exam or go to a meeting at school.”

“It all worked out,” he added. “Without that experience on the backside I don’t think I would have gotten through school; I’d never have been involved in public service. There were so many people that I surrounded myself with that understood that I was kind of on a mission in life to help people and to not forget where I came from.”

There was a crossroad for Gonzales once he finished his education. Training horses had always been a passion of his. He secured his trainers license at Sunland Park in New Mexico, but before he dove into that profession life circumstances drew him into politics.

“Training was always a desire of mine because it’s such an honorable profession,” said Gonzales. “It takes a lot of hard work and attention to detail. I always looked up to the trainers and their ability to straddle many worlds; they have to be competent in so many ways. It’s one of the best professions out there. The good trainers last so long because they love what they do.”

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My new Kentucky home - Michael Hernon - Gainesway Farm

By Jeff Lowe

My NEW Kentucky home

As much as horse racing and breeding are steeped in parts of English and Irish culture, the avenue to America has been wide open for many years in providing numerous young horsemen with a chance to branch out in establishing themselves in the Thoroughbred industry. A fascinating aspect among the driven 20-somethings who come across the pond each year to work for farms and agencies, Kentucky is the likelihood that a certain number of them will find a new home there—both personally and professionally. 

Michael Hernon

MICHAEL HERNON - Gainesway Farm

Expats dot the landscape of the Thoroughbred world in America, including a broad swath in the bluegrass. Take, for instance, Geoffrey Russell—Keeneland's long-time director of sales—and Michael Hernon, who has the same title at Gainesway, which is one of the leading stud farms and perennial leading consignors in the U.S. Russell and Hernon both arrived in Kentucky from Ireland in the same time period in the early 1980s and were roommates for a while in a Lexington townhouse. 

Hernon was just getting started working for a pedigree service, and Russell was beginning a stint at Fasig-Tipton. Within a little more than a decade, both Dublin natives had ascended many heights with Hernon taking his current job at Gainesway in November 1995 and Russell joining Keeneland as Assistant Director of Sales in 1996.  Hernon has been a mainstay under the Beck family's ownership of Gainesway and played an integral part in both the sales division and the acquisition of stallions, including leading sire Tapit and the repatriation of Empire Maker from Japan. 

Hernon also has dabbled in breeding and pinhooking for his own account and has scored some big victories on that front recently as the co-breeder of champion Monomoy Girl and Gr1 winner Zazu. 

Hernon can instantly recite the hip numbers of certain highlight horses with which he has been involved, not to mention prices and pedigree nuggets. He is a fervent admirer of Tapit, dating back to when he watched a replay one Saturday morning in the fall of 2003 of the horse's juvenile stakes win in the Laurel Futurity, which led to Gainesway pursuing Tapit's services as a stallion. 

Where pride really begins to swell in Hernon's voice is in discussing a personal milestone: becoming a U.S. citizen in August 2019. 

"I had been a permanent resident with a green card for many years, and I am very happy to say that I am now a U.S. citizen," he said. "Someone asked me last year if I was going home for Christmas and I remember replying, 'I am home.' 

"America is what you make of it. If you work hard, you will get an opportunity to make your own buck. I have had so many great opportunities here from when I first came over and was learning from the ground up. I started out doing pedigree reading, writing, composition, and one key thing we did on Saturday mornings was go around and look at stallions. I got to see the stallions I was writing about and get that perspective. A lot of them did not have perfect conformation. But if you look at a horse long enough, they will more than likely tell you who they are. You can learn so much [by] looking at them in the flesh, seeing how everything fits together, and that is something that was formative for me from when I first came over." 

CARL MCENTEE - Ballysax Bloodstock

Carl McEntee

Carl McEntee, president of the Kentucky Farm Managers Club and head of the Ballysax Bloodstock consignment, is a sixth-generation Irish horseman and came to America for good when he was 23 years old in a bit of an unusual circumstance. A graduate of the British National Stud, McEntee worked for Darley in Europe for three years before injuring his arm and needing to take off a few weeks of work. During the downtime, he decided to come and visit his brother, Mark, who was already working in the racing industry in Kentucky. 

