Chris McGrath | Horse Racing Free Tips

This Side Up: Don’t Make Them Like That Anymore

Well, I guess it's precisely because the protagonists aren't used to the limelight that everybody has so enjoyed their arrival at center stage. But they have quickly learned that once there, with everyone hanging on your every word, you had better know your script.

In the excitement of his success, under one of the most remarkable rides in GI Kentucky Derby history, connections of Rich Strike (Keen Ice) told everyone that they had the previous morning been reconciled to instead contesting the GIII Peter Pan S. at Belmont this weekend. But they are now claiming that they were actually targeting the GI Preakness S.–and that spacing out his races was always their priority.

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Their strategies and pretexts for ultimately missing the Preakness are entirely their own business. Nonetheless it's vexing that those who want to spread out the Triple Crown series, having been effectively muted by American Pharoah and Justify, now feel emboldened to put their heads back over the parapet. Colleague Bill Finley masterfully disposed of this myopic and really rather decadent lobby in Friday's edition, and I would merely add that the Rich Strike decision is particularly disappointing in view of the miles he has on the clock. Because however little else he brought to the Derby, he did have more “bottom” (eight starts) than any other runner bar the obvious herbivore Tiz the Bomb (Hit It a Bomb) (nine).

By modern standards, runner-up Epicenter (Not This Time) had also laid fairly solid foundations, especially compared with the raw Zandon (Upstart) who seemed to hit a wall after the race had set up perfectly. True, he graduated from a race that nowadays serves the prejudices of modern trainers to the extent of granting them an extra week, but remember the GII Louisiana Derby also trades that concession for extra distance. The race produced four of the first six past the post last year, and once again it has proved a major bonus to have run a mile and three-sixteenths before the first Saturday in May.

Rich Strike was nowhere near the Derby's hot pace | Coady

Epicenter's perseverance, after contributing to the pace meltdown, indicates courage as exceptional as talent. Whether he can himself absorb such an exacting effort inside two weeks remains to be seen. Here, after all my complaints about the two-dimensional nature of the modern Derby, was a horse ideally equipped to boss the kind of procession we have seen so often since the points system eliminated sprint speed–only to hit the first pace implosion since Orb in 2013 (paradoxically, the first year of gate points).

Be all that as it may, we can't pretend that Rich Strike would have been an especially obvious fancy had he instead rolled up for the Peter Pan. Just try to restore his spectral presence, from that parallel world he fleetingly inhabited eight days ago, into the field that does assemble at Belmont on Saturday–potentially, in some cases, with a view to instead beating him back at the same track next month. Really, the exercise doesn't feel so different from the moment he suddenly appeared along the rail at Churchill: the ghost runner, the puzzling silks in the post parade, the impostor who seemed merely a ceremonial, three-dimensional representation of the horse scratched by D. Wayne Lukas.

So much for my hunch that the Coach might yet have a say in the Derby, despite having reserved what may yet prove the best sophomore of the crop to the company of her own sex. In the event, it became a tale of two substitutes, his brilliant filly's proxy Ethereal Road (Quality Road) crucially ceding his spot to this interloper.

Nobody in the modern era has put more “bottom” into a horse than Lukas, and the taxing race she endured under a fairly witless ride in that GI Arkansas Derby experiment not only set up Secret Oath (Arrogate) to dominate a vintage field for the GI Longines Kentucky Oaks but will also, surely, steel her for her imminent next encounter with colts.

The 2022 Kentucky Derby winner | Coady

The defection from that showdown of a fairytale Derby winner does deprive our sport of an opportunity to redeem much of the public distaste we have collectively invited over the past two or three years. The Preakness had offered to bring together two very different phoenixes: one rising from the pyre of age and fashion, his genius gleaming bright as ever; the other literally from the flames, an inferno having consumed 23 horses in as harrowing a nightmare as any horseman could imagine.

But the Rich Strike team are clearly going to follow their own narrative. Everybody else presumed that he didn't really belong in the Derby; and now they have decided, contrary to the outside consensus, that he doesn't belong in the Preakness. Again, it's their prerogative to do as they please. But the Triple Crown gods had cast them in pretty compelling roles, and I'm not sure anyone should want to start meddling with a plot of such momentum and coherence. They can flatter themselves that he was only primed to seize his moment last weekend because of their own calculation, but they do have to credit somebody up there with an assist.

