Trainer of the Quarter - Jason Servis

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By Bill Heller

The start of a new year did nothing to slow the momentum of 60-year-old trainer Jason Servis. He headed into February just 20 wins shy of a 1,000th career victory thanks to a sensational 2017 campaign, when he posted career highs in earnings, victories, and starts. And his legitimate Kentucky Derby contender, Firenze Fire, already has a step up on his rivals, having captured his three-year-old debut.

Though he may lack a national presence, Servis has a phenomenal career win percentage of 23.3, with 9,800 victories in 4,211 starts.

“Life is great, I was telling myself when I was out on my stable pony the other morning,” Servis said on February 1st. “I had my son (Garrett, 29) with me. I said, ‘I can’t believe I’m getting paid to do this.’”

At the start of his lifetime with horses, he wasn’t getting paid much. And he didn’t even mind. “My dad ended up a steward at Charles Town. That’s where I cut my teeth. No money. But they were the good old days. My dad made me. I learned the straight and narrow. Work hard. Keep your nose clean.”

It’s not only worked for Jason, but also for his younger brother John, who guided Smarty Jones to a career that came up one length short of winning the 2004 Triple Crown.

Servis started out as a jockey before he conceded to his size and weight. Next, he worked as an exercise rider and assistant trainer for Peter Fortay in the mornings and in the jockeys’ room in the afternoons at Monmouth Park.

In his first year as a trainer, he saddled just one horse. “I didn’t start training until I was 43,” he said. “I had seen a lot. It was a very good education for me.”

In his first full year of training in 2002, he won 14 races from 71 starts, just under 20 percent.

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Two years later, his brother John had the horse of a lifetime in Smarty Jones, whose victories in the Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes left him eight-for-eight. “I’ll never forget, I was just sitting at the kitchen table by myself at a quarter to five the day after the Derby,” Jason said. “And I’m looking at these roses my wife had taken. I can’t believe my brother won the Kentucky Derby. We were on the track our whole lives.”

On the day after Smarty Jones won the Preakness, John, Jason, and their father were at Pimlico. “John did ‘Good Morning America’ and other interviews,” Jason said. “We were in such a fog from the race. It was overwhelming. We were kind of dazed. We couldn’t get the car started.”

There was a good reason. They were in the wrong car.

Talking about Smarty Jones’ second by a length in the Belmont Stakes is still painful for Jason Servis. You can hear it in his voice. “Gosh, I was really sad for my brother,” he said. “It was like someone beat him up.”

Maybe he can avenge that loss on behalf of his brother. Firenze Fire is now the winner of four-of-six starts, including the Grade 1 Champagne and Grade 3 Sanford Stakes, and the Poseidon’s Warrior colt started 2018 off right with a win in the Jerome Stakes at Aqueduct.

In 2017, Servis won 112 races and $4.9 million – 23rd in the country – from 391 starts, and it proved to be his most successful season to date, with Mr. Amore Stable’s Firenze Fire providing him with his first Grade 1, and Gary and Mary West’s Actress winning two graded stakes races.

He split his 50-horse stable at Belmont Park in New York and Payson Park in Florida this winter. “I could have more horses,” he said, but I think maybe less is worth more. I like to keep my hands on my horses.”

His philosophy is simple. “I developed a program from galloping horses,” he said. “Keep your horses happy. Once they’re fit, stay out of their way.”

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Trainer Profile - Roger Attfield

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By Alex Campbell

At 78 years old, Hall of Fame trainer Roger Attfield is still at the top of his game, showing no signs of slowing down.

“While I’m well and healthy and enjoying it, I’ll keep on doing it,” Attfield said. “I enjoy the horses. I always have. I’m still enjoying the people and my owners that I’m working with, so there’s no reason not to.”

While some people are born into the sport, Attfield developed a love of horses all on his own. Born in England to Leslie, a coal merchant, and Gladys, a stay-at-home mother, in 1939, he grew up in the town of Newbury. Attfield said that as a child, he would often venture off with a group of foreign settlers that made their home just outside of his village.

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“The Romaners used to come up and camp on the village green, and still do apparently,” Attfield said. “They used to come up there with donkeys and goats, and when I was very young I followed them up. They sort of befriended me up there. My parents went mad when they found me because they thought they were stealing me. I fell in love with animals, and especially horses, from a very early age.”

This love of horses led him to a riding school. His parents didn’t have the means to pay for lessons, so Attfield funded them himself by working for farmers in the area.

“I started riding for some local farmers that had ponies kicking around,” Attfield said. “I used to do a milk round and I used to go ferreting for rabbits and sell the rabbits to the village and the local butchers to get enough money to go to the riding school.”

As Attfield got older, he moved into competitive riding. He started with show horses and eventually raced steeplechase horses as a teenager, where he won the juvenile steeplechase championship in 1955 at 16 years of age. The next year, he enrolled in the Berkshire Institute of Agriculture, where he specialized in farm management. Once he finished his education, Attfield started his own training and breeding business, while also riding show jumpers at the same time.

But as he moved into his 30s, Attfield was finding it tough to get by, even while competing in international equestrian competitions. In 1970, he made the decision to move to Canada in search of greener pastures.

