Chris McGrath | Horse Racing Free Tips

Keeneland Breeder Spotlight: Rigney Savoring Sweet Flavor of Success

Richard Rigney says that nothing in life gives him a bigger kick than his horses. To understand just what that means, it might help to know his idea of a vacation. A few years ago, for instance, he went on a shooting range in Russia. Not that startling, perhaps: this was obviously before the war in Ukraine. It's just the caliber of the ordnance that was a little unusual.

“Shooting a bazooka is so fun,” Rigney says. “My wife Tammy was like, 'You know what? I think it's okay that he shoots the bazooka, but I don't think you should really trust him to drive it.' Because I'm a really bad driver!”

He finds a picture on his phone.

“Here's me going into the tank,” he says. “It was from World War II. I blew up a car, like, half a mile away. So that was a thing. We do a lot of traveling, and we love safaris. I guess that was kind of one.”

If that's a day on the range, you can imagine what scuba diving in Honolulu might entail.

“So Tammy set it up with these Navy SEALs who do a lot of stuff for Hawaii Five-O,” Rigney says. “So we're doing all these helicopter stunts and then, at the end of it, we're 45 feet above the ocean in our wetsuits and dive into the ocean for a shark dive.”

Sorry, this is for fun?

“This is for fun!” exclaims Rigney. “It's like when we went to Cambodia. She goes, 'I got two things for you to do out there. They're burning down the jungle. So how do you feel about being an anti-poacher, one day, and then putting out fires the next?' For that we had a zipline from the helicopter into the hotel.”

He chuckles, before making the most superfluous statement of 2023: “We're not like normal tourists.”

And that is true in more ways than one. Just ask the Vietnamese jungle guide whose daughter was upset when he made her laugh, because it showed how bad her teeth were. Rigney paid for a dentist to fix those. Then, when Covid hit and the guide had no trade, he also paid her college fees.

So here's a guy whose appetite for life is commensurate with the size of his heart. Rigney talks with infectious relish, a frank grin never far away. But nothing is more instructive of his nature than how that heart deals with a horserace.

In its literal function, it pumps the blood at such a frantic rate that the pulse monitor on his smart-watch goes nuts. “Whenever we're racing, even if it's just a cheap claimer, my watch will say: 'Did you fall down? Do you need help?'” he says. “Because I'm so excited. So yeah, the racing is my favorite of all. And winning a Grade I was the No. 1 most exciting thing in my life, besides having my kids.”

Played Hard with Phil Bauer | Mike Kane

That was when Played Hard, a $280,000 Keeneland September yearling, won the GI La Troienne S. on Derby Day at Churchill. She couldn't be more aptly named, whether for her parentage–by Into Mischief out of Well Lived (Tiznow)–or her owner in the other, more figurative workings of his heart. For this is indeed a life lived on a most generous scale.

Phil Bauer, his trainer, interjects that Rigney didn't even go down to the saddling ring before the race, because he gave all his paddock passes to guests. His finish-line suite at Churchill was supposed to accommodate 40 people, but Rigney brought in extra tables so that he could seat 60. His guests ranged from his kids' ski instructor, to greenkeepers from a golf course he owns in Oklahoma, to his usher at the Tampa Bay Rays.

“All these people are important to me,” Rigney says. “So I had them all come in to experience this race. What a humongous day for me, right?”

And that's key: Rigney makes it sound as though he's doing himself a favor. There's no mistaking the authentic pleasure this man derives from doing things for other people. Even if, like the friend who watched the Churchill race alongside Rigney, the process has its perils.

“I got so excited that I knocked him over!” Rigney admits. “He thought he was going through the window. If you don't know what a rebel yell is, stand next to me during a race.”

There were further such scenes at Keeneland last weekend, when Buchu (Justify) came from last to win the GII Jessamine S. in emphatic style. This was a new frontier, as the filly is homebred, retained at $275,000 at the September Sale last year. She's the first foal of Flowering Peach (Ire), a staying mare by Galileo (Ire) out of a Giant's Causeway half-sister to Medaglia d'Oro. Unsurprisingly, after starting out on dirt, those genes have enabled Buchu to thrive for the switch to grass and she will now be among the leading home contenders for the GI Breeders' Cup Juvenile Fillies Turf.

Buchu | Coady Photography

The sense that Rigney's program is going up a level, after some early struggles, is no coincidence. Played Hard was one of the first recruits made for Rigney by John Moynihan, renowned for his work with Stonestreet and others; while the private acquisition from Coolmore of Flowering Peach, with her sensational pedigree, qualified her as the cornerstone of a relatively new venture: a broodmare band, already up to 16, based at Denali Stud.

“So it's been kind of like a new thing with John,” Rigney explains. “I'm very excited about it. I really want John to be involved in developing the broodmare part. He's the right guy for it, that's obvious. And Played Hard was from the first full crop of yearlings he picked out for us. She was always one we were excited about–from when we were buying her, to when she went into pre-training, John was like, 'This is the horse that might take you to the promised land.'”

Before that, Rigney and Bauer are candid that they were not shopping quite so effectively. But first let's rewind to how this whole thing started; how Rigney was first drawn to the color and excitement of the sport, as a young man privileged to grow up in buzzing Pasadena, California. (His father was an engineer who worked on the B1 bomber and Apollo spacecraft; while his mother was an accountant.)

Rigney paid his way through college by his wagering at Santa Anita and Hollywood Park–which instinct, incidentally, has never left him. In 2014, having never played a hand in his life, Rigney accompanied a buddy to Las Vegas for the World Series of Poker. He thought he might as well pay the $10,000 fee and, from a field of 6,683, was famously ranking as high as 86th when losing out, on the fourth day, on a pile of chips that exceeded more than $800,000. Some of his rookie moves had baffled the professionals and Rigney, to disguise his ignorance, had maintained a silence so resolutely enigmatic that many assumed he couldn't even speak English.

But all this freewheeling through life–all these exotic exploits, all his munificence–is actually founded on lab coats and precision.

Rigney owns Clarendon Flavors, a manufacturer of extracts for the beverage industry. “It was just a very fortunate thing,” he protests. “I'm not the smartest guy in the world, but it was the right place, right time. I was working on my master's degree and looking for a job close by. And the nearest one to my school was in this little company, a flavor house. I didn't even know what that meant. But it said they needed a chemist, so I went to interview.”

So began his education in the intricate palette of ingredients from which flavor is designed.

