Some of the Thoroughbred breed's most important stock has passed through the gloved hands of the Keeneland ringmen and women over the past two weeks of the September Yearling Sale, but Hip 3552 meant quite a bit more than the rest for DeJuan Smith.
On the other end of the shank during Thursday's session was his own horse; a first-crop Instagrand colt he purchased earlier this year for $15,000. When the hammer fell on Thursday, the number on the board was $105,000 – tied for the third-highest price of the day.
High fives and fist bumps were exchanged between Smith, 41, head ringman Ronald Hill, and the nearby staff of consignor Taylor Made Sales Agency, and then the next horse came into the ring.
Business carried on, as it always does at a horse auction, but under the surface was proof that Smith's plans were working, inside the ring and out.
Born in New York City and self-described “born dirt-poor,” Smith's family spent time in and out of shelters, sometimes living with family while his mother dealt with personal issues and sometimes residing in the lowest-rent apartments. He'd never been out of the city and he'd never gone anywhere near livestock before his mother moved him and his brother near Charlottesville, Va.
He was active in whatever sports were put in front of him, and through those, he befriended Jamie Jenkins, the son of trainer Dale Jenkins and nephew of trainer and Hall of Fame showjumper Rodney Jenkins. They met at a high school party, and it turned out to be a flashpoint in Smith's life.
“We started hanging out, and he'd come over to my house,” Smith said. “One day, he said, 'Hey, come to my house one day and check it out.' I go down there and there are these paddocks full of horses, there are pools, a hot tub, paintings, it's a nice house. I said, 'Dang, what's your dad do?' and he said, 'Oh, he just sells racehorses.' That sounded interesting.”
Prospects were bleak for Smith at the time. He turned down college scholarships to care for his mother, who was ailing with a cancer that would eventually claim her, and he started working as soon as he had his high school diploma, cooking at a restaurant, painting fences, and working on construction crews.
With little else to do, Smith joined Jamie Jenkins at a 2-year-old sale where his family was selling horses. Observing turned into running errands, which turned into feeding and watering the horses, which turned into a job.
“One day, they asked me to walk a horse, and I'm one of those guys that likes that thrill, that adrenaline rush,” he said. “I walked this horse, and he was acting all crazy, and I was like, 'Aww man, this is cool.' I kind of got the hang of it, and the next thing you know, I'm grooming.”
When it came to his interactions with the horses, Smith was at that point “ground-only.” He was too preoccupied with handling business in the barn to pay much attention to what was going on once a rider got the leg up and went out to the track. That all changed after inclement weather forced the horses to get their under-tack exercise in the shedrow. Seeing the combination of speed and challenge that close-up fed into his desire to go fast that had previously been fueled by cars and motorcycles.
No one had the time or interest to teach Smith how to ride, so a friend purchased a dithering racehorse at Charles Town for $500 and a six pack of beer for him to use as a lesson horse.
One of Smith's greatest gifts is his sponge-like observation. His ability to watch something be done and replicate it has served him at every stage of his journey in the Thoroughbred industry, and by watching others in the saddle, he learned how to ride Thoroughbreds essentially on his own, with a few pointers from local old-timers.
While he was getting better, the cheap horse he was learning on was getting better, too.
“All I did was teach her how to ease back, to rate herself, because I ran track, and I know you don't want to start off stronger than you finish,” Smith said. “So, I just taught her how to rate, and we won like four races with her at the bottom of Charles Town. Then, she got claimed.”
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If you appreciate our work, you can support us by subscribing to our Patreon stream. Learn more.While he was gaining his education in the saddle, Smith was also learning about the commercial side of the industry. He started working for the Taylor Made consignment in 2006, and the discipline he gained from the program served him well going forward.
“They changed me,” he said. “I was born in New York, and I was kind of knuckleheaded. Taylor Made had this guy named John Hall (Taylor Made's yearling manager, who died in 2021), and he was like a drill sergeant. You respected him. 'DeJuan, tighten your belt. DeJuan, be proactive.' He's got me hustling, thinking about presenting myself well, and I was thinking this was okay. I got more involved into the horse industry through Taylor Made.
“When I first started in the sales, I was trying to bring people out of Virginia that I knew,” he continued. “'Hey, try this out. It's better than sitting in this little town.' I was bringing people who had never done anything with horses before, friends and family members, and trying to get them involved, but for some of them it was intimidating because they'd never been around horses.”