“It’s pretty hard to make a living, no matter how well you’re doing, riding jumpers and show jumpers,” he said. “You had to sell the odd horse every now and then to make ends meet and you’re working really, really hard. That was getting to be a little tedious, and I didn’t see how I was going to do much better financially.”

Attfield had established a good foundation in the horse business during his time in England.

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“A number of the people that I rode for were horse and cattle dealers, and they were just true farmers and horse people,” he said. “I used to go around sales and ride for a lot of these horse dealers that were really, really good horse people. I was always asking them questions and listening to conversations. I was always surrounding myself with some pretty good older horse people that really knew horses.”

Attfield said it was easy to spot the differences in horseracing between England and Canada once he made his first visit to Woodbine Racetrack in Toronto.

“When I first came over, I went down to the track with Frank Stronach one morning,” he said. “It was an eye opener for me as opposed to how we train horses in England. I was going into a situation where there’s riders and hotwalkers and grooms. Back home, somebody would do two or three horses and do everything with them.”

Attfield said he initially gave himself three years in Canada before he was going to move back to England. His first job at Woodbine was as a freelance exercise rider, but he quickly moved into training himself. He was given the opportunity to spend one season at Blue Bonnets Raceway in Montreal with Stronach’s trainer Fred Loschke, but when the meet at Blue Bonnets ended, Attfield wasn’t sure if he wanted to continue in racing.

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Diamonds are Forever: Chuck Fipke in Profile

By Frances J. Karon

The kitchen table is in a state of organized chaos. Thick white binders; thin red binders; a three-hole punch; scissors; clear tape; paper printouts; a box filled mostly with yellow HB 2 Paper Mate pencils, their erasers worn to the nub. From where Charles “Chuck” Fipke is seated at the table, he need only glance up to see Forever Unbridled’s Breeders’ Cup Distaff trophy. To his left, down the length of the wooden table, is a window bench that was overtaken long ago by more fat white binders, behind a Nikon with an 800mm lens on a tripod.

This is where Fipke plans his matings, like the one that produced Eclipse Award-winning champion older female Forever Unbridled.

The view through the back window is magnificent: the house backs up to the shore of the Okanagan Lake in Kelowna, British Columbia. And the Nikon is pointed at the top of a tall perch, recently frequented by an osprey, on the dock outside. On the ground, plump quail, unperturbed by a fat squirrel in their midst, peck at the birdseed that Fipke tosses out from a container near the door.

The yard, says his son Taylor, the youngest of Fipke’s six children, is “like a mini-ecosystem.”

For as long as anyone knows, Fipke has always had this connection with nature, linked with his fearlessness, fervor for adventure, and the methodical approach of a passionate and unwavering workaholic. Listen – you don’t discover diamond mines by accident or luck.

Nor has his Thoroughbred breeding operation been run by accident or luck.

“In both disciplines [horses and geology], I do my own little research,” he says. “To identify minerals that go with diamonds, I’ve got my ways of doing it. It’s pretty complicated, and I do the same with horses, too.”

They’re really not so different, finding diamond mines and breeding champions.

Chuck Fipke was the first of Ed and Anna’s four children, born in Alberta, Canada, in 1946 with independence and a take-charge attitude.

Anna was, she says, “always right behind” her young son.

“I remember when he was just a little boy and he used to take his little tricycle and go down a hill,” says Anna, “and there was traffic down there. That really scared me. I didn’t want him to do that but he did it anyway. It was a challenge for him to go fast down there and just stop.”

Instead of curbing his strong personality, she gave him freedom. “I always encouraged him to do things, I never restricted his doings. He was quite a kid to raise.” And here she laughs again. “He had his own way and he wanted it done his way. He always was a leader. Whenever he was with a group of boys, he was the one that was always arranging things and taking them wherever they should go, which he still does. And it seemed like he did good because I never heard complaints about it.”

His family couldn’t afford much, and with Ed drifting in – and mostly out – of the picture during the early years, Anna resolutely raised four children. “I always found a way,” she says. “They never went hungry.”

“My dad left us once for two years, eh.” Fipke says matter-of-factly. It’s consigned to the past now. “We had this garden, and at one stage all we had left was celery to eat. I didn’t like celery after that, but now I love celery, because I ate it when I was young.”

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Jerseytown

Fipke was a quick thinker, precocious and clever enough to devise means of earning money – though not always in ways that he could tell his mother. “I actually was quite a good entrepreneur,” he says. “I was probably the richest kid in my class. And you know, I never got anything from my parents.

“I did a lot of questionable things, to be quite honest. Even though I was a Scout,” he says quietly, looking back on a child’s survival instinct through an adult’s filter.

When his father started an aerial farm photography business and settled down somewhat, moving the family from Alberta to British Columbia – to a Peachland farm on the outskirts of Kelowna – Ed was more present in their lives, although his work took him away often.

Anna used a paintbrush to turn Ed’s pictures into beautiful works of art, and their oldest son knocked on doors to sell the photos. Young Fipke was, he discovered, good at sales, and the job helped prepare him for the future. “It doesn’t matter what you do, you have to sell yourself,” he says.