'TDN Rising Star' Twirling Good Time | Coady Photography

“It's like painting,” he says. “It's a really bizarre industry: part chemistry, part art. And the longer you do it, the more of an artist you need to be. I don't really see myself as a chemist really anymore. It's just being a creative person.”

All flavor can apparently be broken down into basic constituents. “Banana, for example, has a hundred different components–but the No. 1 is isoamyl acetate,” Rigney explains. “And that's something you can synthesize from natural ingredients.”

In 1996, after a takeover of the holding group, the opportunity arose for Rigney to finance a buyout of the company he was working for. Three years later he had paid off the loan, and growth since has been perennial. He has clients around the world and across the spectrum: at least half in distilled spirits, but also others making soda pop, apple sauce, ice cream, baby food. Though his company's input usually comprises no more than 0.5-1.0 percent of the finished product, it will go out in 6,000-gallon tankers from two factories in Kentucky, at Louisville and Owensboro.

Things were soon going well enough that Tammy bought her husband a share in a racehorse: a Bernstein filly found by Kenny McPeek for $60,000 at the 2007 September Sale. In the silks of the Livin The Dream partnership, Dream Empress broke her maiden at Saratoga and then won the GI Alcibiades S. by four lengths before running second at the Breeders' Cup.

Not only was Rigney now hooked. He had also hit it off with Bauer, then working for McPeek. In fact, Bauer was the filly's groom at Saratoga before being made McPeek's assistant, even as Rigney started buying a few horses in his own right. The very next season Rigney was back in the Keeneland winner's circle after another juvenile Grade I, and Breeders' Futurity winner Noble's Promise (Cuvee) then went on to run fifth in the GI Kentucky Derby.

Eventually Rigney told Bauer that he would like to take his involvement to another level.

“He originally asked me how many horses it would take for me to go out on my own,” recalls Bauer. “I was unsure of a number. So then he said, 'Well, what about a private job? Just you and me?' And I said, 'I'm ready to go today.'”

“And we did terribly,” declares Rigney with a laugh. “So then I'm getting phone calls from all these different trainers, like, 'Hey, why don't you drop Phil?' And I was like, 'If I'm not with Philip, I'm not going to be in this game.' People didn't really quite understand, at first, but after a couple of years people stopped calling me. Because it's us doing this together. I get to be part of this process, I get to do the day-to-day. We talk all the time. We're like a married couple. We're always together, and we always support each other.”

Xigera | Sarah Andrew

And now, with the stock upgraded by Moynihan, it's all coming together. In 2023, Bauer has saddled 21 winners from just 89 starters–doubling his strike-rate from just two years ago. There are green shoots everywhere. A couple of weeks ago Twirling Good Time (Twirling Candy), a $250,000 Keeneland September yearling, was named a 'TDN Rising Star' for her stylish debut in a sprint maiden at Churchill Downs. Just three days previously Gorilla Trek (Curlin), homebred with Denali and Valli Rose Equine, also opened his account in Louisville; while only a day before that, Buchu herself had broken her maiden on a card that also featured a second stakes success, by six lengths, for the sophomore Xigera (Nyquist). That performance earned Xigera a 97 Beyer, one of the three fastest of the year among 3-year-old fillies, and helped Rigney racing to a share of the owner's title at the September meet.

“I knew Phil was a good trainer from the very beginning,” Rigney says proudly. “It's the way he takes care of horses. But it's also about the way we take care of people. The people at the barn are very important to us. We hire the best that we possibly can, and treat them the best we possibly can. So what's happening now, these are the most fun times.

“Some of these horses we get so close to, it all becomes very personal. Like a family experience. I have to worry about Philip a lot more than he has to worry about me! He gets all upset if a horse runs like Xigera did at the Breeders' Cup last year. I was like, 'It's okay, it's okay.' Most owners don't have to deal with this! But if things don't work out, we never look back.”

No need to do that, anyhow, with so much to look forward to.

“There's been an overall feeling, the last three years, that you could feel it coming,” Bauer agrees. “Just when you get introduced to the new ones coming in, when you breeze the horses, there's just so much more quality. It's such a difference. These horses are extremely talented athletes. A lot of times, you just have to keep out of their way.”

And, given how much their patron loves action, the program's evolution since Moynihan came aboard makes a lot of sense. With so much more quality now, plus a breeding division, there's seldom a dull moment. When they go to the sales these days, for instance, Rigney will be selling as well as buying. Buchu's dam Flowering Peach–aptly enough, Buchu is the flavoring agent for peach–already looks an extremely commercial proposition. She had an Uncle Mo filly this spring and is now in foal to Golden Pal.

Best of all, these episodic excitements all aggregate to something bigger. “The thing is that we're looking at it really long term,” Rigney emphasizes. “Even in our bad years, we've done better each year, and that was what I wanted. You do get used to being knocked down in this game, and that doesn't really bother me. It's a tough sport. There's a lot of people here who want to win just as badly as we do. And so I'm okay with that. But when we do win a big race, then it's just huge. We're so excited.”

The post Keeneland Breeder Spotlight: Rigney Savoring Sweet Flavor of Success appeared first on TDN | Thoroughbred Daily News | Horse Racing News, Results and Video | Thoroughbred Breeding and Auctions.

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Sikura: No Simple Solutions for a Fractured Sport

At a time that so plainly demands leadership, where better to come than the desk of John Sikura? A man of notably independent outlook, the owner of Hill 'n' Dale can be relied upon for a perspective that combines candor and detachment with flair and imagination.

And those are all assets that appear to be in short supply right now. For while our community's emotional response to the traumas at Saratoga this summer was one of shared horror and grief, the polarization of opinion since has been emotive.

Much as we have seen in the political sphere, since the advent of social media, the sport's recent experiences appear to have stimulated increasing resentment and intransigence. On the one hand, some propose radical but relatively simple solutions; others, however, believe our problems are too varied to be tackled other than by diligent increments.
Sikura pleads for less panic, fewer polemics, and more circumspection, above all more coherence.

“The difficulty in every emotional event–be it gun control, abortion, be you liberal, labor, conservative–is that emotion and rational thinking tend to be polar opposites,” he says. “When you see a shocking event, you react with emotion. But there's never a simplistic answer to a complex problem.”