McEntee heard about a job opening at Idle Hour Farm in Lexington and figured he should apply and see if he got an interview, thinking it would be a good experience for him. 

"I really didn't expect to get the job, but I did, and that kind of put me on an accelerated career path here in America—compared to what I would have been in Europe because it takes a little more time there, and I just settled right in," said McEntee, who met his wife, Rachel, a Kentucky native, the following year. The couple met at a barbecue hosted by Ben Colebrook, who is now a Kentucky-based trainer. The McEntees have three children. 

"Things have continuously reached a crescendo," McEntee said. "I had the chance to set up Ghost Ridge Farm in Pennsylvania, and I think we helped move the breeding industry along there bringing in stallions like Jump Start, E Dubai, Honour and Glory and Smarty Jones from Kentucky. Jump Start was the first stallion I bought, and that was kind of my entry into sales. I had never done sales before, but I figured I could sell the shares of the stallion myself, and that's what I did. I think it turned out that I am probably better at sales than any other aspect of the industry, and so that was a big discovery.” 

A stint at Northview Stallion Station in the Mid-Atlantic followed; and while attending the Keeneland November breeding stock sale, Carl and Rachel McEntee discussed their desire to return to Kentucky. 

"We had just had our third child and she was dropping me off at the sale and she said, 'If there is an opportunity for us to move back to Kentucky, I would really like that since my mom lives here and we could have some help with the children," McEntee recalled. "I walked halfway around the pavilion and bumped into Robert Hammond and his first question was, 'Do you think you would be interested in being director of sales and bloodstock for Darby Dan Farm?’ That's how I ended up back in Kentucky.

"I think that's the great thing about working in America. You are presented with so many opportunities, and from all that I've developed a well-rounded perspective to go along with what I grew up with. I've done just about everything at some point: hotwalker, exercise rider, assistant trainer, farm manager, sales, yearlings, broodmares. I've been able to have my hand in just about everything and see horses from different points of view." 

In early 2018, McEntee launched Ballysax, focusing on sales consignments.

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Tyler Servis - like father, like son

By Linda Dougherty

When Afleet Tizzy defeated eight rivals in winning the $100,000 Dr. Teresa Garofalo Memorial Stakes at Parx Racing August 3—one of five stakes for Pennsylvania-Breds on the Pennsylvania’s Day at the Races card—it represented the first stakes victory for young trainer Tyler Servis, the son of prominent trainer John Servis. 

And not only did Tyler Servis collect his first stakes win, but he did it two races before his father won with Main Line Racing Stable and Alexandria Stable’s Someday Jones in the $100,000 Roanoke Stakes.

Afleet Tizzy wins the Garofalo

Adding to the festivities of the day was the presence of the family patriarch Joe Servis, now in his late 80s. The former jockey and steward, who rode on the West Virginia circuit and was inducted into the Charles Town Hall of Fame, was there to celebrate a birthday but ended up having a double celebration thanks to the accomplishments of his son and grandson.

“To have (my grandfather) here to see this, at his age, was awesome,” said Tyler afterwards. 

John Servis echoed those words, saying, “It was a very special afternoon, not only because it was Tyler’s first stakes win and we both won a stakes on the card, but because three generations of the Servis family were there.”

Owned by Marvin Delfiner and George Krall, Afleet Tizzy is a five-year-old daughter of Tizway, bred by Blackstone Farm. Tyler Servis began training her earlier this year, and she was his second starter and second career winner, having won an allowance/optional claiming race at Parx May 14.

Sent off at odds of 7-1 in the six furlong Garofalo, Afleet Tizzy was piloted by Angel Rodriguez, who kept her about a length behind the early leaders, I’m the Talent and Zipper’s Hero, as they ding-donged through early splits of :21.93 and 44.78. She made her move at the top of the stretch when the taxing pace took its toll on the top two and stormed to the lead, drawing clear by a length and crossing the wire in 1:10.52 over betting favorite Sweet Bye and Bye with Trace of Grace, third.

The Garofalo Memorial was also the first stakes win for Afleet Tizzy, who had been second in her previous start, the Power by Far Stakes for Pennsylvania-Breds at Parx June 22. The $57,600 she earned boosted her career earnings to $374,646.

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