Gary Hartunian - Roy H

Breeders’ Cup winning owners - sponsored by:

Gary Hartunian (right) leading Roy H, winner of the Twinspires Breeders' Cup Sprint

Better Than an Airplane or Yacht

There were two crucial moments in Gary Hartunian’s brief, yet incredibly successful, tenure as a Thoroughbred owner after building a strong career in Los Angeles commercial real estate. The first—the decision to buy a Thoroughbred—came in 2012 when he took advantage of the first Barretts Paddock Sale at Del Mar and purchased a ready-to-race Fast N Furius Cat after conferring with trainer Peter Miller. Hartunian explained his rationale for becoming an owner in a July 15, 2013, story by Ed Zieralski in the San Diego Tribune: “I was having such a great time at Del Mar every year, I thought, why not? I might as well buy a horse. I figured it was better than owning an airplane or yacht—probably cheaper and a lot more fun because I really like horses. They’re such beautiful animals and do so much amazing things.”

His second seminal decision to stay in the business also came in 2012, when, after Fast N Furius Cat finished third and eighth, he was claimed for $32,000. Instead of walking away, Hartunian plunged head first into racing, not a bad decision as his Rockingham Ranch and David Bernsen’s two sprinters, Roy H, who is named for Hartunian’s grandfather, and Stormy Liberal, captured their second consecutive Breeders’ Cup stakes in 2018, winning the Sprint and the Turf Sprint. That’s four Breeders’ Cup victories in a little more than one year.

Roy H, ridden by Paco Lopez, wins Twinspires Breeders' Cup Sprint for owner Gary Hartunian

Roy H began his career on turf, making nine of his first 12 starts on grass. He was zero-for-three on dirt at that point, when Miller returned him to dirt out of desperation and watched him blossom into a two-time Breeders’ Cup winner.

Stormy Liberal, ridden by Drayden Van Dyke, winner of the Breeders’ Cup Turf Sprint

Even more remarkable is that they purchased Stormy Liberal in a $40,000 claim, and that he won his four last starts of 2018 by a nose, a nose, a head and his second straight Breeders’ Cup by a neck, a year after he won his Breeders’ Cup race at Del Mar. “It’s pretty amazing to have won at Del Mar, which is sort of my home track, and then to come out to Churchill Downs and pull the same thing off,” Bernsen said. “It sort of capped off a very tumultuous year for Peter especially, dealing with the barns that were burning down (at the San Luis Rey Training Center); and a month later we’re getting an Eclipse Award. Then a couple of months after that, we’re in Dubai, and both horses ran well.”

Two months after winning his second consecutive Breeders’ Cup race, Stormy Liberal proved that he’s mortal, finishing second to Caribou Club in the Gr3 Joe Hernandez Stakes at Santa Anita on 2019 New Year’s Day.

A year ago, after Stormy Liberal won the Breeders’ Cup Turf Sprint at Del Mar, he finished 11th in the Gp1 Hong Kong Sprint. Then, after finishing second in the Gr3 Daytona Stakes at Santa Anita, he was second by a half-length in the Gp1 Al Quoz Sprint in Dubai.

He’d literally taken his connections all over the globe. They could have gotten to those exotic destinations in an airplane or on a yacht, but what fun would that have been?

Seth Klarman - Newspaperofrecord

Breeders’ Cup winning owners - sponsored by:

Cloud Computing owners, William Lawrence (left) and Seth Klarman (right) with trainer Chad Brown (far right)

Worth the Wait

Seth Klarman’s whole life has revolved around numbers, usually business numbers as a financial boy genius who became a self-made billionaire as CEO and president and portfolio manager of the Boston-based Baupost Group, a private investment partnership he founded in 1982. He also, as a minority owner of the Boston Red Sox, knows all of baseball’s analytics.

In Thoroughbred racing, a natural fit for him growing up three blocks from Pimlico Race Course in Baltimore, he’s put up great numbers since becoming an owner in 1993, first in partnership with Jeff Ravich as Klaravich Stables before Ravich opened his own stable on the West Coast. Klarman held on to the stable name and found a new partner in 2006 in William H. Lawrence, the CEO and chief investment officer of Meridian Capital Partners in Albany, N.Y.