Sikura places the challenge in unflinching perspective. “The unfortunate incidence of catastrophic death in racehorses has remained relatively consistent for more than 20 years,” he notes. “And over the last four or five, we've had a steady decline. Difficult as it is to say in a public forum, unfortunately a horse race is a concussive, high velocity event where everything can happen. A mis-step. A bump turning you sideways at the wrong time. Jumping on heels. The dangers of entering, exiting the gate.”

Little wonder, he suggests, if forensic studies after breakdown clusters have tended-as at Churchill earlier this year-to find no single cause. In fairness, moreover, two dirt breakdowns during the Saratoga meet scarcely qualified as a “cluster.” For both to involve horses in the process of winning a Grade I, in front of the grandstand, was a coincidence that horribly exposed the sport. But Sikura feels that its freakish nature needs to be recognized before any single, sweeping solution is proposed or embraced.

“Not to sound callous, but I believe that if the Saratoga casualties [six others on turf] were 50 percent higher but it was Belterra Park, it would not be front page of the TDN,” he reasons. “You're wracked with emotion because of the connections, Grade I races, Saratoga, everybody's there.

“Ultimately you can never control what day this event happens, what race, what place on the racetrack, who's watching. But from the perspective of an insurance company, they would say, 'We don't know where or when, but some years we must expect clusters of these events.' The reason they will insure barrenness in mares, mortality in horses, all the possible events, is that there's a baseline. Same with insuring properties, hurricane, fire, etc. We may [at a given time] have a higher number of casualties due to cardiac arrest. And then everything gets to a norm, until or unless you can find a drug or a scientific breakthrough that changes everything.”

Sikura recognizes that none of this should discourage us from striving relentlessly to make the sport as safe as possible. The aspiration, naturally, should be zero fatalities. But he reminds us that we can never hope actually to hit zero, because with animals constructed this way there will always be an attrition rate-even per number of foals playing in a paddock. In the meantime, nobody should suggest to Sikura that either the problem or the solution can be simple.

“There are lots of factors that we can look into. Certainly, a study on the ideal racetrack. The ideal amount of cushion. Possibly a new kind of surface that is part artificial, part dirt. It could be that we come up with something that hasn't even been tried before, that is profoundly safer. And the highest level of scrutiny. Pre-scanning. A traveling team could go racetrack to racetrack, make sure that we're doing everything we can to have the surface ideal. I think that definitely we can, should and must do better.”

But even then, he predicts, from time to time something will go wrong. And it won't necessarily be anybody's fault. We will want to point to this or that reason, but many events-most, even-Sikura feels to be random. And, granted that our sport will always contain an element of danger, he finds another oversimplification in the familiar argument that only the humans participate voluntarily.

“You can say jockeys can verbalize their will,” he allows. “But really racehorses do the same, because they're innately bred to have that trait. They want to run, they want to compete, they want to perform much like a hound will chase a fox. We have breeds specifically bred for defining qualities, and I think it's extremist to say that if something goes wrong, it's cruel.”

He offers an example. You buy a German Shepherd puppy. But you read the science, and discover the breed to be susceptible to hip dysplasia.

“So you have the joy of the animal, the love of the animal, they're a family member, they can be a protector, many things,” Sikura says. “But when they turn 12, and they have hip dysplasia and can't get up, and everybody's crying, and you're taking your dog to the vet, is the breeder somehow immoral or inhumane for breeding that dog?”

Sikura sees that inborn sense of vocation in all Thoroughbreds, from the moment they wobble onto their feet. But here, presumably, his professional peers would find easy consensus. The differences arise from how we best deploy these instincts. And here is where the sport's governance exasperates Sikura.

“Who's in charge, who's funding, and how do you put it together?” he asks. “Our 'organizations' all have the opinion that certain things are under their purview and they should be in charge. If you have a conundrum that seems to have no solution, it's folly to get the same group of people to study the issue. It takes an independence where, real or perceived, you can't have prejudice. Where they won't say, 'Well, this will cost too much,' or 'What about the shareholders?' Just unbiased, well-paid professionals.”

But even if such people produced recommendations, who would decide on their adoption?

“We're a Rubik's Cube with one square taken out,” Sikura says. “So it can't be solved under our fragmented, disorganized, parochial, backyard mentality. If an outsider came in and took over the business, many of these organizations would be eliminated as either inefficient or redundant. The others would be governed in such a way that each had a specific task: public relations, humane treatment of racehorses, media source, sponsorship.”

Sikura has two axioms on power. “One, nobody voluntarily gives it up,” he says. “Two, you're never doing a bad job when you're in charge.”

The outsider just mentioned would look at the metrics and conclude that the sport, under the current dispensation, is diminishing. But who, Sikura asks, will sacrifice the narrow interests of their own sector to create the kind of rising tide that might eventually float all boats? As things stand, he complains, people will confine themselves to asking, “Did I improve handle at my meet?” or “What is the yearling average of my stallion?”

“You can't have direction without directions,” Sikura says. “Say someone has a bold idea. Say I did a paper and spent six months on it, and I can't wait to talk about it, I'm so excited. The biggest challenge would be who do I bring this to, and can they do anything about it? The answer would be, 'I don't know' and, 'No, they can't.' It's eternally frustrating. So there's innovative guys, billionaires, some of the brightest entrepreneurs in America-and therefore the world-that have contributed no intellect, no ideas, no participation because they felt frustrated.”

Any major change has duly had to overcome fierce factional opposition: the Breeders' Cup, now HISA. Even the Breeders' Cup, perceived as a triumph, is not what Sikura feels it might be: its purses stagnant, international engagement extremely uneven. And then there's the showpiece itself, the Kentucky Derby.

“The single event that drives the commerce of the industry,” he declares. “The point of entry to virtually everybody that owns a horse: 'I want to win the Kentucky Derby.' If you're fortunate enough to do so, there should be a financial reward that recognizes that-not just pride in achievement.

“A purse of $3 million, with $1 million dollars in fees and nominations, is an embarrassment to the sport. A huge windfall is given to a corporate entity, which they're entitled to. Corporately, they've been brilliant stewards of their brand and stock value. But they have to recognize that they're in a sport that has many participants-and that those should be rewarded.

“In the NFL, players are paid to measure with their ability. There's revenue-sharing. Things are done recognizing that the league has to prosper and succeed. The best teams can have high ticket prices, etc., but everybody needs to be a part of it. Yet participants in our industry, the people that provide the product, put on the show, are effectively minimum wage workers. The money is here from the historical racing. Instantly, the Derby can be $5 million; the Oaks $2.5 million. Instantly. Should be $10 million and $5 million. And it doesn't even have to come out of their pocket. It's a redistribution of KTDF funds, the money's there.”