“My dad was always critical, which was good. It’s good to have criticism. But my mum was always positive, so I had a balance of both.”

While finding his balance, Fipke began to yearn for a horse. He says, “I liked all animals, but all I dreamt about was having a horse. I never thought I’d get one.”

He’d raised a collection of birds, from pigeons to owls and even a falcon, from a very young age. Maybe he was attracted to the freedom that birds experienced. One day he’d stood helplessly watching as his falcon flew away, never to return.

With horses, he, too, could fly. Their wildness that could never be fully tamed was a buzz.

“The thing about riding a horse going full blast is it’s exciting, because with downhill skiing, you can control yourself, but with a horse you never really know exactly what’s going to happen. You direct it, but it doesn’t necessarily go there!” He laughs, his enthusiasm boyish and pure.

He had two horses before he was out of high school, an Arabian filly he lost when his father still owed money for her and an ex-racehorse he sold after it nearly killed him, giving Fipke a concussion and fracturing his skull in three places.

“I used to love to ride like the wind. You develop quite an attachment to them, too. It’s one of the things I don’t like about having so many horses, that I can’t really see them all,” he says.

He rode the ex-racehorse against Exhibition (now Hastings) Park racehorses that were on their way to the Calgary Stampede. “I came dead last, but it didn’t discourage me,” he says, remembering that he’d ridden Western against real jockeys on lightweight saddles. “I didn’t think I’d lose, you know.”

Taylor tells his dad, “That doesn’t cross your mind often.”

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Unbridled Forever

Fipke graduated from high school in Kelowna and enrolled at the University of British Columbia (UBC). His father had advised him that there were nine jobs available for every geophysicist who earned a degree, so he started off in that direction until a required course unearthed a talent for geology.

“Before I went to university, my little brother liked rocks, but I didn’t really. You know, they were interesting, but…”

Rocks, he soon learned, presented him with the intellectual challenge of discovery and the physical challenge of the hunt that drives him even now. Geology could unlock the secrets, billions of years old, of the Earth for anyone with the intelligence, patience, and derring-do to find them.

On a typical day, Chuck Fipke spends his mornings poring over the papers in his horse binders and afternoons poring over samples, results, charts, and maps at his lab, where he’s in the process of finalizing a “very important” diamond indicator mineral classification scheme that no one else has done.

C.F. Mineral Research Ltd. is in a modest building that’s been the company’s base since it relocated from the kitchen of Fipke’s first house. His parking spot – which he uses more often now that he isn’t bicycling or rollerblading to the office anymore – is marked with a sign: “Stud parking only. All others will be towed.” An old, broken-down Oldsmobile, AKA “The Shark,” occupies a parking space, too.

“We do things cost-effectively. What I found when we were starting out is that it was cheaper to put five guys in a car and drive than it was to have everyone go on a bus, eh!” he says. The Shark is kept around as a reminder of how Fipke once had to make do on a shoestring budget.

The work that goes on inside the lab is, frankly, staggering. The process of sifting through each sample of what, to the uneducated eye, looks like dirt, dirt, and more dirt is incredibly detailed and exacting. No single grain is ignored; each step sifts out particles of earth whose analysis will not lead to diamonds, gold, or whatever element they happen to be looking for, until they are left with a small, viable sample that warrants closer examination.

The man running the wet-sieving equipment removes every last speck of dirt before moving on to another bag of dirt. If he doesn’t do this perfectly, the next sample will be contaminated. And so it goes for each of the weeding-out processes. One tiny misstep can put prospectors on a costly false trail – or turn them away from a legitimate one.

This lab, it’s been said, is the world’s best in its field. “One reason we’re so successful in mining,” Fipke says, “is we developed the technology ourselves.”

That technology has helped Fipke identify what he thinks is his second diamond mine, in the Attawapiskat area north of Toronto.

“It’s fun finding diamonds!” he says.

But despite using the highest level of technology to separate and analyze millions of grains in a bag of dirt – or to breed and develop horses – Fipke doesn’t use the internet. For him, the fax machine is still king, and, though his horses sometimes wear heart monitors and GPS equipment, there’s nothing better than a stopwatch when it comes to training.

Fipke, who has a perpetual hint of mischief in blue eyes and a laugh always percolating under the surface, says, “I’ve learned how to use a microwave! People call me a dinosaur, but I’m high tech now that I use that microwave.”

Maybe his reluctance to embrace all aspects of modern technology is a vestige of his earliest days in the field when, just out of college with a wife (from whom he’s divorced) and young son, he lived among cannibals, warriors, and bushmen, sometimes sleeping with a double-barreled shotgun by his side.

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Practical Tips for International Travels

By Denise Steffanus

Horses thrive on a daily routine and do their best when racing in a familiar environment, like a sports team with home-court advantage. But more and more American trainers are trying their hand at racing abroad, in places where racing is very different from what their horses are accustomed to.

Racehorses in Europe don't live and train on the racetrack. They are stabled at training yards, similar to a trainer's private farm in America. Riders hack the horses to grass gallops, sometimes through the nearby town, to get their daily exercise. It is a relaxing, pastoral setting.