Everything we do with horses, of course, combines luck as well as judgement. That's certainly true of breeding, and it may be no more than a striking coincidence that both Secret Oath and Rich Strike appear to have hewn their physical competence for the Classics, these most demanding examinations of the adolescent Thoroughbred, from genetic foundations assembled with an exceptional eye on reinforcement.

Secret Oath is pegged down at every corner by the great Aspidistra. Damsire Quiet American is famously inbred as close as 3×2 to Aspidistra's son Dr. Fager, in both cases moreover through a mating with a daughter of another matriarch in Cequillo. Secret Oath's second dam is by Great Above, a son of Aspidistra's Hall of Fame daughter Ta Wee. And Arrogate's grandsire Unbridled also brings in Aspidistra, as fourth dam; besides being (like Quiet American) a son of Fappiano, himself out of a Dr. Fager mare.

As we discussed in Tuesday's edition, Rich Strike's pedigree is also conspicuous for doubling down on venerable influences. His sire is a grandson of his own damsire, Smart Strike, while his third dam is by a full-brother to Smart Strike's sire Mr. Prospector. Keen Ice himself, meanwhile, duplicates the broodmare sire legend Deputy Minister 3×3. And his fourth dam Chic Shirine is by Mr. Prospector.

Keen Ice at Calumet | Sarah Andrew

Keen Ice's family–tracing to the 1962 Epsom Oaks winner Monade (Fr), imported by King Ranch–was developed through five generations by Emory Hamilton. We would have no Rich Strike, then, without the parallel human and equine dynasties going through her mother Helen Groves, that wonderfully vital connection to the Old West whose unique spark was finally extinguished this week at 94. They simply don't make them like “Helenita” anymore. In fact, I'm not sure they can have done previously, either.

I doubt that the fearless cowgirl would be terribly impressed by anyone turning down the opportunity to emulate Assault, who won the Triple Crown for King Ranch in 1946. She never forgot that Preakness Ball, full of demobbed servicemen and an infectious optimism, as a 19-year-old college student.

Assault, incidentally, won the Dwyer S. two weeks after the Belmont. That was his sixth win in nine weeks. (Nothing compared to Citation, of course, who two years later also landed the Triple Crown in winning 19 of 20 sophomore starts.) Sadly, infertility prevented Assault passing on that constitution, but that's what we're looking for in Triple Crown horses, and that's why it is set up as it is. It's how their predecessors keep the horsemen of today honest.

Last year not one horse lined up for all three legs. That may reflect on modern breeding, or merely the perceptions of modern trainers. Either way, it's obvious what needs reform–and, even more obviously, it isn't the Triple Crown.

The post This Side Up: Don’t Make Them Like That Anymore appeared first on TDN | Thoroughbred Daily News | Horse Racing News, Results and Video | Thoroughbred Breeding and Auctions.

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Highflier Lands Running on Pastures New

Somehow they had got it into their heads that it might be nice to buy “a small, gentleman's farm”, just 10 acres or so, as an eventual retirement project. Jana Barbe's daughters, emulating her own childhood passion, had always enjoyed riding and some of the show horses were kept here in Kentucky. Such a beautiful part of the world, they hired a local broker and did some idle prospecting. Then came the 2008 crash.

“And this business, being built on disposable income, suffered terribly,” Barbe recalls. “Suddenly it felt like every farm was on the market. And our broker called with this place on Newtown Pike near Georgetown. Just a little bigger than we wanted.”

Like, eight times bigger. But they came out and had a look anyway. A little Eden on the Elkhorn Creek. There and then, Barbe's husband announced that their search was over.

They returned to their Chicago home, situated on a 25×125-foot lot, and Barbe summoned all the hard-headed sense that had for six years made her the only woman on the global board of law giant Dentons.

“Roy,” she said, “you're out of your mind. We can't possibly do this. I work like a dog, seven days a week. I'm on the road all the time. Not to mention the fact that we know nothing about farming. You grew up on the northwest side of Chicago. I've never taken care of my own horses. We don't even have a yard. This is a working farm. It comes with a tractor!”

“No,” he said, immovable. “We're going to do this.”