He invokes the example of Ron Winchell at Kentucky Downs.

“Look at what they give away!” he exclaims. “They give millions of dollars to other tracks. They can't count the money. People don't think that purses are a huge part of this, everyone talks about the pageantry and the mornings and how great it all is. I don't diminish any of that. But when nobody would race at Turfway Park or Ellis Park, and now you can't get in, is it a mystery why?”

Those tracks, of course, are under the same ownership as Churchill Downs.

“Again, I'm not critiquing the way they run their business as a 'business',” Sikura stresses. “But they've made a lot of money off the horseracing industry. Hollywood Park, shut down and sold. Arlington, shut down and sold. Calder. So I think they have a responsibility and their bottom line, it's nothing. Nothing. It's like leaving a nickel tip. Not even. A penny falls out of your pocket, you're in a hurry, you just leave it there.”

And if it's human nature never to surrender more than necessary, Sikura feels that the case for doing so will never even be made by so fractured a sport.

“I think an open-minded evaluation by the other side would have to agree with you,” he says. “But we have this perfect conundrum of no rules, no uniformity-the fragmentation that is always great for an opponent. In fact, the game never takes place, because one side is too disorganized even to schedule a date.”

Characteristically, Sikura's freethinking, freewheeling mind has taken us far from our opening challenge. But that's precisely because the moral interdependence of the sport's many dimensions is not matched in its structure.

“We only consider these things when there's a crisis,” he says. “But for me, the big crisis is a shrinking of the industry. And there are so many positives: healthy markets that now offer great purses, attendance, excitement. We have to find an equitable way to support places that aren't going as well. Like California. They're one racetrack closure away from being out of business. Socially, horseracing would either be neutrally or negatively interpreted by the majority of people there. You have Golden Gate being sold. You have small fields. You have land that's worth a tremendous amount of money. So what can we do, as an industry?”

The Kentucky scene is thriving, but that took work, campaigns, legislation. “It's a great example of how you can make things happen, with determination and especially unity,” Sikura adds. “But again, if all you're concerned about is what's happening to you, today, California doesn't even enter your mind. It should.”

As it is, California is in a vicious circle: fields drop, handle drops, purses drop, shippers drop, fields drop further. So Sikura asks whether we could we trim, say, $3 million from Kentucky purses-so that maidens were $105,000 rather than $120,000-and put that into Californian graded stakes? Would that prompt a Californian investor to buy a yearling? Who knows? But what we do know is that only he is asking.

In time, he predicts, all Grade I races will be slots-funded. But he feels that the sport would be drastically eroded without sturdy coast-to-coast bookends in New York and California. By now, admittedly, past mistakes in California can't be repaired. “I don't know where everybody was when these bills were being passed, but here we are,” Sikura says with a shrug. “Without some Indian participation, racing's going to have to survive being racing. And a lot of people would say, 'Well, that's the way it should be.'”

So could Horse Racing LLC, non-profit, buy Californian tracks?

“It's a free country,” Sikura replies. “Whether you could do that on terms at which you could operate racing and fund the debt, I wouldn't know. I think Golden Gate is a pretty strong message on the economics: that the return on investment needs to be better. Without saying it in words, that action tells me that Santa Anita is the next consideration. Somebody offers $1.2 billion? I believe that deal would get done. Is there a way to develop the property, keep racing? Smarter people than me would have to evaluate that. But you can't just have a patient on life support. You need a quality of life. So you need racing to thrive.”

And, by a bitter irony that brings things full circle, it is actually California that has shown the rest of the industry the way in terms of breakdowns. Not so long ago, those now announcing domesday were doing just the same at Santa Anita. But backstretch resistance to new protocols was overcome and Santa Anita and Del Mar, without waving some magic wand, have achieved exemplary outcomes at astonishing speed. Arguably the rest of the industry has not adequately acknowledged a debt of gratitude for this, and will only do so if more people start to think along the same lines as Sikura.

“We don't want our money transported,” he says. “But then if you thought about it long and hard, that money, was it really ours? No, it's people pulling a handle.

“Everybody is just here to reap as much as they can. If you operate a nursing home, you could make the sheets thinner: there's higher profit. But you look at the racetrack environment. You have animals, you have people living on the backside, you have van drivers, you have a lot of good people that are part of it. I think they all have to be recognized. It's not just about the head guy: how much he can eat, and what he has left over, he throws in the garbage. It might sound like I'm half-crazy. But I think that mentality flows down to everything, in every business.”

Well, if this is what it sounds like to be half-crazy, then that can't be because the rest of us are sane. If anything, in fact, “half-crazy” might well represent major progress on where we are right now.

The post Sikura: No Simple Solutions for a Fractured Sport appeared first on TDN | Thoroughbred Daily News | Horse Racing News, Results and Video | Thoroughbred Breeding and Auctions.

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Keeneland Breeder Spotlight: Mandy Pope’s Whisper Hill Turning Up The Volume

Even a horse on the end of a chain can be a conveyance to horizons without end. At Keeneland last week, Mandy Pope's equine journey reached a fresh milestone: five seven-figure yearlings sold from Whisper Hill Farm in Book I. But the road remains the same as the one she stumbled across in a neighboring yard at four years of age.

“We lived in a small farming town in North Carolina, outside of Raleigh,” Pope recalls. “People there were still using horses to plow their fields. And there was this gray that lived across the street. He would be out on this long chain, so he could move around. My brothers scooted him over to our driveway wall so that I could get on him. And they just turned me loose. I just sat on the horse, no bridle or anything, and stayed there until someone came and got me off. And that was pretty much start of it. Probably the gray thing, too!”

Such was the spark that ultimately ignited a program conspicuous for a fearless emphasis on quality over quantity. If a blazing new cycle opened in 2012, with the $10 million purchase of Horse of the Year Havre de Grace (Saint Liam), then last week represented an unmistakable moment of validation—and with poignant timing, too, Pope having lost Havre de Grace this spring at just 16. But the point is that even the high-staking commercial priorities of her Thoroughbred business today still hinge on one woman's connection with the animal itself. Complementing a determination to make her mark as an astute businesswoman in a male-dominated environment, that connection unites her first ponies to those elite mares that have introduced Pope, in her understated way, to wider attention and responsibility–as, for instance, in her recent election to The Jockey Club.

