Month: March 2023

Three years ago, trainer Jerry O'Dwyer traveled to Dubai with Shotski, his first graded-stakes winner, and, thanks to the coronavirus pandemic canceling racing, came home without ever having had the chance to run.

Based at Palm Meadows, Gulfstream Park's satellite training facility in Palm Beach County, O'Dwyer arrived back in South Florida early Tuesday afternoon under much different circumstances.

His current stable star, Jun Park and Delia Nash's Sibelius – winner of Gulfstream's Mr. Prospector (G3) Dec. 31 – pulled off a thrilling upset of defending champion Switzerland in the $2 million Dubai Golden Shaheen (G1) March 25 at Meydan Racecourse. It was the third straight victory for Sibelius, all in stakes, and first Grade 1 for both the 5-year-old gelding and his 41-year-old trainer, who admitted to still grasping the magnitude of their accomplishment.

“It's still feels like a day's work, I guess. It's just something you do. We prepared for it and it came off. Every now and again you think about it and you say, 'Wow, it's unbelievable. We just won a Grade 1 halfway around the world.' It's unreal,” O'Dwyer said. “We got a plethora of texts and calls. It was great. Lots of well wishes.”

O'Dwyer headed to Dubai 'quietly confident' in Sibelius, who earned his first stakes victory in the Lite the Fuse last September at historic Pimlico Race Course. From there he ran fourth in the Phoenix (G2) at Keeneland and second in the Bet on Sunshine at Churchill Downs before kicking off his win streak in the Mr. Prospector.

Sibelius punched his ticket to the Golden Shaheen with a record-setting triumph in the Feb. 11 Pelican at Tampa Bay Downs. He left for Dubai via Miami March 12 with assistant trainer and exercise rider Chelsea Raabe, who was joined by O'Dwyer six days later.

“I was feeling good going into the race. He's been slowly developing and getting better since the second half of last year. He's been able to keep going,” O'Dwyer said. “A lot of people told me I was mad by saying we hadn't gotten to the bottom of him yet, and he's turning 5. But, I've seen the horse every day and seen what he's doing and was pretty adamant that we hadn't seen the best of him just yet.

“He flew to Dubai and everything went perfect. He flew in great, he settled in well, was eating good and looking bright,” he added. “He really enjoyed the place, and that gave me a lot of confidence that he was going to run his best race. Whether his best was good enough to win it, I wasn't going to be putting my life on the line to say it was. But, I was quietly confident of him running a big race and getting a good piece of it.”

Even before the race Sibelius was a popular subject during his time in Dubai, showing up on several social media platforms as well as international television coverage.

“He's a good looking horse, he's got a great personality, loves to go out to the track and stand out. He's very nosy when he sees people,” O'Dwyer said. “He kinds of goes over to them to see what they're doing. He got a big following out there, which was nice. He really enjoyed the attention.”

A slower start than normal had Sibelius unusually off the pace and stuck inside in the Golden Shaheen but got a heady ride from European champion Ryan Moore, aboard for the first time.

“I wasn't feeling too good at the start when he broke very flat-footed and didn't get up in a forward position like he normally does. That wasn't a good feeling, but then you could see he was holding his position around fifth or sixth on the inside,” O'Dwyer said. “I would have liked to see him get on the bridle and travel for a few strides at some stage, but he didn't even do that.

“Ryan just kept niggling away at him and the horse kept finding for him. Turning for home you're thinking maybe he'll be fourth or third but he just kept coming and coming and grinding it out,” he added. “I knew he was going to be gritty in that sense. He's hardened now. I was a little worried early on in the race when he was a little further back than I'm used to seeing him.”

As he anxiously awaited the photo finish, O'Dwyer said he felt Sibelius was a winner when he crossed the wire.

“We were standing right on the rail looking at it,” he said. “I thought we'd won but then they were taking ages with the photo and you start questioning yourself. 'Was I seeing things? Was I just seeing it the way I wanted to see it?' But luckily, they called the photo in our favor.”