When the horses head to the races, they are vanned from the training yard to the racetrack. The disadvantage for an American horse racing for the first time at a European racecourse is it doesn't have the opportunity to train over the track. So on race day, the horse finds itself in strange surroundings without the security of a lead pony, which are not customary in European racing.

Eoin Harty is a fifth-generation Irish trainer now based in California. Under his tutelage, Bill Casner's Well Armed dominated the Group 1 Dubai World Cup in 2009, winning by 14 lengths, the largest margin in the race's history.

Harty described the scene at England's famed Newmarket.

"The town is just basically around different training establishments," he said. "When you go to the track, you might be driving through the town and there's 50 horses walking on the street beside you, and I mean literally walking on the street. Then they just turn off and they go gallop up a hill somewhere. Then they walk back down through the middle of town and go back to their stalls. It takes a little bit of getting used to."

Racetrack configurations

Racetracks in America differ greatly from those in Europe. Here, horses travel counterclockwise on an oval, usually with a dirt surface that the track crew diligently works to keep as flat and even as possible. Turf courses are located inside the dirt tracks, so they are shorter with tighter turns. In Europe, horses race both clockwise and counterclockwise, primarily on turf, traveling up and down grades, and not necessarily in an oval.

England's racecourses are the most interesting. At Goodwood Racecourse in Chichester, the straightaway leads into a loop with sharp turns on a severely undulating surface that sends the horses back over the ground they traversed on the way out. Windsor Racecourse in Berkshire is a figure eight, with horses negotiating both right and left turns. Epsom Downs in Surrey also has right and left turns and a steep downhill turn. At Ascot, some races, such as the Group 1 Queen Anne Stakes, are contested over a straight mile course.

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Goodwood

"The hardest thing for me has been dealing with the straightaway, which is such a different race," said trainer Graham Motion, who grew up in Newmarket and apprenticed with Jonathan Pease in Chantilly, France, before coming to the United States. "It's more figuring out the idiosyncrasies of how the race should be run. Because you can't really teach a horse to run straight. It's something they're going to have to adjust to."

Find a local trainer

Harty said American horses tend to get mentally stressed in this strange environment. The way to solve the problem, he said, is to arrive a few weeks earlier and have a local trainer assimilate the horses into his own yard's string so they can train on the same gallops and become accustomed to the local racing environment.

Trainer Art Sherman did exactly that when California Chrome's connections decided to send the horse to Royal Ascot after his second-place finish in the 2015 Dubai World Cup.

"I wasn't familiar with how they train in Newmarket, up and down those hills and different courses," Sherman said. "So I thought it would be better off for the horse to be with somebody who knew everything going on in that area."

California Chrome was placed with Newmarket trainer Rae Guest, but Sherman remained his trainer of record. Guest was tasked with introducing the American Horse of the Year to running clockwise as he prepared for the Group 1 Prince of Wales's Stakes.

"You're not going to go there cold turkey and have them go the wrong way and think they're going to run their best race," Sherman said. "Another factor of going the opposite way is they're going to be on a lead they're not used to running on. That's why you need to train them that [direction] for that type of turn, going from one lead to the other."

Unfortunately, a bruised foot knocked California Chrome out of the race. Sherman visited the horse and said, "He was not a happy camper." His grueling two-year campaign had caught up with him, so California Chrome's connections brought him home for a three-month turnout at Taylor Made Farm in Kentucky.

Trainer Ken McPeek has raced at Ascot and Epsom. In 2004, his Hard Buck finished second in the Group 1 King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes at Ascot. When he built his Magdalena Farm in Lexington, he installed a two-mile European turf gallop up and down the Kentucky hills.

"We train them right-handed and left-handed on gallops here on my farm to prepare them," he said. "If they're going to run at Ascot, we train them right-handed every day. And if they're going to run at Epsom, they go left. And they also get a chance to gallop the hills."

Trainers at the racetrack are not as fortunate.

"I don't know of any track in the States where you can do that," Harty said. "Maybe the racetrack that you're training at would work with you and give you 10 minutes at the end of the day to gallop the wrong way."

Take a Pony

Getting a horse the distance to the starting gate without incident is Motion's concern.

"It's a very free gallop down to the start of the race," he said. "Normally, for the mile at Ascot, the start is a mile away. So you have to gallop a mile down to the start the wrong way up the racetrack. So that can be an issue. Last year McPeek's horse got loose going down to the start."

Daddys Lil Darling, Epsom

Motion was talking about Daddys Lil Darling, who was loping toward the start of last year's Group 1 Epsom Oaks with nine other horses when a loud clap of thunder startled her. The filly ran off with rider Olivier Peslier, eventually parting company with him and running loose until she was caught and scratched from the race.

“I can’t tell you why or how that happened, though I was initially kicking myself that I should have had a pony with her,” McPeek told the Daily Racing Form after the incident.

Lead ponies aren't prohibited in Europe. Trainers just rarely use them.