Mandy Pope, Todd Quast, and Brian Graves at the Keeneland September Yearling Sale | Keeneland photo

Obviously, other resources have been essential: the funds accrued through the Pope family business, Variety Wholesalers; the skills of Todd Quast, as general manager and farm trainer. But the dividends increasingly commensurate with Pope's investment–and with her determination to build a broodmare band both profitable and lastingly influential–could never have been achieved, without that abiding core of empathy.

“Any horse could pull you around, knock you over, walk all over top of you,” Pope remarks. “But you work out this communication. It's amazing what these horses do for us. You walk them into a starting gate, which is totally beyond their comprehension. These are flight animals, they don't want to be cooped up in those things. Same with an aqua tread, all the wild stuff that we do with them. But they have so much trust in you, that you're not going to put them in a bad situation; and we have so much trust in them, that they are just going to do what we ask. And most will do it with a happy face. Not all, but most.

“I was always more of a horse person, not a people person. They were my 'people.' You could just take off and ride and nothing else mattered at that moment, but the peacefulness and trust that you have together. Even if you're showing, or jumping, or on a fox hunt, it's always something you're doing together; it's tranquility away from everything else going on in your life and in the world.”

By the same token, there's a bittersweet undertone even to a sale as spectacular as this one. Yes, it was rewarding in every sense of the word: both financially, and in terms of market acknowledgement of an audacious business strategy. But it's always hard to say goodbye, even to a young horse—albeit nothing like as grievous as the annual cull of fringe mares, essential to the sustainability of the model.

“It can be very emotional seeing horses go, and there are times I get a little hesitant,” Pope admits. “It's hardest with mares, because we're so attached to them. That's done only with a very heavy heart. But if we do end up with a yearling coming back, we're not disheartened. We always feel we still have a legitimate possibility of a racehorse.”

Few from this farm will nowadays fail to find a buyer. And while Pope has required the same patience as every breeder lower down the pyramid, she has reached a stage where the foals are starting to make financial sense of the significant capital investment made in their dams.

A perfect example of the way the program is maturing is Lady Take Charge (War Front), purchased as a weanling at the 2015 Keeneland November Sale for $3.2 million. She never made it to the racetrack. A pity, but not a disaster. For last week her colt by Tapit [202] brought $1.3 million–and she's obviously still a young mare.

Charge It | Sarah Andrew

Her acquisition, moreover, had represented a doubling down on her illustrious dam Take Charge Lady (Dehere). Pope had already given $2.2 million for the blue hen's daughter by Indian Charlie at the 2012 Keeneland September Sale. I'll Take Charge managed only a maiden win in a light career, but now she too is quickly paying her way. Having already produced Charge It (Tapit), who was retained for the racetrack division and won the GII Suburban S. this summer, last week I'll Take Charge sold her Into Mischief colt for $1.7 million [162]. Other seven-figure dividends were meanwhile set against the expensive purchase as breeding prospects of American Gal (Concord Point), Magical World (Distorted Humor) and champion Songbird (Medaglia d'Oro).

It's not a strategy for the faint-hearted, but it is plainly coming together.

“We are in this as a business, and trying to make money,” Pope stresses. “We've been very lucky this year, but it's not just luck. A lot of thought, work, and planning went into this. The luck comes with what God created, and gave you, to start the process. There are so many variables we can't control: how they grow, veterinary issues, X-rays, throats. But if we can get to the sale with the pedigree, the conformation and the X-rays, then hopefully the buyers are going to gather.”

So far as things do fall within control, then, Pope has been determined to breed to the best to get the best. After all, a $5,000 mare takes no less to maintain than a $5 million one.

“Exactly,” Pope says. “That's been my whole point for the last several years. It costs the same to take care of the mare, costs the same to raise the foal. But statistically you have a higher probability of a big sales horse, and also of a graded stakes winner, from these more expensive mares and breedings. It costs the same to train them, too. Everything is the same, other than what you're paying for the mare and the stud fee.”

Mandy Pope Celebrates Tapit Trice's Bluegrass victory | Coady photo

So, when people ask Pope why she doesn't seek safety in numbers, buying 10 or 20 mares for the same headline cost as one or two, she sees a false economy.

“To me, the financial risk would be even greater,” she explains. “Doing it this way, you always have the next generation as back-up. If one of those hits it big, that can make everything work out.”

Havre de Grace herself was a paragon of pedigree plus performance: her third dam, remember, is Toll Booth (Buckpasser). And that quality will linger in the blood even if misfortune might cause it to lie dormant for a generation.

“Some of those more expensive mares, like Havre de Grace, only have one graded stakes winner,” she says. “But several of their other foals had talent and then got injured. That's going to happen. But the fillies can still put half her genes into it, when they're bred. And statistically, again, a lot of breeding theory has shown that even if these big racemares don't reproduce themselves in the first generation, it's going to show up in the second.”

Among the young producers now coming onstream are Doll Collection (Tapit), out of dual Breeders' Cup winner Groupie Doll (Bowman's Band), and Havre de Grace's daughter Heavenly Grace (Tapit). And Pope evidently has similar hopes for daughters of Plum Pretty (Medaglia d'Oro), acquired for $4.2 million at Keeneland the same fall that Pope broke the broodmare record for Havre de Grace.

“She's another whose daughters are now having these gorgeous babies,” Pope says. “And they'll be coming on the market in the next year or so. So even though it may not always look good right away, it's about generational planning; about continuing to multiply, and hopefully getting better and better.”

Such a bold strategy, of course, brings challenges as well as privileges to those charged with its execution. For while every foal slithering into the Whisper Hill straw is an aristocrat, each must learn how to deal with roughneck opposition on the track. Quast and farm manager Lynda Hayes duly strive for an appropriate balance.

Songbird with Mandy Pope | Fasig-Tipton

“Turned out, you're going to maybe lose one, or one's going to get a bump,” says Quast. “But they've got to be a horse. They've got to develop that pecking order, just like any lower caliber horse. Mandy's really big on that. They come in, temperatures checked, food check later, and then they get to go out and be a horse. Hotboxing them, you don't get the same bone and ligament development. We have the pedigree, and we're not going to mess that up by bubble-wrapping them.”

