Let's Go Stable & WinStar Farm LLC

Let’s Go Stable was founded in 2006 by 33-year-old Kevin Scatuorchio and his brother-in-law, Bryan Sullivan, who married Scatuorchio’s sister, Courtney. Scatuorchio became a fan through his dad, Jim, who has owned horses for more than 25 years. Jim campaigned multiple-graded stakes winner and million-dollar earner More Than Ready and 2007 Eclipse Turf Champion Older Male and Breeders’ Cup Turf winner English Channel. Jim is a partner in Let’s Go Stable. “I’ve been going to the racetrack with my dad since I was a little kid,” Kevin said. Sullivan was a trader for the Clinton Group until he decided to concentrate on Let’s Go Stable in 2007.

    The stable name came from a favorite expression of one of Kevin’s friends, Rob Petitti, who played in the NFL with the St. Louis Rams and is now an investor in the stable.

    Many of Let’s Go Stable’s investors are from the New York City metropolitan area, which is why the stable named a son of More Than Ready Verrazano—the name of the double-decker suspension bridge connecting Brooklyn and Staten Island. Let’s Go Stable bought Verrazano for $250,000 at the Keeneland September 2011 Yearling Sale and he won six of 13 starts, including the Grade 1 Wood Memorial and the Grade 1 Haskell Invitational, earning more than $1.8 million.

Twin Creek Racing Stables LLC

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Multi-faceted Steve Davison, a 47-year-old native of Ruston, La., owns both Twin Creeks Farm and Twin Creeks Racing Stables. He is an attorney who also is the principal owner of Genesis Energy LP, a publicly-traded energy and transportation company. He developed Squire Creek Country Club, a residential golf course community where his family lives in Choudrant, La.; and recently bought “The Sheets” handicapping service. He remains close to his alma mater, Louisiana Tech University, and is a radio broadcaster for its football games.

Davison got involved in racing when his farm manager and best friend since kindergarten, Randy Gullatt, began his career as a trainer in 1985. Davison bought a couple of horses for him to train. One was La Paz, whom was eventually sold as a broodmare for $1.6 million in 2000. Eight years later, Twin Creeks purchased her colt for $200,000, Mission Impazible, who went on to win a pair of Grade II stakes, the Louisiana Derby and the New Orleans Handicap.

Twin Creeks is the co-breeder of multiple Grade I stakes winner To Honor and Serve, who was sold as a weanling for $250,000 and then re-sold as a yearling for $575,000. Twin Creeks also sold his dam, Pilfer, for $650,000 in 2008.

Twin Creeks raced graded stakes winner Graydar, whose victories included the Grade I Donn Handicap and the Grade II New Orleans Handicap and Kelso Handicap.

Gullatt, who trains in Louisiana, Arkansas, California and Kentucky, is responsible for selecting the horses Twin Creeks purchases and managing their racing careers, while Davison handles the organization of the partnership and the evaluation and purchase of yearlings. Twin Creeks also race horses with trainers Todd Pletcher, Mike Maker, Dale Romans and Steve Asmussen. Gullatt’s wife Kim, a former jockey, handles marking and client relations.

Twin Creeks Farm, which opened in 1992, features 180 scenic acres in Nonesuch, Ky., and is home to 25 broodmares. Twin Creeks consign horses they want to sell commercially under its own name or with Taylor Made Sales Agency.

Davison and his wife, Sara, have twins, Joe and Kate. He also has two children from a previous marriage.

Paul Bulmahn's GoldMark Farm

Paul Bulmahn is the founder, chairman, and CEO of ATP Oil and Gas Corporation, based in Houston, Texas, which develops and produces natural gas in the Gulf of Mexico and the North Sea.

Bulmahn purchased 2,500-acre GoldMark Farm in Ocala, Florida, in 2002, but didn’t get involved in racing until 2006. The farm is now home to more than 1,400 horses, with about a third of them belonging to Bulmahn, who has had success with stakes winners Elusive Lady, Double Espresso, and Moontune Missy among others and Mylute, who was third in this year’s Preakness Stakes. But Cross Traffic has taken him even higher.

Cross Traffic, a gray or roan colt by Unbridled’s Song out of the Cure the Blues mare Stop Traffic, was purchased for $300,000 at the Fasig-Tipton Saratoga Sale in 2010. In the Grade 1 Metropolitan Handicap, Cross Traffic led from the start almost to the finish, losing by a nose on a head bob to Sahara Sky. Trainer Todd Pletcher called it one of the worst beats he’s had in years.

The sting of Cross Traffic’s Metropolitan loss evaporated on a historic, sunny afternoon at Saratoga two months later. There was Cross Traffic in the winner’s circle after taking the $750,000 Whitney by three-quarters of a length over Successful Dan. There was Bulmahn holding the Whitney trophy with Marylou Whitney on the exact 150th birthday of Saratoga Race Course, August 3rd. “This is huge,” Bulmahn said. “To be here with Marylou Whitney on Saratoga’s 150th birthday. This is my first Grade 1.”