"Our horses, when they go over there, need that security blanket," Harty said. "If you look at their horses, they send two-year-olds to three different racetracks and three starts and they're in front of a crowd and it doesn't seem to bother them. So I think it's just a different kind of horse with a different kind of upbringing, and that's why they don't use ponies."

A trainer can make a request in advance for permission to use a pony, but has to supply it himself. That often means shipping it to Europe with his other horses.

To further add to the horse's comfort, most trainers take their key personnel with them. Sherman took California Chrome's groom, Raul Rodriguez, and his exercise rider, Dihigi Gladney, to Dubai. Both times, the horse’s regular jockey, Victor Espinoza, was aboard.

Riders up

In the history of the Dubai World Cup, American trainers always have taken the horse's regular jockey with them. Notably, Baffert named Chantal Sutherland-Kruse to ride Game On Dude in the 2012 edition. She is the only female jockey to compete in the auspicious race on United Arab Emirates soil.

Hall of Fame trainer Steve Asmussen said, "With that caliber of horse it would be insulting not to continue to ride who has helped you get there."

In 2008, Asmussen teamed Curlin with Robby Albarado for the win, and Gun Runner had Florent Geroux up for their second-place finish behind Arrogate in 2017.

In Europe, Wesley Ward primarily taps the jockeys with whom he has had the most success in the U.S., among them John Velazquez, Joel Rosario, and Espinoza. Recently, Ward has teamed up over there with champion jockey Frankie Dettori.

"He seems to be able to ride anywhere in the world and adapt to certain situations," Ward said. "He has, in fact, won certain races that I think an American rider or a rider from there wouldn't win, just because he's a phenomenal rider."

Ward was the first American trainer to win a race at Royal Ascot when his Strike the Tiger, with Velazquez in the irons, took the Windsor Castle Stakes by a neck in 2009. Ward returns every year to England and France with a string of horses that rack up impressive wins.

He begins preparing his horses for the midsummer Ascot meet around the first of the year, with a winter break to freshen them. His goal is to give the horses one or two well-spaced prep races in the U.S. before shipping them to England.

"We give them ample time to recover and ample time from their last start here to go there to prepare for those starts. So, essentially, we are running very fresh horses on the day, not tired horses," he said.

Logistics of the trip…

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The Legacy of El Prado

By Frances J. Karon

From the town of Cashel in County Tipperary, Ireland, at Lyonstown Stud, sprang a stallion that launched a breeding operation for Canadian entrepreneur Frank Stronach and has left an unmistakable mark on Thoroughbred racing.

Raced, like his sire and dam before him, by Robert Sangster, El Prado was trained on the holy ground of Ballydoyle by the incomparable Vincent O’Brien.  

A son of Sadler’s Wells, in his day the leading sire in Great Britain and Ireland a record 14 times, El Prado caught the attention of bloodstock agent Dermot Carty.

To appreciate what El Prado has accomplished, one must recognize the brilliance of his sire.

Sadler’s Wells entered stud in 1985 to immediate success. Over time, he became the sire of 294 stakes winners, including 14 individual Irish classic winners, 12 classic winners England, and three classic winners in France.

But it was El Prado, foaled in 1989 from the brilliant Lady Capulet, that would travel his talents to North America and find a home in Kentucky as the stud who made Stronach’s Adena Springs an award-winning force in racing.

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Charles O’Brien, an assistant to his father, trainer Vincent O’Brien, when El Prado was racing, looks back fondly on the young horse.

“He was not a very typical Sadler’s Wells and didn’t look like him,” recalled O’Brien. “Most of them were bay with white points, and he was grey and bigger and more substantial.  Many were quite light-framed, but he was a big, heavy horse.”

O’Brien recalls putting a green El Prado through his paces.

“He wasn’t the two-year-old type but he had such a good constitution that we just kept moving him up in his work, and he thrived on it and just kept going, although he didn’t really have the physique of a sharp two-year-old,” said O’Brien.

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El Prado at the Curragh

But familiarity through the bloodlines struck a chord and despite physical appearances, O’Brien knew that El Prado had a genetic right to be good young.

“We knew him well from scratch. He was out of a very good filly, Lady Capulet, which won the Irish Guineas first time out.  We knew him all his life,” said O’Brien.

Blessed by pedigree, El Prado is a half-brother to Irish champion Entitled. El Prado made six starts in his juvenile campaign, including a score at first asking and a next-out win in the Group 3 John J. Long Memorial Stakes.

In his third career start, the Group 3 Anglesey Stakes, he came up against a monster in St. Jovite, who denied a stubborn El Prado by a desperate neck.

St. Jovite went on to win the Futurity en route to sharing year-end championship honors with El Prado.  A year later, St. Jovite would win the Irish Derby.

Keeping El Prado, a horse already considered not your typical juvenile racing prospect, in form, however, was proving to be something of an issue.

“He was such a good eater it was hard to keep the weight off him. You had to give him a little more work than most, plus he wasn’t the greatest work horse in the world so it took a fair bit of graft to keep him fit,” said O’Brien.