O'Dwyer said Sibelius is scheduled to get some time off and then begin preparing for the next step with the trainer's string in Kentucky. A possibility could be the seven-furlong Churchill Downs (G1) on the Kentucky Derby (G1) undercard May 6.

“He'll leave Dubai and he'll go to Chicago for a few days of quarantine and then he's going to ship to Kentucky. We'll give him a couple of easy weeks on the farm there and freshen him up and we'll probably keep him in Kentucky and decide where we're going to run him from there,” he said. “We haven't made any plans yet. There's a race for him on Derby day, but that's not set in stone. We'll let him to the talking.”

According to O'Dwyer, spending the winter at Palm Meadows was instrumental in Sibelius' development overall and, in particular, his success in Dubai.

“The Florida weather is very similar to the Dubai weather, so I think that it was good that he was down here for a while and acclimatized to the conditions,” he said. “Dubai was very similar, cool in the mornings and heated up in the afternoon. Florida has been very good to us.”

It's right back to work for O'Dwyer, a native of Tipperary, Ireland where he grew up riding ponies and attending horse sales with his father. He ultimately graduated from the Irish Racing Academy with designs on being a jockey despite his 5-foot-10 frame. After serving as an apprentice to trainer David Hanley, now general manager of WinStar Farm, O'Dwyer rode more than 100 winners in Ireland and England before coming to the U.S. at the urging of trainer John Ennis.

O'Dwyer got a job with trainer Al Stall Jr. in Kentucky, spent a summer in Saratoga and prepped 2-year-olds in Florida before settling on a training career. His first of 159 winners to date came courtesy of Aleutian Queen at Belterra Park Sept. 27, 2014.

In addition to Sibelius and 2019 Remsen (G2) winner Shotski, other top horses trained by O'Dwyer include stakes winners Needs Supervision, Rookie Salsa, Cooke Creek, Cruise and Danze and V.I.P. Ticket.

“I'll be back in the barn, checking a few of those 2-year-olds out and seeing if we can find the next Sibelius,” O'Dwyer said.

“A big shout out to the whole team. Everyone did such a great job taking care of him and getting him ready,” he added. “It's not like it's just my horse or your horse, he's everybody's horse at the barn and we're super proud of him.”

The post Trainer Jerry O’Dwyer Relishing ‘Unbelievable’ Dubai Victory With Sibelius appeared first on Horse Racing News | Paulick Report.

Source of original post

Sentell “Sonny” Taylor, Jr., who went to work for the New York Racing Association, Inc. (NYRA) as an assistant clocker on April 15, 1964 at Aqueduct Racetrack and built a career of nearly six decades as a racing official and ambassador for the sport, has announced his retirement.

Taylor, now 85 and a NYRA placing judge, will step down on Sunday after 58 years, an era in which he worked as the official timer for Secretariat's astonishing 31-length victory in the 1973 Belmont Stakes to secure the Triple Crown and witnessed and officiated thousands of races at NYRA tracks.

“Sonny Taylor is a friend, a mentor and an encyclopedia of racing – and we will miss him,” said NYRA's Senior Vice President, Racing Operations Frank G. Gabriel, Jr. “There's no one else like Sonny, and we look forward to honoring him in a way that highlights his many contributions to New York racing.”

Taylor's legion of friends read like a who's-who of racing. Trainer John Nerud was a friend. So were Horatio Luro, Penny Chenery and Cot Campbell; along with riders, Angel Cordero, Jr., John Rotz and Jacinto Vásquez. Mrs. (Jackie) Rachel Robinson is a friend as were the late bandleaders Cab Calloway and Count Basie. On vacations, Taylor visited Florida, California and even Japan, where he often stayed with racing friends and visited tracks.

On mornings at Saratoga Race Course, he typically grabbed a bench across from the jockey room for a cigar and horse talk with everyone from racetrackers and railbirds to jockeys, trainers and owners; NFL Hall of Famer and thoroughbred owner Bill Parcells often stopped by when on track. At Belmont Park, Taylor's morning perch was a seat near the paddock, where he was as likely to launch into a story about Kelso or Ruffian as yesterday's claiming race.

