California trainers | Horse Racing Free Tips

Over the years, the rise of the so-called super trainer has prompted many a clutched pearl by virtue of a perceived monopoly on the sport.

Anecdotally, it can certainly appear as though the same few names wield an outsized impact. But what does the data say?

The TDN has crunched the numbers in California from 2007 onward. This is far from a comprehensive overview of the situation, and what emerges is a picture that can be viewed from multiple angles.

On the one hand, the numbers suggest that the biggest stables in the state have indeed consolidated their positions at the top during a long period of market contraction. Yet at the same time, other indicators afford tentative encouragement for the smaller players.

One statistic that should make industry leaders sit up and take notice, however, is how in just 14 years, the number of trainers making at least one start in California has nearly halved. As a market shrinks, the impact from any dominant force is going to be more keenly felt.

Super trainers

One common narrative in California is that the 80/20 rule–the notion that 80% of prize money funnels into the pockets of 20% of the trainers–has long been a defining feature of the industry.

How accurate is this?

The 80/20 rule has fluctuated a little over the last 14 years, with the top 20% of trainers in the state typically winning more then 80% of available purses. Indeed, back in 2007, they won more than 85% of all available prize money.

Between 2007 and 2018, the closest California came to the 80/20 benchmark was 2015, when the top 20% trainers won 80.7% of all prize money. But the last two years have seen a very slight shift in that trend.

In 2019, the top 20% of trainers won 80.8% of prize money. Last year, it fell to 79.2%–the first time it dipped below 80% in at least 14 years.

There doesn't appear any one clear explanation. These past two years in California have been far from typical, with 2019's welfare issues followed by a global pandemic. It's unclear, however, exactly why those events should begin to iron out prize money distribution disparities.

Another factor to take into consideration is purse distribution between stakes and overnight races. Then there's the shrinking opportunities out West–has that led to the bigger barns stabling more horses elsewhere?

Arguably more consequential was the expulsion in June of 2019 of trainer Jerry Hollendorfer from The Stronach Group's California facilities (Santa Anita and Golden Gate Fields).

Prior to that, Hollendorfer had been the dominant numerical force in California racing for many years. In 2018, for example, his runners made up 3.6% of all starts in the state. As recently as 2015, they had made up 4.1% of all starts in the state.

Nevertheless, without a clear understanding of where Hollendorfer's horses went, it's difficult to accurately diagnose. And as we shall see farther down, when the data is restricted to stables with 100+ horses making a start per year, their dominance appears as strong as ever.

Trainer data

Between 2007 and 2020, California has witnessed a 46.4% decrease in the number of individual trainers making at least one start: from 573 in 2007 to 307 in 2020.

At the same time, the number of trainers making up the 20% highest earners has decreased by nearly 47%–from 115 in 2007 to 61 last year–putting it in line with the overall drop in trainers.

The top 20% of trainers have consistently had an outsized impact when it comes to the apportioning of horses.

For the past 14 years, these top 20% trainers have started between 58.6% and nearly 65% of horses that have made at least one start in the state.

There are other indicators illustrating how, while the industry has shrunk, the big players have consolidated their position at the top.

One hundred-plus horses

Back in 2007, the number of trainers with 100 or more horses making at least one start per year was 14–the highest over the last 14 years.

Since then, however, the number of trainers with 100 or more horses making at least one start has fluctuated between eight and 12.

This means that while the number of active trainers in California has almost halved, the number of trainers with 100+ horses making starts has stayed fairly constant.

Not surprisingly, these large stables have long wielded tremendous sway in terms of prize money won and number of starts made.

In 2007, the 14 stables with 100 or more horses making at least one start annexed roughly 27% of all prize money and 21.6% of all starts. These 14 stables represent 2.4% of all trainers with at least one start in the state.

In 2020, the eight stables with 100 or more horses making at least one start (Isidro, Glatt, Sadler, Wong, O'Neill, Baltas, Miller and Baffert) represented 2.6% of all trainers with at least one start in the state. All in all, they annexed nearly 31% of all prize money and roughly 18% of all starts.

Lower end

There are, however, some angles to the data which appear to show glimmers of encouragement for the smaller stables barely scratching out a living.

As the number of active trainers in California has shrunk, the average earnings per trainer have trended upward.

Comparing 2007 to 2020, the average earnings per trainer for the bottom 80% had increased nearly 53% (from roughly $52,000 in 2007 to roughly $80,000 last year).

In comparison, the average earnings per trainer for the top 20% had increased only 0.6% during that same period (from roughly $1.212 million in 2007 to roughly $1.220 million last year).

Comparing 2007 figures to last year's, the bottom 80% of trainers have also significantly outpaced their top 20% cousins in terms of growth in both earnings per horse and earnings per starter.

Nevertheless, when the data is adjusted for the relative purchasing power of the dollar, the picture looks less rosy. When overall earnings per trainer are adjusted for inflation, for example, we see a more than 13% decrease from 2007 to last year.

To reinforce just how important the smaller stables are to the racing ecosystem, over 70% of trainers start fewer than 20 individual horses a year, but last year their horses accounted for about one-quarter of the entire horse inventory (1,392 of 5,389) and about one-quarter of all starts (4,321 of 17,973).