If anything, that narrow loss to St. Jovite may have been the race to bring El Prado to top form.  On September 7, 1991, El Prado made his Group 1 debut in the National Stakes at the Curragh. With Lester Piggott up, El Prado was expected to win, which he did by a half-length over Nordic Brief.

“The Group 1 National was his peak. It was very typical for him. He wasn’t a flashy horse; it was very much a grind for him. He wasn’t the type to quicken away in a matter of strides but he’d just grind other horses down through sheer power,” offered O’Brien.

El Prado traveled to England, where he was 12th of 30 runners in a valuable Tattersalls-sponsored race, before finishing out his juvenile season with a win in the Group 2 Beresford Stakes in Ireland.

“He took on whatever was around at the time as a two-year-old,” said O’Brien.

El Prado’s three-year-old campaign didn’t pan out as desired.  From three starts, he mustered a fifth in the Group 3 Scottish Classic at Ayr and failed to impress in consecutive Group 1 tries in France.

“His first run back as a three-year-old was obviously disappointing,” admitted O’Brien. “We thought we had him back to somewhere near his best but he didn’t show any spark.”

Given the success of El Prado’s high-profile son Medaglia d’Oro, some might wonder what El Prado might have accomplished if given a chance on a natural dirt surface.  

“It wouldn’t have happened (trying dirt) as a two-year-old anyway, and then he got hurt in the spring of his three-year-old year, he twisted an ankle basically and was never really right again afterwards, so it never became a possibility,” said O’Brien.

Instead, he prefers to hold onto the family ties to the great grey.

“It makes it that much more special to know (my father) had trained both parents and then him. That adds a bit of extra to it,” he said.

El Prado's racing career had come to a close, but his true calling was about to begin.

A native of Austria, Frank Stronach made his fortune as the founder of Magna International, an auto parts company in Aurora, Ontario, Canada. His Adena Springs Farm now stands multiple stallions in Canada and the U.S. --  in Ontario, Kentucky, and California -- but El Prado was the start of it all.

In 1993, Dermot Carty, equine consultant, bloodstock agent, and the man responsible for Stronach's Adena Springs North location, asked longtime friend and associate Edward Daly to provide a list of potential stallion prospects from the Sadler’s Wells line. Daly sent three names, including that of El Prado.

On paper, the horse’s two-year-old form was exceptional, but a closer analysis of his family line found many threads worth pulling.

“I started my research by going to Kentucky to speak to one of my mentors, Tom Gentry,” said Carty. “Tom had a great understanding of pedigrees and had bred Terlingua (the dam of Storm Cat), War and Peace, Pancho Villa, Royal Academy, and many more.”

Gentry’s analysis of El Prado, out of the grey Lady Capulet (by Sir Ivor, another horse trained by Vincent O’Brien), found that bringing the horse to North America might have precedent.

“Tom told me that El Prado had more of an American pedigree and when I asked him why, he said, ‘Well, Lady Capulet’s brother is a horse called Drone, who stood at Claiborne Farm and was very successful,’” smiled Carty.

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Carty, in addition to his own keen eye, knew that the knowledge of the veteran horsemen that came before him was priceless and reached out to another friend and mentor in Arthur Stollery.  A member of the Canadian Horse Racing Hall of Fame as a builder, Stollery owned Angus Glen Farm and bred standouts such as fellow Canadian Horse Racing Hall of Famers Kennedy Road and Lauries Dancer.

At the time of Carty’s research, Stollery had two Drone mares on hand and Carty simply had to know why.

“He said, ‘Speed, unbelievable speed,’” recalled Carty with a shake of the head.

Carty recognized the potential, but was there opportunity? He worked the phones to his native Ireland and started to dig up all the information he could on his budding stallion prospect and the people who owned him.

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Career Makers - The Role of Jockeys’ Agent

By Ed Golden

Manager, mastermind, guru, agent, call him what you will, Colonel Tom Parker was the man who made Elvis Presley.

The King of Rock and Roll’s talent was only exceeded by his raw sex appeal, and Parker, self-proclaimed military officer or not, saw to it that the world would march en masse to a cadence called by Presley’s signature tones.

Elvis died more than four decades ago, but not before he and Parker reached the apex in gold and glory, still yielding riches of infinite proportions all these years later.

In racing, it’s not clothes that make the man; in part it is the agent directing the jockey. Agent and jockey provide a service to trainers, a salesman offering a product.

An agent in this instance is best described as a person empowered to transact business for a jockey. On any given morning at any given track, condition book in hand, there they are, Monty Hall wannabes, ready to make a deal.

A standard arrangement calls for an agent to be paid 25 percent of a jockey’s earnings, but that percentage could vary. If the rider’s services are in great demand, he could pay the agent a smaller percentage. Or, if the agent possesses the persuasive prowess of a Colonel Parker, he could warrant the higher percentage. It’s Economics 101.

Back in the day, agents were not prominent, if in evidence at all. Major stables employed contract riders and in order to ride for an outside trainer, the jockey had to receive permission from his contract stable to do so.

Now, the vast majority of riders have an agent, although jocks on a restricted budget with limited mounts have been known to represent themselves.