Taylor relished having visitors to the judging booth. He lined the booths at Belmont Park and Aqueduct tracks with photos of legends like “Sunny Jim” Fitzsimmons, Eddie Arcaro and another friend, Hall of Fame rider Gary Stevens. The booth is a stop on the orientation tour of new NYRA employees, who would meet Taylor, often pick up some advice – “get to know the people of the track and get to know what they do,” he counseled – and soak in the atmosphere.

A Chicago native, Taylor attended Southern University in Baton Rouge, where he played collegiate basketball. After working for the U.S. Postal Service, he joined the U.S. Army, serving in Germany, before a visit to New York changed the path of his life. Shortly after his discharge, Taylor accompanied his great uncle and NYRA clocker Earl Williams to the track and liked what he saw.

With Williams' recommendation, Taylor become an assistant clocker at NYRA, working under the tutelage of Jack Kennedy, a fixture in the racing office; he became an official timer in 1971 and a patrol judge in 1972. By timing the races with a stop watch, Taylor's clockings were deemed “official” in the event the electronic system malfunctioned.

That's what Taylor was doing in Secretariat's record-shattering performance of 2:24 in the 1 1/2-mile Belmont Stakes of 1973.

“I kept looking at my stopwatch and not really believing the time,” recalled Taylor. “Then I looked on the board, which had the same time. I said to myself, 'My goodness, how can a horse run this fast and win by so far?'”

Taylor timed two other Belmont Stakes that resulted in Triple Crowns – Seattle Slew in 1977 and Affirmed in 1978. In 1981, at the suggestion of the late NYRA board chairman Alfred G. Vanderbilt, Jr., he became a placing judge, where he worked another couple of Belmont Stakes that led to Triple Crowns – American Pharoah in 2015 and Justify in 2018.

Taylor called the 1973 Belmont Stakes – 50 years ago this June – his most memorable day in racing. Meanwhile, the exploits of other horses he has seen like Dr. Fager, Forego and Cigar remain vivid. And so do Taylor's remembrances of electric racing moments, often a Belmont Stakes or a Travers; or in 1964 at Aqueduct when Gun Bow outdueled Kelso to deny him a fourth straight Woodward victory.

Aftercare was a particular passion – and in 2014, Old Friends Thoroughbred Retirement honored Taylor with its Frankel Award for Lifetime Achievement. According to Old Friends, among the horses he assisted in placement were Ogygian, Gulch, Kiri's Clown, Awad, Hidden Lake, Polish Navy, Glitterman, Ruhlmann, Sunshine Forever, Commentator and Affirmed Success.

But Taylor isn't one to talk endlessly about the so-called “good old days.” Well, maybe just a little: He looks back to a time when horses' careers tended to be longer and fans could build up a real affinity in watching their favorites for six or seven years. And he misses departed friends and loved ones, none more than his wife, Claire Taylor, who passed away in 2012 after 46 years of marriage.

And yet for all the horses and the races Taylor has witnessed, it's the people he will miss most of all in retirement.

“I've seen plenty of great races and some terrific performances, but I think what I've especially enjoyed the most is all the different kinds of amazing people I've met and encountered in racing,” he said.

Taylor promised to be a frequent visitor to the track, especially Belmont Park, which remains his favorite track and is all of a seven-minute drive from his apartment in Floral Park.

“Belmont puts you in mind of a racetrack,” he said. “It's simply the best racetrack in the country.”

“Besides, I'll have friends to see,” Taylor added. “Once the racetrack gets in your blood, it's tough to stay away.”

The post ‘A Friend, A Mentor, And An Encyclopedia Of Racing’: After 58 Years, NYRA Racing Official Sonny Taylor Calls It A Career appeared first on Horse Racing News | Paulick Report.

Source of original post