J.T. Lundy, the controversial former president of Calumet Farm, passed away Tuesday. He was 82.
The news was reported on Facebook by his sister, Kathy Lundy Jones, and his son, Robert. According to Robert's post, Lundy fell in November, suffered from a head injury and never fully recovered.
According to the BloodHorse, Lundy was a native of Georgetown, Ky. and grew up on a farm working primarily around show cattle. He told the magazine in 1990 that he eventually steered into the horse business because it appeared to be more lucrative than cattle and “it was more fun.”
After operating his own farm, Lundy got his foot in the door at Calumet when he married Lucille “Cindy” Wright, the granddaughter of Calumet founder Warren Wright, Sr. Lucille Wright died in 1982, which paved the way for Lundy to take over the day-to-day operations of the farm.
With Lundy at the helm, Calumet enjoyed success on the racetrack and in the breeding business. In Alydar, Calumet was home to one of the top sires in the sport. Calumet's best horse at the time turned out to be homebred Criminal Type, who was named Horse of the Year in 1990. Another star was GI Shuvee H. winner Tis Juliet. Calumet Farm won the 1990 Eclipse Award for Outstanding Breeder.
Things took a turn in the wrong direction starting in November of 1990 when the then 15-year-old Alydar kicked his stall door and fractured his leg. He was euthanized two days later. Alydar was insured for $36 million, which raised suspicions about his death that persist today.
Though it might have seemed that Calumet was in sound shape financially, that turned out to be untrue. Under Lundy, Calumet was deep in debt due to his fraud and mismanagement. Calumet filed for bankruptcy protection in 1991 and was losing $1 million a month. Lundy resigned as the farm's president in April of 1991. Then under former trainer John Ward, Jr., Calumet was forced to sell off property and reduce its holdings.
In 2000, Lundy, along with Gary Matthews, Calumet's former attorney and chief financial officer, was convicted of fraud and bribery and sent to prison. Along with a 4 1/2-year prison sentence, Lundy was ordered to pay $20.4 million in restitution. A jury found that Lundy and Matthews had committed fraud when acquiring $65 million in loans made to Calumet by the First City National Bank of Houston through bribery and deceit.
According to the BloodHorse, federal prosecutors argued Lundy deserved a stiffer penalty because he was responsible for the death of Alydar, which was the main asset securing the loans. On that latter allegation, United States District Court Judge Sim Lake would conclude: “There is some physical evidence, and circumstances surrounding the event are suspicious, but I cannot conclude he is responsible.”
Keeneland Library's Lecture Series returns in winter/spring 2024 with four ticketed events that celebrate recently published works about Thoroughbred racing whose authors conducted research at Keeneland Library, the repository said in a release Wednesday.
During programs planned from January through May, the following authors will discuss their books, with each presentation followed by a reception and book signing:
24 – Kim Wickens, Lexington: The Extraordinary Life and Turbulent Times of America's Legendary Racehorse.
21 – Fred M. Kray, Broken: The Suspicious Death of Alydar and the End of Horse Racing's Golden Age.
March 7 – John Paul Miller, False Riches.
May 9 – Avalyn Hunter, The Kentucky Oaks: 150 Years of Running for the Lilies.
“The authors in this lineup cover varied and engrossing territory,” Keeneland Library Director Roda Ferraro said. “From a chronicle of legendary racehorse and sire Lexington to a gripping account of superstar Alydar, and from a novel of race track intrigue to a comprehensive history of the Kentucky Oaks, this series is sure to please our fans of racing and newcomers alike.”
If there was a Thoroughbred who ever needed legal counsel to mount an adequate defense of his life, then perhaps it would be Calumet Farm's MGISW Alydar.
His battles with rival Affirmed as both a juvenile, and of course, through the 1978 Triple Crown are now the stuff of legend. However, what has clouded all those spectacular past performances came during his stallion career when he tragically died from an injury which was sustained while he was in his Calumet stall on a November night in 1990. Officially chalked up as an accident, his sudden and shocking death has remained shrouded in conjecture ever since.
What happened to Alydar? That is the central question that Fred M. Kray attempts to tackle in his ambitiously titled new book, Broken: The Suspicious Death of Alydar and the End of Horse Racing's Golden Age.
There is nothing quite like a tenacious true crime writer. Plucky isn't a descriptor that goes far enough. It's one's dogged determination, coupled with an ability to stare deep into the abyss that demands sterner stuff. Kray has all of that and more. His passion for this topic is evident, and he possesses the requisite skills to follow a labyrinth of clues and misstatements that go back forty-plus years.