Klarman’s precociousness in business was absolutely extraordinary. When he was four, he redecorated his room as a retail store, putting price tags on all his possessions. In the fifth grade, he gave his class a presentation about buying a stock. To supplement his personal income, he had a paper route, a snow cone stand, a snow shoveling business and sold stamp and coin collections. He bought his first stock at the age of 10, purchasing one share of Johnson & Johnson because he had gone through a lot of band-aids growing up. The stock split three-for-one, allowing Klarman to triple his investment. By the age of 12, he was calling his broker regularly to get stock quotes.

He intended to major in mathematics when he enrolled at Cornell University, but switched to economics. He graduated magna cum laude in economics with a minor in history in 1979. He worked for the Mutual Share Fund, where he had interned in the summer of his junior year, for a year and a half before going to business school at Harvard, where he was a Baker Scholar. When he graduated in 1982, he co-founded the Baupost Group. In 2008, he was inducted into the International Investors Alpha’s Hedge Fund Manager Hall of Fame.

His philanthropic endeavors are legendary.

William H. Lawrence, who is on the Board of Overseers for the Wharton School of Business, was born in North Dakota, but his family moved to Albany, N.Y., when he was young and his family enjoyed going to Saratoga. He was 12 when he visited Saratoga Race Course for the first time, and he subsequently went back with friends many times. They told each other that if any of them wound up with the capital to buy Thoroughbreds, they would do that. A few decades later, after Lawrence had graduated from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and made his fortune as the founder and CEO of Meridian Capital Partners, his friends reminded him of that, saying “You’re the guy.”

So he stepped up to the plate and joined forced with Klarman. He did so with no pretensions. “If you find people who are actually making money in this sport, then please let me know,” Lawrence told Tim Hyland in a 2013 story in The Wharton Magazine. “For me, being from Wharton; for Seth, who is a great investor, this business is very incongruous to how we would normally think otherwise.”

Cloud Computing wins the Preakness Stakes

Regardless, Klaravich Stables has some 100 horses, most of them with Chad Brown. Many have had financial names, including Currency Swap, Balance the Books, Economic Model, Takeover Target and Cloud Computing. One can only imagine the thrill Klarman had when Klaravich Stables and William Lawrence’s Cloud Computing won the 2017 Preakness Stakes in his hometown.

Newspaperofrecord, ridden by Irad Ortiz Jr., wins the Juvenile Fillies Turf on Breeders' Cup World Championship Friday at Churchill Downs

Through October, 2018, though, there was one number that Klaravich hadn’t reached: one. They had not had one victory In the Breeders’ Cup. Klaravich was 0-for-16 and Klarman 0-2 on his own heading into the 2018 Breeders’ Cup, an oh-fer that ended in exultation when their unworldly two-year-old filly Newspaperofrecord upped her perfect record to three-for-three with a dominant 6 ¾-length victory in the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Filly Turf. “We never won a Breeders’ Cup race, so that’s special,” Klarman said. “I think she’s our most spectacular horse. We’ve never had somebody that emerged so quickly in their career—showed so much promise and fulfilled it.”

Economics be damned because, as Lawrence pointed out, “Winning a horse race is one of the greatest feelings in the world.”

Peter Brant - Sistercharlie

Breeders’ Cup winning owners - sponsored by:

Sistercharlie, ridden by John Velazquez, wins the Maker’s Mark Breeders’ Cup Filly & Mare Turf

Even Better Second Time Around

Peter Brant, the 71-year-old owner of the $2 million Breeders’ Cup Filly and Mare Turf winner Sistercharlie, had so much success in his first life as an owner or co-owner. With 1979 and 1980 Older Filly Champion Waya, 1984 Kentucky Derby and Belmont Stakes winner Swale; 1984 Breeders’ Cup Sprint winner Gulch, 1995 Kentucky Derby, Belmont Stakes and Travers Stakes winner Thunder Gulch, who made Brant the only breeder to have bred a Kentucky Derby winner and both his sire and dam, it’s amazing he ever walked away from the sport for two decades.

Brant, who is Chairman and CEO of White Birch Paper Company in Greenwich, Connecticut, and a noted arts advocate and the founder and president of the Brant Foundation and The Brant Foundation Art Study Center in Greenwich, is also a world-class polo player. When he left racing in 1996, he concentrated on polo, playing for the White Birch Farm team and serving as founder of the Greenwich Polo Club and the Saratoga Polo Association and co-founder of the Bridgehampton Polo Club. He retired from polo in 2016 and returned to racing.