If the health of a racing product is defined in good part by fielding races with a varied breadth of competitor, therefore, this certainly leaves much food for thought, especially when the broken business model widely used throughout the industry disproportionately impacts the smaller trainer struggling to stay afloat.

And if the smaller stables find themselves unable to survive in an increasingly lopsided marketplace, what kind of product can the bettor expect?

Note: The data is derived from Daily Racing Form chart text files.

The post Super Trainers in California: The Story in Numbers appeared first on TDN | Thoroughbred Daily News | Horse Racing News, Results and Video | Thoroughbred Breeding and Auctions.

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In a new TDN series, we curry lessons and wise counsel from veteran Californian figures who, like gold nuggets panned from the Tuolomne River in the High Sierras, have unearthed career riches on arguably the toughest circuit in the States. We begin this series with John Shirreffs.

Born at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, Shirreffs was raised around horses on his family farm, and was deployed to Vietnam with the Marine Corps before embarking on a career in racing, using a 10-year stint at the Loma Rica Horse Ranch in Northern California as a springboard to a training career that would see him sift one of the rarest jewels of all.

Part I

Amid the tall spiking pines and jutting mountain cathedrals of Northern California's Grass Valley back when the sprawling Loma Rica Horse Ranch still hummed with activity and where the transatlantic phenom Noor would later be interred–to haunt the barns, some say–one stubborn son-of-a-gun yearling colt gave a young John Shirreffs an abject lesson in obstinance.

“He's in the stall rearing up and striking and I can't get the bridle on him,” said Shirreffs, remembering the scene from the safe hindsight of some five decades. The memory remains sharp, however.

Rolling up his sleeves, the young Shirreffs sniffed a challenge, which quickly turned from a wily game of wits into a war of muscle. He jumped on the colt bareback. He grabbed his ears. “We're having this Battle Royale.”

After a fashion, though, Shirreffs waved the white flag and with ego deflated turned to Henry Freitas, the farm's storied manager, for pointers on a less adversarial approach.
“Henry said, 'John, just stop all the B.S. Just go down the stall and put the bridle on the horse and quit all that crap you're doing.'”

Shirreffs was unimpressed. “I'm walking down the shedrow thinking to myself, 'what kind of help was that?'” Still, the relationship between pupil and master was one of deference to experience–decades worth, in the case of Freitas–and so, Shirreffs dutifully obliged.

“I went in the stall, put the bridle on the horse–the horse never moved. It was over.”

And what was the main takeaway? “The value of a timeout with horses,” he replied. “When you're caught up in the moment and things aren't working out, the best thing to do is just stop and give yourself and the horse a chance to have a moment of thought to recover.”

Shirreffs after the Breeders' Cup Distaff with Zenyatta | Sarah Andrew

Shirreffs imparted the story one recent morning in his office at Santa Anita, the nearby San Gabriel Mountains draped in a cold, grey drizzle like a soggy blanket, as the veteran trainer reflected on a 45-year career looped into which is a Kentucky Derby win and multiple Breeders' Cups and the sort of horse in Zenyatta (Street Cry {Ire}) that comes along about as often as Halley's Comet.

This nugget of barn-spun wisdom also provides a useful barometer of the trainer's evolution as a horseman, familiar sounding to anyone long enough in the tooth to know that any career with racehorses is akin to a college course without end.

“When I was younger, I could dominate a horse, right? I could handle them pretty well through strength. But as I got older, horses started getting a lot stronger than I was. Most of them were starting to outsmart me. So, I learned over the years what a mental game it is.”

Indeed, from a world in which the economics of high-level competition has sprouted large military-run outfits–those where routine and repetition are bywords for necessity and thrift–the Shirreffs barn offers a refreshing alternative, where morning training is approached with the same certitude of an explorer setting foot on virgin terrain.

But while Cook and Columbus had in the North Star their guiding light, Shirreffs has for his something altogether more fluid and transactional.

“It's always about building the bond,” said Shirreffs, focusing in on what appears a central conceit of his.

“You have to build a bond between the horse and the person. I have to find a way where that horse has trust in whoever's handling him or doing something with them. So, it's always about the bond, because if that horse trusts the groom or trusts the person with them, then they will behave much better than if all they're thinking about is being nervous, being anxious about what's coming next.”

Big range of emotions

Wander down any shedrow and you'll hear horse behavior equated with everything from wayward teens to recalcitrant spouses to loving sweethearts. This isn't new–the instinct to anthropomorphize is as ancient as civilization itself.

What's unusual is to hear any trainer–especially those operating within the upper echelons of a sport where a business degree can sometimes feel like the most instructive qualification–talk of the complex emotional bandwidth of a racehorse, as Shirreffs does.

The foundations of this clearly stem from those early days under Freitas at Loma Rica Ranch, a 600-acre university for horsemanship, home as it was to stallion and mare, yearling and breaker, lay-up and foal.