A former animal-rights attorney who was on hand to witness the John M. Veitch trainee when he won the 1978 GI Flamingo S. at Hialeah Park and the GI Florida Derby at Gulfstream Park, Kray began to delve into the case in 2018. He tried to track down those involved, performed seemingly countless interviews and attempted to weave together a story chock full of contradiction.
But has Kray actually uncovered a smoking gun or is this just a series of red herrings? Where exactly is the conspiracy to commit murder?
Broken flows rather like a true crime memoir. It's Kray's defense laid bare on behalf of the Thoroughbred in question. Committing the cardinal sin if we skip to the end of this mystery, the author mythically knots his favorite Windsor tie and strides to the same courtroom in Houston, Texas where the security guard who was on duty that fateful night was tried and sentenced. There, he gives his own account of why he believes Alydar was murdered. It's heartfelt, but somehow it falls just short of compelling drama à la Raymond Burr.
Still, what makes this work a worthy read is the journey. Kray starts with the initial, all-too-brief insurance investigation. He then moves briskly through a composite of Alydar's racing and breeding shed exploits and delves into the questionable economic practices of Calumet's J.T. Lundy & Co. After painstakingly wading through the ensuing trials which fingered less than a handful of Calumet figures, Kray opens the curtain for the final act in which he becomes the lead. Perched on his shoulder like a GoPro Camera, we watch as he sits in front of many a horse farm gate, chides a reluctant private detective who didn't deliver and relates a number of emotional moments with key witnesses.
Alydar visiting Lucille Gene Markey on Blue Grass S. Day in 1978 | Keeneland
The relationship he forms with Tom Dixon, the equine insurance agent who was the first on the scene at Calumet, is particularly poignant. Dixon is a no-nonsense umpire that calls them like he sees them, and Kray has to steadily battle for the former agent's uneasy trust in order to access key photographs and notes. 'Deep Throat', Dixon is not, but the back-and-forth between the pair as they argue points of view on several occasions is quite a chess match.
Speaking of emotional moments, Kray's interview with Alydar's groom, Michael Coulter is both enlightening to his case, but we also find a man who hasn't returned to the scene mentally in quite some time. Though a witness in one of the trials, Coulter's perspective was underutilized and from Kray's questions, we get a window into the relationship the groom built with this superb equine athlete. Coulter explains how tired Alydar was from over-breeding and addresses the horse's psychological state. This is important because there were constant questions throughout the different trials about Alydar's penchant for kicking stall doors.
What Kray finds is a trail of dead ends and memories which are parsed with a few nuggets of remembrance. The author leads us to the assumption that key players that do not want to talk are clinging to something deeper. His mission to ask everyone connected why there were no marks on the paint in Alydar's stall, and why the latch was not disturbed becomes an indelible part of the script. A tense section relates an interview with the well-known Dr. Larry Bramlage. It is particularly excruciating to plow through, but it also shows how resolute Kray is when it comes to defending Alydar. You feel both men's frustration bearing out and it makes for good theater in the Rood & Riddle waiting room where the interview was conducted.
There is something very Citizen Kane about Broken. Like the reporter who is sent to find out what Charles Foster Kane meant when he said 'Rosebud' on his deathbed, we may never know what happened to Alydar that night at Calumet in 1990. Was his leg hit with something? Was more than one person involved? Who knew about the coverup at Calumet? Who knows something right now? Questions will continue to float. While we are on a roll, did Kray prove that this was the end of horse racing's 'Golden Age' as the book's subtitle suggests? That answer seems even more amorphous.
Instead, maybe we can take a sliver of comfort in knowing that there are some things we just can't uncover about a tragedy. If you read Broken as an homage to this Thoroughbred, then we need to thank the author for his contribution and determination. What we can say is that if Fred Kray had defended Alydar, at the very least, he might have had his day in court.
Broken: The Suspicions Death of Alydar and the End of Horse Racing's Golden Age by Live Oak Press, 348 pages, photos, May 2023.
The world we share with these amazing animals may be an ever-changing one, but its mysteries abide. We consider ourselves ever more knowledgeable, ever more certain, riding the slipstream of science. Yet how much do we truly know, when Afternoon Deelites holds out for all those years and then waits just six days before following his owner to whatever shore may (or may not) lie beyond the horizon of life?
