It's always exciting to have a Grade 1-winning 2-year-old in the barn, but it is perhaps more so when it's your first graded stakes winner in 11 years and first Grade 1 winner since 1993.
“It's great. We are really, really happy for the people who own this horse,” said trainer Phil Serpe after Leave No Trace captured Saratoga's G1 Spinaway for owner Dr. Robert Vukovich, founder of the WellSpring pharmaceutical corporation. “They're great people, they're deserving, and it's all around a great feeling for everyone.”
Serpe is well-acquainted with the ups and downs of the Thoroughbred business. He's gone from the highs of winning training titles in New Jersey and training for New York's leading owners, all the way down to having just a handful of mid-level horses in the barn.
The tides began to turn when Serpe's longtime owner Carl Lizza (Flying Zee Stable) died suddenly in 2011, and turned further when owner/breeders Chester and Mary Broman decided to cut back on their stock several years ago.
The lowest point was as recent as 2020: aided in part by the cessation of racing caused by the pandemic, Serpe's trainees earned just $406,785, the smallest total since he began training in the mid-1980s.
It has been Vukovich and his wife Laura's support that has helped to keep Serpe in business for the past five years; he and his wife send the trainer four to five 2-year-olds each year. In 2021, Serpe sent out just four winners, though one of those was Vukovich's Safe Conduct to win the prestigious $1 million Queen's Plate at Woodbine, boosting Serpe's annual earnings to $889,785.
With just over three months remaining in 2022, Serpe has already sent out 11 winners for earnings of $747,677.
“My friend, Jim Ryerson, he doesn't go to Florida, so he had a filly for the Vukovichs that he asked me to take to Florida,” Serpe explained. “They send horses to both of us now, and they are just incredibly nice, really down to earth people. As successful as they both are, they're really enjoying the racing success.
“Currently the stable has like 22 horses, so we're still trying to build back the numbers.”
Serpe began riding horses at eight years old and worked for a show farm in his mid-teens. The farm had a few racehorses, and he would sometimes accompany them to Monmouth Park to watch them race. Serpe really got his start on the track shortly after the opening of the Meadowlands in 1976.
“That was a huge thing in its early years,” Serpe said. “When I was a teenager, I would go down there and walk horses for free at night, just for the chance to be around them.”
Serpe started as a groom, then progressed to assistant trainer, and eventually took out his training license with four horses at Monmouth Park in 1984.
“Several years later I had 50 horses at Monmouth and was leading trainer both there and at the Meadowlands,” said Serpe. “Then I got the opportunity to make the move to New York.”
He first trained for multiple Eclipse Award-winning breeder Fred Hooper, then was introduced to Lizza, another owner-breeder.
“You have to understand that when you're training for breeders, the horses don't come along as easily as they do when you're hand-picking 2-year-olds, so that can hurt your percentages a little bit,” said Serpe. “I feel very successful at what I've done for them.”
A few years into the partnership, Lizza made a strange request.
“Mr. Lizza was having serious health issues, and he asked me to come to the hospital to see him one day,” Serpe remembered. “I was thinking, 'Well, this can't be good,' but he told me he wanted to upgrade his stable and change his whole breeding operation. So myself and my partner, Lisa Bartkowski, went to work.
“The first thing was to upgrade his broodmare band, to move on some horses that we didn't want to keep. The hard thing was to make sure they ended up in a good spot; there wasn't such a focus on aftercare back then, so it was a bit tougher finding homes for older mares and ones with not-so-great pedigrees, but we were able to get it done.
“Five years into the breeding operation, we started winning a lot of races. Carlos Martin also trained for them, as did my friend Jimmy Jerkens, and when all was said and done, Flying Zee Stable had won like 13 owner titles, which included the most coveted Saratoga leading owner title and the year-end New York owner title.
“Just as the thing had gotten rolling along, Carl unexpectedly passed away one night in his sleep. That left a big void, both emotionally and in the business, because we would have 25-30 new horses for him every year.
“We were fortunate enough to then get horses for Chester and Mary Broman. We did very well with them because they really do an incredible job breeding them, but now he's scaled way back so that was another void.”
The acquaintance with Vukovich was the latest to fill the void in Serpe's barn.
“We kept going and we're still going,” Serpe said. “The thing about this business is that there's a lot of good guys out there like myself with not a lot of horses. We know what we're doing, but trainers are only as good as the horses in their barns.”
Horses like Safe Conduct and Leave No Trace have certainly buoyed Serpe's hopes in the past two years. Vukovich prefers to select the horses himself: Safe Conduct was a $45,000 weanling at the Keeneland November sale, and Leave No Trace was a $40,000 yearling at the Fasig-Tipton Midlantic fall sale.
“We have a lot of great conversations about his programs and theories, and he's willing to take a shot on horses that other people might pass over,” said Serpe. “He's not going to spend 200 or 300 thousand on a yearling; he likes to have horses as a pet project, and he likes coming to the races and watching his horses run.”
That pet project has been a success thus far. Leave No Trace first showed her talent to the world with a big maiden win at Saratoga on July 20, which was a bit of a surprise because Serpe's stable isn't known for winning with first-time starters.
“I think we really don't wind our 2-year-olds up or our first-time starters up, at all. We have them fit and ready to run,” Serpe said. “When she won that day like that, she was impressive and that shows something in our barn. So, she was impressive and she's been impressive since before we ever left Belmont. She was working well, easily 47 and change, and you have to be impressed with a horse like that. If you look at her, she's gorgeous. She went through a growth spurt in the spring. She's grown six inches in every direction which is what you want a horse to do in August going into September. It was everything you would like.”
The filly could provide the stable with its first Breeders' Cup starter: the filly earned a $30,000 credit via the “Breeders' Cup Dirt Dozen” program towards entry fees for the Grade 1 Juvenile Fillies in November at the Lexington oval.
It would be Serpe's third starter at the World Championships, following Birdonthewire in the 1994 Sprint and Pure Gossip in the 2011 Juvenile Fillies Turf.
“I'm more settled than I used to be, so I try to keep my feet on the ground,” Serpe said. “But Leave No Trace didn't just win: she seemed pretty dominating to me. We'll probably take her to the Frizette next, moving from seven furlongs to the one-turn mile, and go to the two-turn Breeders' Cup from there. She's bred for ground, so I think the distance is not really a question. It's whether we keep her the way she is right now for a couple more months.
“She's answered all the calls so far.”
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