The same logic is still more pertinent to the early training. Having educated three Kentucky Derby winners during 11 years with D. Wayne Lukas in his heyday, followed by a long stint at Gold Mark, Quast knows that the best will only emerge if treated the same as the rest.

“They don't know if they're a $10,000 claimer or next Horse of the Year,” Quast says. “You can't say, 'Oh, no, I can't do this because he's out of Songbird.' And conversely you don't push another horse just because he's not by Tapit.

“So, we have a way of doing it. My guy at the farm, Lee Guerrero, has been with me for 32 years: all the way through Wayne, all the way to this. And we're lucky enough that our average crew has been there about 15 years. We keep track of it all, and Lee tells me we're up to 4,887 horses that we broke together. That's a number! If you don't learn something through all those horses, there's something wrong.”

Pope met Quast just as she was upgrading her program, in 2012, moving a first handful of novices to his supervision at Gold Mark. She partnered with that operation in Classic-placed Mylute (Midnight Lute)–gray, of course–and in 2019 invited Quast aboard full-time.

“Gold Mark was a great job,” Quast emphasizes. “But I had three stallions, I was foaling 60 mares, I trained 160 head. And I had an 8-year-old son. Mandy and I always had a good relationship, professionally and personally, and we said, 'All right, let's do this.' She already had the farm, and we found a training center, got it up to what we felt was our caliber.

“Lynda's doing a fantastic job, too, and has people underneath her that have also been there forever. Everybody's gelled as a team, and that's what it takes. It's a lot of work, it's long hours, but we're having a lot of fun.”

Pope and Quast both stress the role of Dr. Greg BonenClark as principal vet to both farm and training center, besides assisting at the sales. And here, too, there has been evolution, with Pope's Bluegrass presence now increasingly focused on Gainesway. Pope stresses her debt to Timbertown, but explains that Wayne Sweezey was winding down somewhat just as her own program was entering overdrive. Pope speaks with enthusiasm about Brian Graves and his team, who board most of the mares and raise the stock until weaned and sent to Florida.

Mandy Pope | Keeneland

One way or another, it feels as though a maturing regime is picking up pace. Among the first graduates of the training center are Charge It and Tapit Trice (Tapit), who took Pope to the last two runnings of the GI Kentucky Derby. And, while nobody spending this kind of money will qualify as underdog, the scale of Pope's program actually remains fairly conservative.

Quast reckons that Whisper Hill produces about 35 foals annually. With retentions largely determined by fate–through market rejection or setbacks–and supplemented by maybe half a dozen purchases, that boils down to around 20 at the racetrack. Charge It, however, was always one of those too cherished to sell, and the team is adamant that he can seal his stud pitch with a Grade I.

Pope has been on his sire's train virtually since it left the station—and not just because of that gray coat.

“When we moved a bunch of our mares over to Gainesway, they had them divided up in two fields,” she says. “And going out there we were like, 'It's snowing! Look at all the white out there!” Because it's Tapit, Tapit, Tapit. I just always had a lot of belief in him, and he has treated us well.

“I loved his breeding and, starting off, when he stood for less money and got those kind of mares, a lot of his progeny were displaying a good turn of foot, some were sprinters. And then, as he's grown, he's gotten better and better mares that are throwing the distance, which he also has in his pedigree. So, I think you're getting stamina with a turn of foot combined. They're multifunctional. We've had some that wanted five-and-a-half on the grass.”

But Tapit's rival Into Mischief certainly served the cause well last week, accounting for three of those seven-figure sales. And he is also sire of perhaps the most precious animal on the farm: the orphaned colt raised by a foster mare after the death of Havre de Grace.

How typical of this game, that the symbol of new ambition should have been lost even as it neared fulfilment! The nadir, however, remains the breakdown in 2021 of America's Joy (American Pharoah), the $8.2 million half-sister to Into Mischief.

“Oh, it was absolutely devastating,” acknowledges Pope. “I thank God that I was not there that day, but Todd was.”

“We lost Mandy for 10 days, maybe two weeks,” Quast recalls. “I couldn't talk to her. Left her alone. Oh, it was horrific. I'll never forget. Just an easy breeze. No rhyme or reason to it. We feel every and any loss, but that was very emotional. Great reports all the way through, she'd outworked all these nice colts, and then something like that happens. Making a call like that is not the good part of my job, for sure. Mandy took it very hard and rightly so.”

Mandy Pope and John Velazquez | Sarah Andrew

Pope is uncomfortable with the word “legacy,” in that she does not aspire to some lauded personal imprint on the breed. Like all good breeders, she sooner has a sense of trusteeship or stewardship. “It's about what gets passed down to generations that will be here long after I'm gone,” she says. “It's a long process and you just want to know that you've done everything right: both in taking care of them, and in what you're trying to achieve for your business plan.”

“It takes time to build the legacy: 10, 15, 20 years,” Quast agrees. “But Mandy's not a flash in the pan. And it's all starting to work out. It was tough getting to this level, but it's paying off now.”

As such, Keeneland felt like a real landmark: vindication for the gradual evolution of what feels a uniquely bold model for commercial viability.

“Absolutely,” Pope affirms. “Especially with the racing over the past couple of years. It's been an amazing year. I'm just a small, one-person band. I have no partners in the farm at all. It's a battle because people will put me up with some of those great names–Stonestreet, Winstar, Spendthrift–and I'm not in the same caliber at all. I mean, gosh, they'll have, I don't know, 200 mares. And partnerships everywhere. But it does feel like it's starting to pan out.

“I was in the business a long time before Havre de Grace, buying less expensive mares. At the time that was all I could afford, and that was a tough business. When I started buying those [top] mares, yes, everything changed. My mindset changed. I wanted to do the best quality job we could, buying and raising and training, and to get to the top.”

Yet it all still circles back to her girlhood, to that inexpressible frisson she discovered with a gray horse in the adjacent yard. There is still nothing Pope values more than petting horses at pasture.

“Oh, absolutely,” she says. “And when they're running, I always go up to the saddling paddock and pat them on their head and neck and say, 'May God be with you. Stay safe. And win!' In that order. But yes, it's been a wonderful year. Knock on wood, we're blessed that all our hard work is showing. You can't sit on your laurels. This year's success is going to put a lot of pressure on us, to keep it going. But we're up to the challenge. It took a very long time to get here–and hopefully we can stay for a bit longer.”

The post Keeneland Breeder Spotlight: Mandy Pope’s Whisper Hill Turning Up The Volume appeared first on TDN | Thoroughbred Daily News | Horse Racing News, Results and Video | Thoroughbred Breeding and Auctions.