Riding fast horses was officially in Smith's blood, but the question was what to do with that interest. After tasting success on the racetrack, he considered becoming a jockey, but he couldn't interact with his mounts the way he'd have preferred.
“I tried, and one time I did drop weight, but since I'm tall, it makes me like a skeleton, and I lost all my strength,” he said. “I was just a passenger on them, and I didn't like that feeling. I like holding a horse, and teaching them to be the best they can. I don't want to just sit there.”
Instead, he combined the skills he learned on the track and with Taylor Made toward the 2-year-old sales, moving to Ocala, Fla., to start horses under tack and train them for the breeze shows. He developed a reputation for being able to handle the tough horses, working for operations including Hemingway Racing and Training and Kirkwood Stables.
Smith also spent four years as an exercise rider for Hall of Fame trainer Todd Pletcher, where he regularly rode the likes of Kentucky Derby winner Always Dreaming, Belmont Stakes winner Tapwrit and Florida Derby winner Audible.
Smith currently works for Sequel Bloodstock in Florida, where he helped 2022 Kentucky Derby winner Mage get his start under saddle.
Being based in the heartland of the 2-year-old auction market would make it seem as though Smith would naturally gravitate toward buying yearlings to pinhook as juveniles, but he said the added costs that come with putting a horse in training – from a higher entry point to buy a yearling to the veterinarian bills – make it prohibitive for the time being.
“My specialty is getting horses ready riding-wise, but there's a lot of risk going from a yearling to a 2-year-old,” he said, “We might do it once we get comfortable. My wife is a big part, and she doesn't do too much riding. She enjoys developing them from weanlings to yearlings, and I like doing whatever she likes to do.”
Smith met his wife of four years – Madeline Duran Smith – while she was working for trainer Jeremiah Engelhardt.
While DeJuan approached the industry as an outsider, Madeline was born into it, with both of her parents being riders on Florida farms. When it came to assigning credit for the success of the Instagrand colt's pinhook, DeJuan credited Madeline's ability to fine-tune a prospect well before he credited himself.
“I'm really happy for my wife,” DeJuan said. “She put in a lot of time and dedication to the horse, cleaning his feet and grooming, and just making him feel like a good horse.
“She's got really good hands,” he continued. “You can ask anybody at the sales. She's better than me at finessing.”
The Instagrand colt was the biggest success of the Smiths' brief career in pinhooking. After taking some lumps and learning some valuable lessons with their first horse during the 2021 yearling season, they worked with Mark Taylor, president and CEO of Taylor Made Farm, to pick out some pinhook prospects for the 2022 sales. Smith credited Taylor's influence heavily in his personal and professional development.
“I love DeJuan,” Taylor said. “He has got the best spirit about him. When you plant him in the middle of a team, there's all these personalities, but I've never heard a single person say a negative thing about DeJuan. Despite the fact that he's very talented, he's very humble and he tries to get along with everybody. He just does the right things, and I think that's just paying off for him, that he's applying those same principals to an entrepreneurial endeavor that he's doing, buying and reselling these babies.”
While juggling duties as a ringman for Keeneland and a showman for Taylor Made at the 2022 Keeneland January Horses of All Ages Sale, Smith landed a pair of newly-turned yearlings, and turned them into a profit that September.
When shopping for the 2023 yearling season, Smith found himself in deeper water than he expected for pinhook prospects, frequently getting outbid.
“The market was so strong,” he said. “Horses that were supposed to go for $15,000 or $20,000 were going for $20,000 to $30,000, because there was so much competition. A lot of them had minor issues, but in reselling, it might come back to bite you.”
Smith was empty-handed entering the final mixed sale of the season – the Fasig-Tipton Kentucky Winter Mixed Sale – and it was quite late in the sale when he finally got the Instagrand colt, out of the winning More Than Ready mare Sistas Ready. He wasn't pristine, but the colt had a good mind, and Smith saw something he and Madeline could work with.
“Wherever he came from, he was way behind,” Smith said. “He needed some groceries. He didn't look good at all, but he had the right angles and he had a really good walk. If you could look past what he looked at right then, maybe we could mold him into something, so we took a chance on him.
“Immediately, we started feeding him the best feed, best supplements,” he continued. “I'm very particular about hay.”
The Smiths rent space from a farm in Ocala to prep their young horses for the yearling sales, carefully controlling their diet and turnout time, and working them to a point of fitness, but not overexertion.