The brilliant filly Ruffian had led to his initial involvement. “I had always been interested in racing since I was a kid,” he said. “I used to go to the racetrack and watch all the great horses like Kelso and Carry Back run. But Ruffian, how great she was and how she performed, really affected me. I wanted to go into racing.”

Owner Peter Brant

The second time around? He credits 2015 Triple Crown winner American Pharoah. “I went out for the Belmont Stakes, and I just had a feeling he was going to win that day at Belmont,” he said. “I went out with my son Chris and we saw a lot of people that we knew and I just felt like, `Wow. This horse, after so many years, won the Triple Crown,’ and that kind of inspired me to get back in racing.”

Yet he won just three races in 2017 before hitting a huge home run in 2018 with Sistercharlie, one of trainer Chad Brown’s outstanding bevy of turf stars. Brant bought Sistercharlie in France in 2017. “This is the greatest win I’ve ever had,” Brant said after the Breeders’ Cup Filly and Mare Turf. “She hasn’t always been able to make her schedule because of the weather, or because of a spider bite, or because of a fever she had. She had a bout of pneumonia earlier. And she’s just overcome everything, and she’s very special, very special to me and very special to my family and I’m sure very special to Chad.”

Brant nearly had two winners in the Breeders’ Cup. His four-year-old filly Wow Cat, who he co-owns with Stud Vendaval, Inc., finished second by a length to the brilliant filly Monomoy Girl in the $2 million Breeders’ Cup Distaff.

It’s good being back.

Cash Is King Stable - Jaywalk

Breeders’ Cup winning owners - sponsored by:

Jaywalk, lead back by co-owner Leonard Green

The Super Bowl and Lemonade

When Cash Is King Stable, co-owners of the brilliant two-year-old filly Jaywalk with DJ Stable, won the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Filly, it wasn’t the stable’s first time in the national spotlight.

Cash Is King’s initial success was almost immediate thanks to managing partner Chuck Zacney. Founder of Sirrus Group—a regional medical billing company based in Norristown, Pennsylvania, Zacney grew up near Liberty Bell and Keystone racetracks and fell in love with racing at a young age. His friend Joe Lerro approached him at the 2004 Super Bowl about buying a Thoroughbred. He did.

One of their first horses was Afleet Alex, who finished second in the 2004 Breeders’ Cup Juvenile.

Afleet Alex’s success as a three-year-old in 2005 took on a whole new level thanks to the brave little girl, Alex Scott, who in 2000, at the age of four while suffering neuroblastoma (a rare form of childhood cancer), created Alex’s Lemonade Stand in her home town in Manchester, Connecticut, to raise awareness and money to fight the pediatric cancer she was battling and to help find a cure for all children with cancer. She opened her first stand on her front lawn and raised $2,000 that day.

Alex, of course, fell in love with Afleet Alex, and his connections brought her family to all three Triple Crown races and the connections became major contributors, helping to raise $4 million in 2005 as Alex’s Lemonade Stands popped up all over the country.

Afleet Alex nearly won the Triple Crown in 2005. Afleet Alex led in deep stretch before finishing third by one length to Giacomo in the Kentucky Derby.

Then Afleet Alex somehow won the Preakness Stakes by 4 ¾ lengths! Despite being clobbered by another horse at the top of the stretch, nearly falling to his nose and keeping his balance somehow with just one foot on the ground, he allowed jockey Jeremy Rose to stay on and regain control. When asked how he stayed on, Rose said, “An angel kept me safe. There was someone up there who helped us; little Alex kept me on.”

Jaywalk wins the Juvenile Fillies at Churchill Downs for co-owners, D.J. Stable LLC and Cash is King LLC

Afleet Alex romped in the Belmont Stakes by seven lengths, but then was injured and retired to stud.

To date, Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation has raised more than $150 million to fight childhood cancer and funded nearly 1,000 research projects nationally—a mission which might not have prospered if Afleet Alex hadn’t distinguished himself in the Triple Crown.

“I will never be able to thank that horse enough for what he did for the Foundation and for our family,” said Jay Scott, Alex’s dad and co-executive director of the Foundation.