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Different Hats Keep McDonald Ever Hopeful

Perhaps it is called the Hopeful Stakes because that's the most anyone can ever be with a Thoroughbred. But if nearly any purchaser at Keeneland over the next couple of weeks would like to be contesting that race, a year from now, then one consignor might give them not just hope but something closer to confidence.

Okay, so a trifecta for Eaton Sales graduates in the Saratoga Grade I last year featured only the winner, Forte (Violence), from the 2021 Keeneland September Sale. Runner-up Gulfport (Uncle Mo) and third Blazing Sevens (Good Magic) were respectively sold through the Eaton drafts at Fasig-Tipton's July and Saratoga Sales. Nonetheless it was an achievement all the more remarkable for the fact that champion juvenile Forte and Blazing Sevens, subsequently runner-up in the GI Preakness, were both pinhooked through Reiley McDonald's own farm, Athens Wood LLC.

Another complement to his supervision of a flagship sales agency, moreover, is the band of around 20 broodmares resident there. These diverse silos help McDonald to stay tuned into the marketplace from every side, but bring much satisfaction besides. One of those mares has produced Defunded (Dialed In) to win another Grade I this year, in the Hollywood Gold Cup. Only last weekend McDonald had winners in his own silks at Saratoga and in a stakes at Colonial Downs, while last month he co-bred a €1 million Wootton Bassett yearling sold at Arqana.

Such is the constant action resulting from the long experience that has brought us to McDonald's office in downtown Lexington. And while there's an intensity here, for sure, it is accompanied by a breadth of perspective that also permits a fulfilling life away from the business. (McDonald, indeed, typically spends half his year with his partner, Cricket, in Connecticut.)

“That was unbelievable,” he acknowledges, when reminded of his Hopeful achievement. “But really, I've done this so long, I don't get too excited, don't jump up and down, because there are so many that don't work out-you have to take the good and bad just the same.” He pauses and chuckles. “And, of course, we only just about broke even on Forte!”

Every year, with a couple of partners, McDonald pinhooks a dozen or so weanlings. Having found Forte for $80,000 at the preceding November Sale, they had to settle for $110,000 from Repole Stable & St. Elias when bringing him back to the same ring.

“Forte is one of the prettier horses you'll ever see, but at that time nobody wanted a Violence,” McDonald recalls. “And then Jacob West walked up, right as he was going into the ring, and said, 'What's your reserve?' I told him he had to bring more than a hundred. All those brilliant horsemen, and it came down to just one guy, one bid.”

Reiley McDonald (left) with Scott Dilworth | Keeneland

But such are the vagaries of this business-and such, duly, is McDonald's achievement, over the past 28 years, in maintaining both quality and quantity since taking on the game-changing agency founded by Lee Eaton.

He has actually started to scale back somewhat, having concluded that sheer volume is nowadays less sustainable. As he says, it costs as much time, labor and administration to sell a horse for $2,000 as for $2 million. Eaton Sales still has over 100 yearlings catalogued at Keeneland, but there have been times when they might have processed as many as 350 at that sale, following maybe 50 at Saratoga.

“That was a dangerous managerial feat and I don't think anybody can pull it off,” McDonald says. “It's so hard to find the help now. I really do worry about the animals, with the kind of help that's out there. And these days, if you're selling a horse for, call it $50,000 or less, you're losing money. Because some of the consignors have cannibalized themselves, reducing fees to a point where there's very little profit margin at the end of the day.”

By the time Eaton (and partner John Williams) stepped down, quite apart from a formidable address book, McDonald could feel no less grateful for his mentorship.

“Lee was like so many people who are successful in business,” McDonald reflects. “He worked hard, and demanded that the people around him worked hard. And he really was smart, always thinking of how you might do things differently, and better. He made it a much more professional business. The 'good old boy' stuff went out the window. The big parties before the July Sale, I mean, we never really did that. We just stuck to trying to make that horse look as good as it could. That was the whole thing: how do you present the horse?

“It used to be the old 'baggy pants' off the farm. But Lee hired all these guys from Virginia who would come in with their creased pants, and they really knew how to show a horse. And suddenly smart guys like Ed Cox, even Warner Jones as good as he was, started to sell with Lee. When you walked into his courtyard at Saratoga or Keeneland, it was definitely different: very clean, very professional–like they all are now. He really did set the standard.”

No less crucially, there were also corresponding advances in preparation, heeded to this day by McDonald.

“He decided to build huge run-in sheds and turn his horses out,” he says. “He was the first to do that. He didn't bring them up in the winter. And I follow the same program. Now, if it's a horrible, icy wet night, we bring everything in, and he would too. But they were out 99 percent of the time. And he developed his own feed. We've modified it over the years, but I still feed the same cubed feed.

“He was very good about horses' weight, getting the proper conditioning to each yearling-which is something that surprisingly few people do well. Back in the day, people wanted yearlings to be almost obese. Lee started to make them look more like racehorses.”

Before joining Eaton, McDonald had spent 10 years under John Finney at Fasig-Tipton, gaining a comprehensive insight into the market. Under head inspector Bobby Powell he learned the optimal physique of a commercial yearling, and as sales announcer he came to understand the functioning of the marketplace itself. “At the time John Finney was probably the smartest guy in the business,” McDonald says. “That's where I really learned about the business of horses, valuations, matings.”

There were other paths McDonald might have taken, having studied Animal Science at Cornell (where he captained the lacrosse team), but he has basically been working with horses since he was 13. The family had moved to the country, the kids got a pony, there was a horse farm down the road. He went to school five minutes from Pimlico, and would run in “smelling of manure and throwing on a tie to get to assembly.” The teenage McDonald then cut his racetrack teeth under Maryland hardboot B. Frank Christmas.

Tom Van Meter | Keeneland

“He was one of the real old-timers,” he recalls. “Quite a crusty character, always chewing tobacco and spitting, always with the hat and the coat on. He was a trainer, but also had a farm and a stallion. We were breeding mares, we were breaking all our horses, we legged up everything on the farm.”

One way or another, then, the young man who took over the sales agency had plenty of miles on the clock. “Then Tom Van Meter bought a 20 percent interest, and he was my partner for about 20 years,” McDonald says. “Tom was a vet, he was sort of the country boy while I was more the city boy. So we had different sets of clients, and that worked for a long time. But that's when the business was huge. We were doing too many horses.”