Be in no doubt, there are still days when she lies there at night, watching the monitors from the foaling stalls, asking how did this happen.

“I can never sleep when we're waiting,” she says. “Even though we have someone on duty.”

This week she has been fretting over the overdue delivery–aptly enough, of a More Than Ready foal share–by an 11-year-old daughter of Tiznow, one of eight Thoroughbred mares now residing at Henley Farms. Letchworth's fourth foal is imminent even as her first prepares for the GIII Peter Pan S., at Belmont on Saturday, with prospects of breaking into the elite of his crop. We the People (Constitution) disappointed when fast-tracked to the GI Arkansas Derby, after two sensational scores, but that attempt to shoehorn him into the first Saturday in May was perhaps too much too soon. Either way, as its first graduate, We the People has already sealed the accidental emergence of this boutique Thoroughbred nursery.

Jana Barbe | Courtesy Henley Farms

But it's a fair question she asks: how did this happen? Raised near Miami, without the affluence for horses of her own, Barbe always found a way to get across a saddle: summer camp, stable work, college riding club. On graduating from law school, when her peers were leasing apartments, she devoted her first paychecks to leasing a jumper. She stabled him in downtown Chicago, on Schiller and Orleans, alongside the carriage horses.

By the time the Barbes bought Henley Farms, however, horses had long been marginal to her stellar career and the raising of a family. The first thing they did, then, was track down all the show horses that had maintained an equine connection over those years. “They looked after you and the girls all that time,” said Roy. “Now it's our turn to look after them.”

That's why you'll find a 31-year-old Welsh Pony next to the dam of We the People. But the Bluegrass soon began its cultural osmosis. Their first farm manager's dad was the late Marvin Little, Jr., breeder of Hansel (Woodman), who invited them to take a piece in a broodmare.

“And that's how it starts, right?” says Barbe. “You dip a toe in, then a whole leg. And one day you wake up and say, 'You know, we could do this. We have all this land, we have paddocks, stalls, everything we'd need.' So that's how it began. But those first years, it should have been a reality TV show. Every stupid horse mistake you could make, we made. Amateur with a capital 'A'.”

But every trial, every error, became a lesson learned. Four years on, they confidently perform their own foaling. And the two sides of Barbe's life not only dovetail but nourish each other. Long before Covid, she was adapting to remote working.

“It soon became apparent that clients were more focused on whether the work got done, and its quality, as opposed to where it might have been done,” she says. “Lexington has airports. I can travel wherever. I'm on a public company board [Invitation Homes, Inc.], a private company board [The Boler Company], I'm a senior advisor for Blackstone. And they all get it.

Courtesy Henley Farms

“Mine is a life of extremes. Yesterday one of the warmbloods had a gas colic. It wasn't severe, but he loves attention so I groomed him for an hour and a half, because it kept him standing. And when I came in and looked in the mirror, I mean, I was wearing his winter coat. I was disgusting. And I did think that if I had to get on a Zoom call now, and explain this! But they've all accepted that people have passions in life, that can run the gamut, and it's OK.”

And then what a treat to break off: nice clean office, fancy hotels, not to mention intellectual stimulation.

“The business world gives you at least an illusion of control,” Barbe reflects. “I'm a control freak by nature, and it gives you that feeling: 'OK, I'm in charge, we're going to make a decision, we're going to weigh in on this. I have authority, a degree of autonomy.' Then you come here, and some colt is dragging me down the road, and there's no control. None. You can be derailed by the weather. And these horses, they all have minds of their own. Like Letchworth's Audible [yearling]. From a very young age, he found it necessary to jump out of the paddock. Doesn't go anywhere, doesn't actually want to leave his herd. But he can clear a four-foot fence, uphill, without a scratch. So very athletic, right? But I have no control.”

Obviously they try to be as proactive as possible in sales prep.

“But so much of farming is about reacting,” Barbe accepts. “And being tuned in. And accepting that what will be, will be. So yes, it keeps everything fresh. During Covid, it was the horses that kept me sane: the bonds, the empathy, were amazing. When I go away for business, I get to be a different person. But then I come back here, and I prize it: I'm in heaven on earth.”