Agents wear many hats, including those falling under the Three P’s: politician, psychiatrist, and pacifist, and they can be a boon to racing departments.

“In my career around the country at tracks on both coasts, I’ve worked with agents who mostly helped the racing office,” said Rick Hammerle, Santa Anita’s vice president of racing as well as racing secretary. “We’re both trying to accomplish the same thing: get horses into races. Working with agents and sharing information about trainers’ intentions can help us achieve our goal.”

Even though it’s his first tour as an agent, Mike Lakow has racing’s paradigm of Tom Brady in jockey Javier Castellano, a 40-year-old Venezuelan at the zenith of his career. The reigning four-time Eclipse Award winner, a world class rider be it at Dubai or Churchill Downs, was inducted into racing’s Hall of Fame in 2017.

Still, for an agent, the pressure is always on.

Although he never trained, the 60-year-old Lakow (pronounced LAKE-ow) otherwise has an extensive background enabling him to understand ramifications that simmer just below racing’s surface.

“When I was working as general manager at Hill ‘n’ Dale (a major breeding farm in Kentucky),” he said, “I owned a quarter of one horse, and believe me, it’s a tough deal, so I respect all the owners, as well as trainers.”

Lakow, now based on the East Coast, was racing director at Santa Anita  before Castellano hired him in August of 2016. Lakow also was racing secretary for the New York Racing Association (NYRA) from 1993 to 2005, served as a racing official in Florida and Dubai, and was hands-on with horsemen regularly at Santa Anita’s Clockers’ Corner during his sojourn at the historic Southern California track.

“I’m incredibly fortunate to represent Javier,” Lakow said, “because he’s a professional who’s liked by everybody. We have no issues as far as not being able to ride for one trainer or one owner. He’s won four Eclipses, done it all, and now we’re trying to focus on riding the top horses.”

Stress and pressure are standard fare in the workforce, whether you’re Donald Trump unceasingly enduring “fake news” attacks 24/7 or a McDonald’s minimum wage burger slinger serving up $2.50 McPicks. It’s all relative.

That includes Lakow, although he is averse to pointing it out, lest he might be looked upon as a malcontent, what with two chickens in the pot.

“People who see all the money we’re making might wonder how being agent for a top jockey could be stressful, but it is,” Lakow said. “I’ve been in administrative positions in racing for many years, with NYRA and at Santa Anita, but if you happen to make a mistake here and there, you move on.

“It affects the company, but it doesn’t affect an individual. If I happen to make a mistake with Javier, it affects him.

“It’s impossible to keep everybody happy. Any agent will tell you that. Fortunately, Javier is level-headed, so I’m in a good position. That’s not the case with some other jockeys, from what I’ve heard. I respect Javier and Javier respects me, but like I’ve said, it’s impossible to keep everybody happy.

“You try to do the right thing. I respect all the horsemen who give us calls, because it’s a tough game for trainers. Horses will fool you, so I understand the stress trainers and owners face. I don’t look at this as a one-shot relationship.

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Tom Knust

“Luckily, I have the respect of horsemen because of my work in New York and California. When I started with Javier, horsemen gave me the benefit of the doubt. I was a bit green and I think other agents probably thought, ‘Look at this guy. He starts a job and has a top rider,’ but I’m lucky because I didn’t burn any bridges. I get along with most people and treat everybody with respect. That’s what’s made it so much easier for me.

“In the long run, honesty is the best policy, and I’m always honest. It hurts sometimes, but in the long run, I think it helps.”

Another agent who has been on both sides of the wall is Tom Knust, former racing secretary at Santa Anita and Del Mar, now booking mounts for two-time Kentucky Derby-winning jockey Mario Gutierrez.

“One thing I learned quickly as an agent is that if you have a good rider, it makes things pretty easy, and if you don’t, it’s very, very difficult,” Knust said. “That’s the key, whether you’ve had experience in the racing office or you’ve just come in off the street.

“If you give a call, you want to honor it, although situations develop where you’re in a bind and ask a trainer if he can help you out, but if he doesn’t, you’ve got to keep your word and ride his horse.”

An additional plus comes from riding regularly for a winning trainer, in the case of Gutierrez, that being Doug O’Neill, who saddled I’ll Have Another and Nyquist to capture the Kentucky Derby for principal owner J. Paul Reddam in 2012 and 2016.

“It’s absolutely an advantage, 100 percent, if you have a go-to stable that wins a lot of races, like O’Neill,” Knust said.

As a female, Patty Sterling is in the minority among agents, but with her extensive familial background in racing, she is looked upon as one of the boys.

Her late father, Larry, trained 1978 Santa Anita Handicap winner Vigors and is the father of jockey Larry Sterling Jr. Patty’s uncle, Terry Gilligan, rode and trained, and his brother, also Larry, made his bones as a rider, too. Now 80, he is the quick official at Santa Anita and Del Mar.

“It’s probably a lot easier for a woman in this business than it used to be,” said Patty, 54, a former clocker. “I don’t see that as a problem.

“Being an agent is almost parallel to training horses; it’s very similar. Right now, it seems owners pick the jockeys more so than they ever did before, when trainers were deciding who to ride.”