Let's Go Stable - Michael B. Tabor, John Magnier and Derrick Smith

Bryan Sullivan was an investor on Wall Street before deciding in 2007 to launch Let’s Go Stable with his brother-in-law Kevin Scatuorchio, whose father, Jim, campaigned 2007 champion turf male English Channel and More Than Ready, the sire of Verrazano. Sullivan described his stable’s first Thoroughbred purchase, Ready’s Echo for $100,000, as “half exhilaration and half nausea.” Ready’s Echo turned out fine, dead-heating for third in the 2008 Belmont Stakes. “That worked out well,” Sullivan said.

So have most of his horses. Verrazano, a $250,000 yearling purchase as the 2011 Keeneland September Sale, gave Let’s Go a New Year’s present earlier this year when he won his debut at Gulfstream Park by 7¾ lengths. Quickly, Let’s Go was contacted by representatives of Michael Tabor, Mrs. John Magnier, and Derrick Smith, who offered to buy a percentage of Verrazano. “We owned horses with them in the past,” Sullivan said. “This made sense. We’d keep part.”

The deal was consummated the day before Verrazano’s second start, when he won an allowance race at Gulfstream by 16¼ lengths. “A lot of people called after that race,” Sullivan said. All of them were too late.

 “The anxiety before the Haskell was incredible,” he said. “I live two miles away.” Verrazano won the Haskell by nearly 10 lengths. “It was unreal,” Sullivan said. “It really was. Outside my wedding and the birth of my children, it was probably the most unforgettable day in my life.”

Cot Campbell's Dogwood Stable

When Wade Cothran “Cot” Campbell surrendered to his passion, selling his Atlanta advertising agency to race Thoroughbreds in the 1960s, he took a leap of faith. When he literally began a new era of racehorse partnerships through his Dogwood Stable in Aiken, South Carolina, he asked others to make that same leap.

He was up front about their prospects, telling them that if they invest, they best do it with discretionary income. He didn’t make any promises. Rather, he told them that if they were lucky, they might enjoy a special moment and have a heck of a good time pursuing the next one.

There’s nothing more special than winning a Triple Crown race. And on June 8th at Belmont Park, 23 years after Dogwood’s Summer Squall won the 1990 Preakness, Dogwood’s Palace Malice captured the Belmont Stakes. Campbell, now 85 years young, is co-owner of Palace Malice with Carl Myers in Monmouth, New Jersey; Paul Oreffice, who lives in Saratoga Springs, New York, and Paradise Valley, Arizona; Charles Pigg of Morton, Illinois; Mike Schneider of Aiken, S.C., and Margaret Smith of New York City.

Those partners are among some 1,500 new owners Campbell and his wife Anne have brought into Thoroughbred racing over the last four decades. That’s not Campbell’s only contribution to the industry. For more than a decade, Dogwood sponsored the Dominion Award recognizing unsung heroes in the sport, and Campbell has authored three thoroughly enjoyable racing books. He was honored with an Eclipse Award of Merit in 2011 for his contributions to racing.

King of Prussia Stable

It didn’t take Ed Stanco, the managing partner of King of Prussia Stable, long to get hooked on racing. Growing up in Schenectady, New York, he was a half hour from Saratoga Race Course and Saratoga Harness. “I think I was about eight when my uncle used to take me to the trotters and sometimes the flats,” he said. “I just absolutely loved it from the very beginning.”

Not just the racing, but also trying to figure out who is going to win races. “I was always very good in math,” he said.” I said, `This is for me.’ The dream was if I could start a horse at Saratoga.”

Now 63, he followed through on both his passions. He used his math skills to become an actuary on the way to becoming CEO of Toa Reinsurance Company of America.

And he not only started and won a race at Saratoga with New York-bred star Capeside Lady, he won a Grade I stakes with Princess Sylmar, King of Prussia’s first home-bred.

Stanco started King of Prussia in 2002 with modest goals. “We take a very prudent approach,” he said. “It’s basically one or two horses at a time.”

King of Prussia invested in fillies, “for their residual value,” Stanco said, and in New York-breds and Pennsylvania-breds because of inflated purses from casino revenue. Through Mike Cascio, one of trainer Todd Pletcher’s earliest clients, King of Prussia secured Pletcher as its trainer. And through his brother, who owned a couple of horses with Ronnie and Betsy Houghton’s Sylmar Farm in Christiana, Pa., King of Prussia had a home for their broodmares and foals.

A filly King of Prussia owned, Storm Dixie, became its first broodmare and her daughter, Princess of Sylmar, became its first home-bred.

Her victory in the Kentucky Oaks allows Stanco to look forward to the Coaching Club American Oaks and the Alabama, a pair of Grade I stakes at Saratoga. Stanco summed up his experience in racing: “It’s been a very cool thing.”