With that inquiring mind, Barbe has relished learning pedigrees. Indeed, while stressing her gratitude to advisors at Taylor Made, it was she who found Letchworth at the 2019 January Sale: unraced, but out of Grade I winner Harmony Lodge (Hennessy).

“The inner nerd takes over, reads every page of every book,” she says with a laugh. “It was one of our first sales, she was pregnant to Constitution, who at that point was an unproven 'bubble' horse. We knew that bloodlines plus black type would be out of our range, so we had to choose–and we went with bloodlines. So I dragged Roy to see her, and she's big and beautiful. At first Taylor Made said, 'Hmm, don't know, what are you going to do with the baby?' And we said we weren't buying for the baby, so they went and looked at the mare and said actually she's really nice.”

And, in the event, the baby turned out to be an unexpected bonus. Constitution's first juveniles flew, and this colt–from his third crop–proved formidable in every way. Barbe shares footage of him bucking and careering round a paddock when barely a week old.

We the People as a foal | Courtesy Henley Farms

“He was strong-willed and aggressive,” she recalls. “Like, if you turned your back, he playfully bit you. He literally came out bucking. He'd cow kick. He was high-spirited, independent, fearless. The mare's Audible colt, he's massive too, but you can walk into the box and pet him. You couldn't have done that with We the People.”

Slipstreaming the momentum of his sire, the feisty weanling immediately recouped the $40,000 paid for his mother when making $110,000 at Keeneland November from Machmer Hall. (He exactly doubled his value in the same ring the following September, albeit a second pinhook cycle only inched him up.) And he may yet perform further services to the page, plainly having far more ability than he showed in his first big test.

“He's so fast, his times were insane,” Barbe says. “But he'd never been in a crowd before, he got stuck in there and didn't like it one bit. The trainer [Rodolphe Brisset] in his interview said that he's not an easy horse, and he wasn't from birth. The personality comes through pretty quickly. My hope would be that he learned, that he can digest and process the experience and bring that speed to bear.”

With his upgrade, We the People's half-brother by Always Dreaming advanced his $65,000 yearling cost (lower than Barbe expected, evidently due to a corrected OCD) to $220,000 from SBM Training & Sales at OBS April. (“The same athleticism,” says Barbe. “Only in a more manageable brain and package.”) But whatever happens next, We the People has already taken the couple who raised him somewhere they hadn't really anticipated in starting their Thoroughbred adventure.

“I was a little ambivalent about the racing,” Barbe admits. “I love animals, and in many ways racing is problematic in how it treats horses. It's an industry in transition, and appropriately so. It does need to clean up its own house. But I do now understand what I didn't fully appreciate before: the way that these Thoroughbreds are born to run. Our babies in the back field, they gallop up the hill, they gallop down the hill, nobody's forcing them. And then We the People happened. Watching this horse we bred, I was screaming like a lunatic at the television. It was like, 'OK, now I get this. This was a baby I played with here. This is quite different.'”

Roy Barbe | Courtesy Henley Farms

In the meantime, she had been heartened that her new community not only embraced these city novices but shared their values; that so many walk the walk on welfare. But something else also happened, the day Letchworth's bronco baby made his debut. All her competitive spirit was suddenly in play. And, as Barbe acknowledges, you don't carve out a career like hers without being extremely competitive.

“It's never easy when you're the only woman in the room,” she says. “But in life I generally find it helpful to give people the benefit of the doubt, to ascribe good motives. Life's too short to go into the room expecting trouble or rejection or condescension. And anyway I'm not easily dissuaded. It's like riding: you fall, you pick yourself up, you get back on.”

She works hard to be not just a model for aspiring young women, but also an advocate and mentor. “Choose your battles, with an eye on the prize,” she urges those who seek her counsel. “Not every pass is a touchdown. You can get a first down by three relatively short running plays. Tortoise, not the hare. Don't be derailed by every obstacle, every potential argument. Don't allow your sense of security and self-worth and identity to be shaken by others. External validation is great, when you get it, but it in the end it's artificial. What has to drive you is internal.”

Easier said than done, she grants. “There'll be lots of days with lots of tears,” she says. “You know that 'glass ceiling' people talk about? I used to come home from work and my husband would be picking shards out of my head. When I graduated from law school, in 1987, the percentage of women equity partners at big law firms was between 15% and 18%, and the goal was 20%. And the goal today? Still 20%.