“I think somebody should spend an hour in the stall with a stud, just to understand the range of emotion that an animal can have,” he said. “Sometimes, the thing that amazes me about horses is how much they are willing to communicate and how much they're studying us.

It's a matter of getting to know your horse: Shirreffs with Giacomo | Horsephotos

He added, “You have to realize that they are trying to make their environment as good as they can. And we are the biggest thing in their environment that they have to control. Right?” he added. “We're the ones that could endanger them. So, obviously they're studying what type of a relationship they're going to have with us.”

Like all relationships, the means define the ends. Of course, when it comes to understanding quirks and foibles, there are few substitutes for patience. “It's a matter of getting to know your horse,” he said.

“It's fun to watch the horses to pick up on their habits–I have the time to do that, when the work gets done and everyone's gone to lunch, I have that opportunity, when it's quiet, to watch the horses and see how they're behaving, see what's different about one or the other.”

This, he says, is particularly instructive to the early diagnosis of injury–arguably the biggest culprit of sleepless nights among insomniac license-holders.

“Horses are very stoic, right? You don't have an obvious sense of what's bothering them in the beginning [of injury], before there's any heat or any inflammation or anything like that,” he explained. “But how he eats is a good indication of how he's feeling, not only emotionally but also physically.

“Even then, by the time you notice that something's going on, he's probably been dealing with pain for probably quite some time.”

Such close scrutiny of behavior feeds into what he terms the “bio-rhythm” of a horse–the idea that a racehorse can be brought to peak performance only when, like a maestro vigilant of each section of the orchestra, they're mentally, physically and emotionally in balance.

“You have to figure out how to get things flowing together,” Shirreffs explained. “So, when they're physically at their peak they might not be mentally at their peak because you've trained them really hard, but mentally they're tired or emotionally they're off–you know, upset about being pushed so hard.

He continued, “So, you're going to have to lose a little bit of conditioning maybe to bring them up mentally and emotionally, right? It's always: How close you can get everything?

“That's the one great thing about campaigning a horse, because when they're campaigning they're conditioning–they're physically staying at a pretty high level. And as they campaign, and as they get used to the rigors of racing and training, mentally they're getting stronger, too. And then, if there's some sort of pleasure involved–some sort of reward for the horse–then they're emotionally getting better.

“So, it's all a question of balancing these three different things.”

The real pleasure a trainer gets

In those early days at Loma Rica Horse Ranch, Freitas came down with a nasty bout of flu, giving Shirreffs an early glimpse into the peculiar juggling act that operating a barn necessitates. Though perhaps baptism of fire would be more apropos.

“I knew the routine, right? I knew how everything ran. So, I was fine for about two or three days because I knew exactly what Henry would do.

“But suddenly, after about three or four days, I had to make new decisions based on ones I made a couple of days ago. That's when I got into trouble because I didn't have Henry to ask.”

Now, many an analogy befits a well-run stable, all shaped around a certain triangular hierarchy–an ant colony, for example, of an aforementioned branch of the military.

It's instructive then to hear Shirreffs explain the roles he's carved out for him and staff.

“I don't really need to know veterinary medicine, right? I don't need to know the name of drugs, all that kind of stuff,” he said. “[Veterinarians], they go to school, they know that. But I can learn what the shoer does, right? I can watch what they do.

“I can feel legs, and the difference between one leg and another and study those things. I can watch the horse and see if he's acting colicky or a little upset because of something else going on. So, I thought in the beginning that was where I would best spend my time to become a better trainer.”

Part of that process of self-evaluation has involved holding a mirror to his own failings–his own Achilles heels-as typified, for example, in the way he has, at times, placed individuals in charge of identifying soft tissue injuries.

“As a trainer, you go in and you're checking behind the saddle, but I'm always thinking it doesn't feel too bad because I want to train that horse, right? I have to have somebody put the brakes on. I have to have my own sort of checks and balances.”

At the same time, “You can't put demands on people, right? Because I think a certain way, and I react a certain way, I can't demand that other person be like me and react the way I would react.

“Let's take the exercise rider or jockey or whatever, you have to understand where they are [ability wise], what are their strong points and how you can best use them to accomplish what you need to accomplish with the horse.”

In an industry that often calibrates professional achievement and pleasure through the narrow aperture of race-day honors, it's refreshing, then, to hear someone no stranger to laurel wreath and garland talk of their other important metrics of success.

“It's so difficult to win a race–in California, especially. So somewhere along the way, if you're going to be in this business, you have to derive some pleasure from somewhere else, right?
“So, the real pleasure a trainer gets is seeing the growth in the horse. Or having somebody, like a rider, start to develop and understand his relationship with the horse, see what impact that person can make on how that horse is going to handle the stresses of racing.

“It's really a pleasure when you suddenly see a guy realize that if he didn't pull on this horse so hard and just kind of released the reins a little bit, the horse starts to relax. He realizes, 'Oh, it's not all muscle, it's a little bit of a finesse.'

“I think those are really fun things.”

Part II of this story will run in next week's TDN.

The post The California Series: John Shirreffs appeared first on TDN | Thoroughbred Daily News | Horse Racing News, Results and Video | Thoroughbred Breeding and Auctions.

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