This is where having a yearling with a good mind was especially important for Smith. Having a willing partner in the training process creates a horse that's easier to handle, and one that can graduate more rapidly to skills beyond just looking good at the end of the shank – skills that might make a horse worth one more bid for a buyer that doesn't have to worry about teaching it themselves.
“I like to do ponying because it's less pressure than round penning them,” Smith said. “We did a lot of open field, big turns, and we never did it where he broke a sweat. We just did it to get the blood flowing, and then we walked him. We either hand-walked them, I'd long-drive them, or we walked them with the pony. Once we gave them enough time where they're pretty tight, we started jogging with the pony. We didn't do anything to overdo it.
“He's already broke to the pony, and he's broke to the saddle,” he continued. “I just don't put any weight on them, but they're ready for you to get on their back. We long drive them, so when you purchase that horse, they're ready to go.”
Smith was recruited to Keeneland's ring crew by Hill after they handled horses together at a sale in California. Hill was impressed by Smith's ability to handle a string of especially unruly yearlings with gentle hands – a necessity in the sometimes chaotic world of Thoroughbred auctions.
Once again, Smith has used his time in the ring as an opportunity to learn by observation. He gets face time with hundreds of yearlings over the course of a sale, learning the patterns of both body and mind, along with the prices those patterns reap, which he uses when shopping for his own prospects.
Once his Instagrand colt shipped to the Taylor Made consignment in Barn 23 of the Keeneland sales grounds, Smith was frequently going straight from handling horses in the ring, up the hill, to his horse's stall to check in on how he was being received by buyers and veterinarians.
The colt received a timely update to his pedigree page ahead of the sale, when half-brother Vote No, by Divisidero, won the Pepsi Juvenile Sprint Stakes on Sept. 13 at Kentucky Downs, making the 2-year-old unbeaten in two starts.
“I was cheering for him the whole time we were showing the horse,” Taylor said. “Every time we had a good show, or every time we'd get another vet come through on our system, I said, 'Oh, good. We're building momentum. We're doing great.'
“I told him about an hour before, 'Let's put the reserve conservative, around $40,000, and I think there's a chance the horse could bring $80,000 to $100,000, but I don't want you to be disappointed if that doesn't happen,'” Taylor continued.
For as much time as Smith spent with the colt leading up to the sale, one would assume he would know the colt's every move when the time came for Hip 3552 to come before the auctioneer's stand, but he had a few surprises for showtime.
“I didn't know how aggressive he was going to be,” Smith said. “He wasn't bad at all. He was just on the muscle. Once he got around these horses, he was just like, 'Hey, I'm here.' He started showing that presence at the barns. They had some monster horses over there, but he just said, 'I'm this little tough guy,' and he walked into the ring with that presence.”
Speaking of presence, Smith had to work to maintain his own, making sure to display the horse the best he could while the number on the board climbed over six figures, ultimately hammering to Don't Stop Me Now Stables.
“I wanted to give him the best presentation,” he said. “I wanted to give them a nice little side view, where they could see his angles. I couldn't stand him up for too long, because he wanted to keep moving, which is fine. Once they hit $40,000, I could take a little breather. That's where I was expecting him to sell before the update, then it kept going. I didn't expect $100,000. If anything, $80,000.”
After seven months, the work was done. He pat the colt on the shoulder, handed the shank over to a Taylor Made crew member, and got back to work.
Selling horses as a business means having to accept letting them go, but that can be easier said than done.
“I try not to get attached to him, but when you're an animal lover, you kind of do,” Smith said. “It's hard not to.”
However, though their time together was relatively short, Smith remained committed to the horse that rewarded him so much.
“They were worried they would never be able to follow him, and DeJuan said, 'If this horse doesn't make it on the track, I'll never let him fall into bad hands. I'll make him a lawn ornament at my house or whatever because he's such a cool horse,'” Taylor said.
Smith acknowledged he is something of an underdog story, but he has aimed to help others find their way through the help of the Thoroughbred industry, even if they don't have access to it where they're from. He remains the only member of his family even remotely tied to horses, but he hopes to bring his brother into the fold.
Having a success like the one he saw on Thursday makes for easy marketing material.
“I just tell them they've got to come down one day and see what goes on, but they watch all of my clips and I send them videos all the time,” Smith said about explaining his job to his family in New York. “They haven't been around it, but they're seeing what I'm seeing and they're loving it.”
The post ‘Adrenaline Rush’: Instagrand Colt Brings Big Pinhook Score For Keeneland Ringman DeJuan Smith appeared first on Horse Racing News | Paulick Report.