“But the more deliberate and strategic I became, the more I understood my power, and married that power to my authenticity, the more effective and accepted I became. But you shouldn't have to wait until you've turned 50 to wake up one morning and say, 'OK, so maybe if I hold my breath a little here, am a bit more measured there…' We're demanding a level of grit and resilience that is unfair. Because the work is hard enough.”

Courtesy Henley Farms

So how has she found the Turf, still so dominated by males?

“It is a very conservative environment, and needs a lot more diversity of all kinds for sure,” she accepts. “But the only way we're going to achieve that is one person at a time, one foot in front of the other, and being really smart in how we go about it. We will get there. Because we have to. In the end the sport will become integrated because it can't not.”

That's also why she believes other, systemic issues will also be tackled: because continued obstruction of reform will simply kill the industry. “In the end, everybody engaged in the sport will have a choice to make,” she says. “Change is hard, I get it. But the sport will have to evolve, or it won't survive. If people think that's not coming, they haven't been paying attention.”

Not that the Barbes intend turning the game on its head. Certainly their program is conforming to established market prejudices, using new sires and fashionable crosses. But they have shown imagination, too, for instance in acquiring (with Taylor Made's help) a 2-year-old Ghostzapper filly for just $10,000. She wasn't going to stand training but conformation and pedigree nonetheless made her eligible to breed.

“So we put her in the field and she was raised by two old hunter geldings,” she says. “And her first baby is to die for. So we've tried to be super strategic in our shopping, and super nimble.”

Barbe and her husband are heartened by their reception from a community that might normally profile them only as patrons, not as rivals or colleagues.

“Lots of people have told us it's great to have new blood in the sport,” she says. “And I do feel like we do have a place here; that our voice as a new entry matters, and can join others to advance the sport.”

Recently they hosted an organisation of young corporate highfliers at Henley Farms, eager to learn more about opportunities in Kentucky and the horse world. More than one took them aside with the same awed message. “Look what you've done here,” they said. “You've made your life the way you want it. How many people would take on that risk?”

“I married a man who knew nothing about horses, and he embraced the dream,” Barbe says. “I got really lucky there. And I feel like we're so privileged to be here, to have the chance to pursue dreams. I mean, my dream wasn't horseracing. It was living with my horses. But to have found a life that revolves around them, to have been able to make that happen? It's like everything else, really. One foot in front of another, and chase the dream.”

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This Side Up: Run to Win, Not Win to Run

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We live in a world where change is routinely mistaken for progress, draped in the cheap frills of “modernization”–a word that needs treating with extreme suspicion, implying as it does that any who challenge innovation are obstructing our species in some otherwise inexorable journey to fulfilment.

Nobody can sensibly deny that a great deal of change has indeed been for the better. Few who honor her memory at Keeneland on Saturday, I'm sure, would like to have been with Jenny Wiley in her pioneer cabin, that bloody day in 1789. But nor should we ever be vapidly impulsive in our stewardship of the Thoroughbred, that beautiful time capsule for generations of toil and reflection by stockmen whose lore has long faded from all other record.

In my homeland of England, they actually have ended up having to use heritage as a substitute for decent purses. Even in that environment, however, vigilance is constantly required against well-intentioned but crass unstitching of the pageant.

On both sides of the water, admittedly, we must tolerate such pragmatic change as will preserve what has become known as “the social license” to persist in our way of life, in an era when a largely urban world can grossly amplify its misapprehensions on social media.

That's a context we can't afford to neglect in any of the scandals, actual or perceived, that undermine our claims to scrupulous regard for equine welfare. At one end of the spectrum, you may this week have glimpsed some nightmarish images from the Quarter Horse world. Be in no doubt, however: we absolutely invite outsiders to place us on the same continuum even in what too many people in our community consider our marginal complicities–when indulging the alchemy apparently practised in certain barns, for instance, or arguably when harnessing ideological lobbies to litigate against meaningful regulation.

And I do feel that some of the decisions we make as breeders show inadequate consideration for the breed's long-term welfare. Everyone talks a good game about turf stallions, for instance, but they won't actually give them commercial oxygen. And the odds are stacked even against dirt stallions if perceived as “slow burners”, whether in terms of maturity or stamina.