Cash Is King was awarded a Special Eclipse Award in 2005 for their work with the lemonade stands and with Alex’s ongoing battle, which she unfortunately lost in August, 2004.

Cash Is King didn’t have another Breeders’ Cup starter until 2018 when Jaywalk entered the starting gate at Churchill Downs.

Alex Scott would likely have fallen in love with Jaywalk, a filly who excelled and had a limitless future—one she deserved but never received.

DJ Stable was founded in the early 1980s by New Jersey natives Lois and Leonard Green. DJ Stable is now managed by their son Jonathan, the “J” in DJ Stable. The “D” is for one of the daughters, Debbie, who, like another daughter, Beth, is an attorney. The stable’s top horses include Grade 1 winner Songandaprayer and 2000 Sapling Stakes winner Shooter. In addition to their racing operation, the Greens have a successful breeding operation at Hawkeye Farm in Lexington, Kentucky.

Kosta & Pete Horonis - Accelerate

Breeders’ Cup winning owners - sponsored by:

Connections to Accelerate

Completing the Circle

When Accelerate and Joel Rosario won the 2018 Breeders’ Cup Classic, they did more than give trainer John Sadler and the Hronis brothers, Kosta and Pete, their first victory in a Breeders’ Cup race. They took Sadler and Hronis Racing, and Rosario, too, full circle.

Growing up on a ranch in Bakersfield, California, the Hronis brothers loved going to visit their grandparents a two-hour drive away. They lived five blocks from Santa Anita. “We were always the first ones in the car to visit Grandma and Grandpa because we knew we’d end up going to the racetrack,” Kosta Hronis told Scott Jagow in a March 4, 2015, story in the Paulick Report. “Me and my brothers were little railbirds. We had our noses glued to the track.”

Fast forward several decades. The Hronis brothers never lost their love of racing, eventually buying a box at Santa Anita. On a fateful day at Santa Anita in 2010, 50-year-old Kosta turned to his brother and told him he was going to buy a horse. Peter told him, “Dude, you’re crazy. You have no idea what you’re getting into.”

Fortunately, someone next to them did. A long-time usher named Tony overheard their conversation and told them he’d set up an appointment with a trainer if they would wait a week. They waited. Tony had set them up for a meeting with John Sadler. Kosta laughed and said, “There’s no way John Sadler’s going to mess with a little valley kid like me that’s never been in the racing business.”

Sadler couldn’t have cared less and welcomed Hronis Racing into his stable, where they had considerable success with Lady of Shamrock, Iotapa, the incredible mare Stellar Wind and Hard Aces. The brothers, whose parents began Hronis, Inc., specialize in growing, packing and shipping premium citrus in Delano, California where they were born and raised. They were the leading owners at Santa Anita in 2012 and 2014 and at Del Mar in 2012, remarkable early success for new owners.

Kosta Hronis with jockey Joel Rosario

But they’d never won a Breeders’ Cup race before the 2018 Classic, losing their first 13 races, including Catalina Cruiser’s disappointing sixth as the 4-5 favorite in the 2018 Breeders’ Cup Dirt Mile. Sadler topped that oh-fer, going zero-for-44, including three losses in races before the Classic—one of them when Catapult finished second by a half-length to Expert Eye in the 2018 Breeders’ Cup Mile. That didn’t prevent the owners and trainer from feeling confident with Accelerate and Rosario, who went off a deserving favorite in the Classic.

“Joel Rosario rode our very first horse in our very first race in February of 2010 on Sleep Ride, a little horse that John claimed for us; and to turn all the way around and have Joel win the Breeders’ Cup Classic today, it’s a special day and we’re very happy for Joel,” Kosta said after the race.

So was Sadler. “It was great,” Sadler said in late December. “I think Joel rode one of his first winners on one of my horses at Golden Gate. We have a long history—a good history. When Victor (Espinoza) got injured (before the Pacific Classic), I sat down and thought to myself, and it came to me right away to use Joel in the Pacific Classic.”

Accelerate, ridden by Joel Rosario, wins the Breeders’ Cup Classic

Sadler also remembers the first time he met the Hronis brothers: “They came down to my box and we introduced each other. Their uncle had a business in San Marino, and I’m a local guy. So we hit it off. We liked each other right away.”

Asked if “like” has grown into “love” after the Breeders’ Cup Classic, Sadler had a long laugh, and said, “Yes it has.”