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From fertility to foal - Considerations for digestive tract health

By Emma Hardy, PhD

The success or failure of any breeding program is dependent on the nutritional status and digestive tract health of foals, mares, and stallions alike. Although this aspect of the operation is often overlooked, it is only by ensuring that these considerations are optimised that foals are given the best chance to survive and thrive, from birth through weaning and on to sale.   

A weighty issue

There exists surprisingly little research surrounding the nutrient requirements of the breeding stallion. This may be in part complicated by the great variation in activity; some stallions may serve several mares a day during peak periods in the breeding season, while others may serve only that number in a year. Other influencing factors may include temperament, management routine, and competitive activities. However, it is generally agreed that energy demands are indeed above maintenance levels, and according to various National Research Council studies it has been suggested that active stallions require approximately a third more digestible energy than their non-breeding, sedentary counterparts.  

Research in other species has shown that a body condition that deviates greatly from the ideal can be associated with an increased risk of infertility (Nguyen et al. 2009). Nutritional content is also of great importance, with zinc and omega-3 fatty acids playing important roles in sperm motility, mobility, and viability.

Extremes in body weight and condition can also affect the fertility of broodmares. Low levels of body fat in mares can inhibit or delay ovarian activity, and obesity is often associated with insulin resistance (equine metabolic syndrome, or EMS), which can also disrupt cyclicity. Gentry et al. (2002) found that mares with a body score of 3-3.5 demonstrated a longer anaestrus than mares with a good body score (eg., 5) (Henneke et al. 1983) and was accompanied by lower plasma leptin, prolactin, and insulin-like growth factors.

It would therefore be sensible to carefully manage the weight and condition of both broodmares and stallions to optimise breeding potential.

Safely improving body condition and weight

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For horses struggling to maintain ideal body condition it is important to assess forage intake and quality, and to also increase concentrates. Energy-dense grains and fats are often employed in these situations; however, caution must be taken to avoid the digestive tract issues these can cause.

Adding fat-fortified feeds to the diet, or top dressing fats or oils, can be an effective way to increase caloric intake. However, oils can pose a palatability issue. For a significant caloric contribution, somewhere between 200-500 ml/day of vegetable oil would be required. This would also increase the need for additional vitamin E and selenium to counteract the greater antioxidant need of a horse on such levels of supplementation.

The horse is naturally limited in its capacity to digest large volumes of starch, so concentrations should be limited to about 2g starch/kg body weight per meal, which equates to 0.2% starch or 1.4kgs of grain per meal. Anything over this risks starch bypass through to the large intestine, which can cause a bacterial inversion and ultimately a range of issues from poor feed absorption and inflammation to colic and laminitis.     

While it is prudent to ensure that a diet is appropriate both in volume and quality, the health of the digestive tract itself can sometimes be overlooked.  Optimal absorption can only be maximised when the mucosal surface of the tract and its vascular supply is healthy, the structure facilitates effective nutrient uptake, and the transit rate allows adequate time for digestion.

Other factors known to affect fertility and gestation can include naturally occurring contaminants found in feed, bedding, and housing. It has been well established that exposure to toxins produced by moulds and yeast can have detrimental effects on many biological systems. Of particular interest to breeders are mycotoxins, such as ergotalcaloids (found in some species of grass) and zearalenone (occurring in cereals). Zearalenone disrupts the oestrous cycle leading to lower conception rates, and ergotalcaloids can induce late gestation fetal loss and placental abnormalities. Mycotoxin binding agents can be a beneficial addition to a broodmare’s diet in a bid to combat mycotoxicosis. Biological products such as yeast cell wall, containing polysaccharides such as glucan or mannan, are emerging as potent adsorbers, with multibinding properties to numerous chemically different mycotoxins (Diaz & Smith, 2005).

Clearly, risk management should be applied at all levels of the feed production and manufacture chain to minimise contamination. Correct storage and regular quality assessment are paramount but the addition of a mycotoxin absorbent to the diet is also likely to be beneficial.

Nutritional demands of the pregnant mare

The nutrient and energy requirements of the pregnant mare begin to increase from month five of gestation (as placental tissues significantly develop). Consequently, a carefully devised diet containing adequate protein, vitamins, and minerals (major and trace) is imperative.

The pregnant mare’s caloric intake should also be increased and, depending on climate, housing, etc., feed volume may need to be increased by up to 30% by the end of gestation. This may be complicated during late gestation when the foal occupies an increasing proportion of the mare’s abdominal cavity, thus making large volumes of feed difficult to ingest.

The foal will gain approximately 80% of its birth weight during the last trimester, and the most rapid growth period will be in the few days before or after birth (Staniar et al. 2004). Ensuring optimal gastrointestinal support helps to safeguard the health of both the mare and her foal.  

Colostrum IgG transfer crucial to foal health…

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Is EIPH beyond the scope of dietary change?

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Tendon Function and Failure - Recent Advances

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Sid Fernando - The Grass is Greener Stateside

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PA Breeders - More Great Reasons to Race and Breed in Pennsylvania

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Norm McKnight - Woodbine's Leading Trainer

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