With far too many horses brought into the world to walk, not run, I recently took the tragic cue of Get Stormy's loss to celebrate the exemplary approach of Crestwood, where the roster majors in competitive longevity, often combined with turf acceleration and/or an aristocratic maternal line. But the suspicion must be that a family farm, with relatively limited resources, can only have created this heroic niche in the Bluegrass because of market contempt for precisely those assets that would best sustain the breed.

Thankfully Crestwood is not alone in understanding how the viability of our sport depends on the physical competence of the model we hand over to the next generation. Few grasp this more ardently than Airdrie–where Divisidero, for instance, built five campaigns on a maternal line extending to Cosmah herself; and Preservationist, who pairs up the King Ranch icons Courtly Dee and Too Chic, must somehow get people to see past the fact that he was six when he broke two minutes in the GII Suburban.

That pair will need a lot of far-sighted support to emulate the breakout of their buddy Upstart, who–multiple Grade I-placed at two, three and four, and tracing to a Federico Tesio champion–has genuine prospects, with only his second crop, of a first Kentucky Derby-Oaks double since Native Dancer.

Whatever happens at Churchill, Upstart has done something pretty phenomenal just to put himself in this position as a $10,000 start-up. Remember this is the 50th anniversary of Airdrie's foundation; and also that Zandon's first three dams were all mated in support of resident stallions. Typically of this farm, moreover, the family traces to a great matriarch in Boudoir II (GB), whose foals included the dam of Flower Bowl, granddam of Majestic Prince and sire of Kelso. Any neutral whose Derby pick will be determined by a due sense of heritage and class, then, will have had goosebumps watching Zandon put it all together in his hometown trial last weekend.

Now it's true that Zandon has himself participated in radical change; in a process, indeed, that many trainers would doubtless hail as “modernization”. Having been so lightly campaigned, by the standards of the past, last week he needed things to go right just to reserve himself a Derby gate.

It's a world away from 1941, when Whirlaway (seven-for-16 at two) was beaten in a Blue Grass nine days before the Derby, and again in the Churchill Derby Trial five days later, only to convert that sharpening into an eight-length win in the first leg of his Triple Crown. On its nine-day turnaround the Blue Grass produced the Derby winner nine times in 14 runnings from 1959. In 1990, however, it was pushed back to three weeks before the Derby, and in 2015 to four. That leaves the GIII Stonestreet Lexington S. as the last chance saloon for those still needing gate points and, despite its relative proximity to the Derby, as the ultimate example of how trials have become treated principally as a means to get into the race, rather than actually to win it.

Lexington contender Ethereal Road with D. Wayne Lukas | Coady

Except that maybe D. Wayne Lukas is trying to do both, in backing up Ethereal Road (Quality Road) a week after the Blue Grass–where patience seems finally to have been exhausted with his jockey, now replaced both here and on Secret Oath (Arrogate) in the Oaks.

Remember how Lukas brought a son of Summer Squall to this race in 1999, a couple of weeks after he'd made some late ground into fourth of eight as an outsider in the GI Santa Anita Derby? Charismatic had needed six attempts to win a maiden, and both his wins had come under a tag, but all that groundwork suddenly came together in the Lexington. And 13 days later he went into the Derby–with 12 more races under his belt than will Taiba (Gun Runner)!

The only rule, with Thoroughbreds, is that there are no rules. If Taiba can win off that prep, then I will have to acknowledge myself not just a traditionalist but a culpable reactionary. Actually, as we've indicated already, there is one immutable rule: that whatever we do with these horses, their welfare comes first. But if they are not being “proved”, the way they once were, then I don't know that anyone gains.

If trainers don't trust the resilience of the genetic material they're being given, then that's a poor reflection on the breeders of today. And equally it's no help to the breeders of tomorrow if stock perfectly equal to a tougher schedule never gets a chance to demonstrate those wares. So, no, not all change is good–any more than all change is bad.

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A Pinhook to Justify Parrish Principles

You can do all those other things, if you like: expensive supplements and therapies, scans and samples. But none of it will do the slightest good unless your horse can trust its weight to the soles of its four feet.

Last September, veteran horseman G.W. Parrish was as usual scouting the later books at the Keeneland September sale for yearlings to pinhook through the small farm he operates at High Springs, Florida, along with wife Karen and daughter Kristin.