The same journey was made this week by the trainer of Alydar. John Veitch laid the ground for the greatest Triple Crown campaign of any horse that never won a Triple Crown race by giving him 10 starts as a juvenile. Curiously, however, trainers of the succeeding generation appear to have decided either that they have found a better way; or at least that the materials provided, since breeding became an almost exclusively commercial enterprise, are no longer equal to the same kind of treatment.
Trainers today map out the road to the Derby with two priorities: minimize gas consumption, and avoid traffic. That way, they feel, their charges can reach Churchill with a relatively full tank and pristine engine. But the fact is that you always feel able to drive a car more aggressively once it has taken a few bumps and scratches. And you also learn far more about its capacity and response if you have repeatedly had to accelerate or brake to get out of trouble, as compared with cruising along an open road and every six weeks overtaking a laboring truck while barely changing gear.
In the prevailing environment, then, we must give credit to the people at Fair Grounds for redressing the shortfall in conditioning by extending the distance of all three legs of their trials program. If horses can no longer get the kind of mental and physical foundation they once derived from sheer volume of racing, then at least they can have a little more aggregate. With a field of 14, moreover, the GII Risen Star S. is meanwhile guaranteed to steepen the learning curve.
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Saturday will be only the fourth time the race has been run over this extra 1/16th, yet its last two winners have both gone on to finish second in the Derby. One, of course, was actually promoted to first place; while much the same was done for the other by voters at the recent Eclipse Awards.
To be fair, the Risen Star was already on a roll, having lately produced a GI Preakness winner, the phenomenal Gun Runner and the promising stallion Girvin. Between here and Oaklawn, then, you won't find many handicappers nowadays still reducing the quest for the Derby winner to the two dimensions of East and West Coasts. Paradoxically, however, I feel that a still better way to regenerate the Triple Crown trail lurks right at the other end of the spectrum.
Alydar started his Classic campaign over seven furlongs; so too, as it happens, did Afternoon Deelites. With Diana Firestone also among the week's obituaries, we might mention Honest Pleasure and Genuine Risk, who both resumed in sprints as well. That had long been standard procedure, for the old school, as a way of sharpening a horse without penetrating to a vulnerable margin of fitness.
I've often remarked on the dilution of the Derby since the willful exclusion of sprinters under the starting points system. Okay, so they finally managed a meltdown last year and so set up a historic aberration in every way. But otherwise the race has lately been dominated by those setting or sharing a pace shorn of raw sprint competition. And I do think that the Derby's status as the definitive test of the American Thoroughbred, identifying the kind of genes we should want to replicate, is suffering as a result.
Between trainers' dread of running horses at all, and the imperative to bank points when they actually do, we're ending up with the worst of both worlds. Remember that it was as recently as 2015 that Nyquist and Exaggerator cranked each other up over seven in the GII San Vicente S., in 1:20.7, and that didn't work out too badly on Derby day.
I really do think that loading a few points into the San Vicente and the GIII Swale S. would be a smart move by Churchill. Because it doesn't feel as though the model nowadays favored by trainers is working on too many levels. It certainly doesn't work for fans, who get a woefully condensed narrative and reduced engagement; it arguably doesn't help the horses, sent straight into the red zone when they can't be fully fit; and I'm not sure it's working for the Derby, either as a spectacle or as a signpost to genes that can carry meaningful speed.
In the meantime, aptitudes of more obvious pertinence to the Derby scenario will at least be examined in this crowd scene for the Risen Star. And wait, look at this: there's actually a horse in the field with eight starts to his name already. Determinedly (Cairo Prince) is followed here by the pair of Tapits he held off in an allowance last month, a performance rather too faintly praised because everyone had written a different script in advance. Actually this horse's own part keeps being rewritten, having started out on turf and apparently flirted with a return to sprinting. But maybe he can keep some of these flashier types honest, and help to measure the kind of talent Victory Formation (Tapwrit) will need to maintain his unbeaten record from a post out near Baton Rouge.
From a European perspective, it's always surprising that people should be so specific, almost dogmatic, about the optimality of dirt horses operating within so narrow a range. The way people talk, you would think that the poor creatures will drop clean off the edge of the world if venturing that crucial 1/16th too far.
That's why I like to see them given the chance to work on their all-around game, and develop different strengths. Because, if the oldest of Old Friends can be so susceptible even in the span of his years, then what limits might we be putting on the things they do in their prime?