In admitting as much, and with Eaton having been such a trailblazer, does McDonald sometimes feel that he has helped to create a monster? This, after all, has become an industry where horses are routinely exploited through several investment cycles before they get anywhere near the gate.

“I feel like I've probably overseen the sale, personally, of more horses than anybody,” he replies. “Which, the last couple of years, doesn't make me the proudest guy in the world. Because I really feel like our business has deteriorated a good bit. And I don't mean just the selling business, but the racing, to a large extent.

“I think often we interfere way too much with these horses. By 'we' I don't mean us, I mean the industry. The more I learn and observe about what's happening on the tracks, the more disappointing I find it. And we're losing fans, and alienating the non-horse public.”

This conversation, it should be noted, took place before the recent traumas at Saratoga. In other words, McDonald was already thinking in terms that have meanwhile come to feel imperative. He feels that the spirit of reform behind HISA is vital, albeit that early mistakes were made: overreaching, not consulting adequately. “I think the trainers got a double whammy,” he says. “They didn't have a lot of say in it, and then a lot of the responsibility was put onto them. But we need HISA and it will get better–as it has to. Like anything worth doing, it needs time and we all need to work on it.”

Nor does he feel that the current use of the crop can last. (“Three strikes and you're out,” he recommends. “One to start, one to steer, one to finish.”) But for all the challenges we face, the magic of the horse itself abides. That's where every fulfilment begins–and many opportunities, too. Standing in the back ring at the 2016 Keeneland November Sale, for instance, McDonald saw a Touch Gold mare led past.

“Oh, she's really pretty,” he murmured to himself. In fact, she reminded him of Scarlet Tango, a mare he had once found in the same ring for $35,000. Five years later, having meanwhile produced GI King's Bishop winner Visionaire (Grand Slam), he sold her on for $850,000 to Stonestreet.

“I can't afford to buy a whole package: race record, pedigree, everything,” McDonald says. “But I can buy looks.” While this mare actually had multiple stakes placings, she cost barely more than Scarlet Tango at $37,000. And Wind Caper is now dam of Defunded, sold for $210,000 at Keeneland September in 2019 and hitherto winner of $1.6 million.

Defunded | Benoit

“I don't breed the fanciest pedigrees,” McDonald says. “But they come up to that little farm and do really well. It was a cattle farm for 300 years, all with the same family. It was about to be developed into 10-acre 'piano-key' lots when four other guys and I bought it. I kept 120 acres, and it's just great land. It's heavy in limestone, it's been fertilized for hundreds of years. And I kind of stick to the old 'leave' formula: leave them out, leave them alone, just keep an eye on any problems creeping up.”

“They're well raised, and the guys have been on the farm for years. Chuchie has been with me 35 years, was on the old Eaton Farm when he was 18. These are the best guys I've ever seen with foals, it's magic to watch their hands.”

But many of the elite performers whose photos are crammed onto the walls have obviously come through the core business of the agency. And here, McDonald says, how you handle people counts for at least as much as how you do horses. Before anything else, he needs to understand his clients' risk tolerance: where they might have slack, when they might race a horse, and so on. Because the market itself is never predictable. Neither Hard Spun nor Omaha Beach made their September reserves, for instance, McDonald eventually persuading the late Rick Porter to take both. (“You're now about $60 million to the good from those two horses,” he told Porter later. “Don't you think I should get a share?” Porter replied: “On the next one!”)

Unique Bella, the daughter of Tapit and Unrivaled Belle (Unbridled's Song), had over 160 shows at the 2015 September Sale and was not vetted once.

“So, you got the best horseman from around the world looking at this filly,” marvels McDonald. “She toed in a little bit, and had a $399,000 reserve. And one person runs up to me, right as she's walking into the ring, and says, 'Can I see the vet report?' And runs back inside. There was one bid at $400,000, and it happened to be Carlos [Heller] at Don Alberto. And look what he got: one of the great mares of that decade. She was gorgeous. So sometimes it just blows your mind.”

Unique Bella and Hard Spun were both bred by Betty Moran, owner of Brushwood Stables, who became another cherished influence.

“An angel was on my shoulder the day I bumped into her, in 1991, and she told me she'd just lost her general manager,” McDonald recalls. He volunteered for the role and they worked together for nearly 30 years, perhaps their most memorable moment actually being with a steeplechaser, Papillon (Ire), in the 2000 Grand National. “Mrs. Moran only wanted to compete at the highest level,” McDonald notes. “And we built and maintained one of the best 20-head broodmare bands in the country. She was a best friend, confidante-and tough boss!”

That highest level, however, is never always confined only to the top of the market–and that, of course, is what drives the whole business.”

“How about Victory Gallop, who I sold many moons ago for $25,000?” says McDonald. “He had a chip in a stifle, and three ankles. Pug Hart bought him and said, 'I can't keep this horse.' This was before the repository. And I said, 'Well, essentially, he's sold, but let me talk to the owner.' And he agreed to take $10,000 off. So, they got Victory Gallop for $15,000! But I could count so many good horses that [apparently] had big, big problems. I purchased Mitole for very little [$20,000 September yearling] because he had a lot of writing on the vet report, but he was a horse of exquisite conformation.”

Kenny McPeek | Sarah Andrew

Like many experienced consignors, McDonald reckons to know buyers' tastes well enough to pull out a horse they haven't even asked for. “The only guy I still can't figure out is Kenny McPeek!” he admits. “He has bought so many good horses through auction, and I still don't know what he looks for. But that's really what puts it all together for us: knowing both sides, the seller and the buyer. And that takes a long time to do. That's why anybody who wants to get into the consignment business, you have to be willing to get on an airplane, to be everywhere and see everyone.”

While he isn't comfortable with everything about the industry, or the way it has changed over the past 40 years, McDonald emphasizes an undiminished passion for the sport.

“We've got a lot of hard work to do, but there are still great parts to it,” he says. “I do feel blessed to have been able to do what I have. It all comes from being hands on. My favorite thing I ever did in my life, and the thing I was best at, was on top of a horse. You learn so much if your hands have learned to absorb what the animal is telling you. Even today I love showing a horse at the sales.

“I don't know, I just love this animal. It's incredible. I mean, last night I was walking around the foals, just thinking how lucky I am, to be in that moment, with these beautiful little animals coming up to you. I still love it.”

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