In the Gainesway consignment, he came across a gray colt by Justify. Lurking as low as Hip 1442, he obviously wasn't considered in the first rank of the Triple Crown winner's debut crop. The colt's dam had certainly appeared deserving of that level of cover, as a daughter of Tapit who had won the GII Pocahontas S. by five lengths. But she had been a disappointing broodmare so far, and her son was frankly lacking in size. Rather more seriously, he also appeared to be afflicted by some kind of deformity on a hoof.

As a result, most people were putting a line straight through his page. But Parrish took a closer look, and realized that it was the result of some adhesive repair treatment and essentially pretty superficial.

“He had some Equilox on the front of one foot, and it did look ugly,” Parrish recalls. “But I've been a blacksmith all my life, and I figured I could fix it. There was some white line, that was all. Most of the horses I get from Kentucky will have a spot of that and you can just grow it out.”

He cast his mind back to the time, a decade or so previously, when he had bought a Roman Ruler colt at the same auction for $4,000.

“With that horse, it looked like he was club footed on one foot,” Parish recalls. “But I thought, this horse just wore his toe off, where the blacksmith had tried to put a shoe on an intorsion. So I got him home and I kept that shoe on him for two months, and when OBS came to select for the February Sale, as it was back then, they said: 'How did you buy this Roman Ruler so cheap?' So I told them about the club foot, and they looked at him and said, 'Which foot was it?' And I said, 'Well I don't remember now!' You really couldn't tell anymore, it had just grown out. And as soon as they left, I took the shoe off, trimmed his feet, and just took care of them the rest of the time through.”

Dogwood Stable bought that colt for $100,000 and he won a maiden special weight at Saratoga on Travers Day.

Karen and G.W. Parrish | Courtesy of the Parrish family

So once again Parrish, 73, called on his decades of experience–for a long time he had trained at places like Atlantic City and Hialeah, getting to understand how to keep cheap horses sound–and took a gamble on the Justify colt. Nonetheless he was astonished when the bidding stopped at $25,000, one-sixth of his sire's opening fee.

“I could have doubled my money on the day I bought him,” Parrish admits. “Mark Casse offered me $50,000, but I'd have paid that for him myself. I was so surprised when they knocked him down to me. I just got lucky, because I thought he was a really nice colt, a super mover. Obviously Gainesway are pretty good at putting them in the right spot, and I guess he was a little small. But still with his pedigree, that shouldn't have stopped him. I guess it was just a case of getting the right advice about that foot. You'd think people could see that it could be fixed okay. It was always going to grow out, just like a fingernail would.”

Parrish took the Justify colt back to Florida, removed the shoe and trimmed the foot. “And I just kept him barefoot all winter,” he explains. “The foot grew out fine, wasn't anything wrong with it. Once I got the shoe off, I wasn't too worried. We're lucky, where my farm is: we don't have any rocks, and the track is really good, so I can train all my horses barefoot. I could just let his foot grow back. In fact, when I took him to the sale, that was the first time he'd had shoes on since September.”

Everything the colt had done in the meantime was heartening. He grew taller and stronger, and took to tack like a natural.

“He grew extremely well,” Parrish says. “He made a 16-hand horse, having been barely 15, I'd say, when I bought him. Grew at least four or five inches taller. And he just trained perfect all winter. He was the first horse we trained every morning, and nearly every time the rider would come back and say, 'You know, this is a really nice horse.' He wasn't scared of anything, he'd gallop right on. He had a really good mind, and just seemed to have this extra endurance. He never got tired.”

It was the same at OBS: he was just as sprightly when shown at the end of the day–and, indeed, just as eager to take a nip at Parrish–as he had been first thing in the morning.

Parrish had driven his six-strong draft into the grounds on Mar. 1, as he likes to complete his preparations over the track there.

“So I prepped him, and he went, like, 11 flat; 10-and-three; and the three-eighths in 34-and-2,” Parrish says. “I was on the podium on the backside, chatting with Jimbo Gladwell. And he said, 'I think your rider might need some help!' He was having trouble slowing him down, and they went right by me before I could get out there in front of him. And he ended up going all the way round the track again. He wasn't running off, just didn't want to stop. I knew then that he'd go a quarter! His endurance was just phenomenal.”

Some of the agents and the other consignors had witnessed that unscheduled extra exertion. The word was soon out. Sure enough, the colt clocked :20.4 in his breeze show, and was caught galloping out in :32.2 and :46.1.

“Pretty good for a baby,” Parrish remarks. “And switched leads on his own, like he always has.”

In the end, then, he had turned into just the type of youngster you would hope to get from a mating between Justify and a Tapit mare. And Rosedown Racing Stables/Oracle Bloodstock duly put their name to a $425,000 docket, 17 times more than he had cost six months previously.

At this stage of a long career in the game, Parrish is not one to be carried away. Only last year, after all, he pinhooked a $34,000 Midnight Storm yearling to realize $310,000 at OBS April. (Named India Ink, that colt recently won his maiden at Tampa Bay for Peachtree Stable and trainer Vicki Oliver.) But this was nonetheless a coup that deserves celebrating–based, as it was, on old-fashioned precepts of horsemanship.

For a time Parrish had emulated his father as a trainer of Quarter Horses, and his initial exposure to Thoroughbreds included galloping at $3 a head for Noel Hickey at Irish Acres. Earlier he had also had a formative experience at the Morven Park riding school operated at Leesburg, Virginia, by the ex-cavalry officer and Olympic eventing coach Major John (Joe) Lynch.

“That was 1968,” Parrish recalls. “I was 20-years-old and that was one of the best things I ever did, the year I spent with him. I rode some really good three-day eventers there. I don't gallop the horses much anymore. Used to, for years and years, but not at the age I am now. But I still break them myself, and pony them. We try to start all our babies by ponying them, until they jog well, get a good mouth on them, get used to the pony. We live right here on the farm, it's only 50 acres, so it's all pretty hands-on.”

Parrish and his family quit the racetrack some 15 or 20 years ago, and settled north of Ocala in a district that is, relatively speaking, something of a backwater in the local horse industry. Between their own investments, a few others made in partnership, and pre-training projects for a handful of clients, Parrish Farms will reckon to process only around 25 head of horse every year. But plenty of good performers have shown the benefits of their grounding here.

2018 Flower Bowl winner Fourstar Crook was a Parrish grad | Sarah Andrew

Fourstar Crook (Freud), whose GI Flower Bowl S. success crowned a $1.6-million career for Chad Brown, was sent here as a $55,000 Saratoga New York yearling purchase by Allied Bloodstock (sold on for $110,000). Stormy Embrace (Circular Quay) was broken here for Matalona Thoroughbreds before winning the GII Princess Rooney S. twice. And Hull (Holy Bull) for a time looked one of the best sophomores of 2009 in winning his first three, including the GIII Derby Trial at Churchill.

Horses on this farm tend to have been dredged from the lower reaches of the market. But Parrish's work with the Justify colt shows what can be done, if you go beyond the superficial judgements reached by people in a hurry, and then apply tried-and-tested principles of husbandry.

“I think when you've trained Quarter Horses, you'll always like them to have a good hip and hind leg,” Parrish says. “A nice 'V' in the chest, some muscle under the belly, and a good, deep shoulder. They've got to be pretty correct, and I like them to have a big walk. Those are the horses I try to buy, at least. They won't all work out, but it averages out okay.”

The idea being to lay a sustainable foundation, Parrish doesn't always feel comfortable with the industry's addiction to the bullet breeze.

“I do think we push them too much,” he says. “Back in '78, we sold horses in Hialeah just galloping. We didn't breeze them then, though of course they didn't bring the kind of money they do now. All the same, I like to put a lot of bottom and condition in these horses. I feed them well and try to start them very slowly, build up the bone. And last week [at OBS] they all did it no problem, came back good, no shins or anything.

“Most of our horses don't need any time off after the sale, people can go right on with them. They do tend to give horses time off, but that's when things can go wrong, when they're turned out. Mine can mostly go right on training: their mind is good, they gallop well, they're not hot, fiery horses. And that's because we try to do a slow process over the winter.”

But let's not forget one last, vital element. “They've got to have good feet, for sure!” Parrish says with a chuckle. “But while you can't fix a crooked leg, you can fix a foot.”

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