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Breeders’ Cup Presents Connections: Hamm’s First Grade 1 Is Not ‘Beginner’s Luck’

Maybe it's a cliché, says Thoroughbred trainer Timothy Hamm, but success breeds success no matter the industry.

So, yes, the 54-year-old was beyond thrilled to saddle the first Grade 1 winner of his career with Dayoutoftheoffice in the Oct. 10 Frizette at Belmont Park, but the adjacent reality is that Hamm's program has been quietly building up to that top-level victory since he purchased his first racehorse in 1994.

An undefeated 2-year-old daughter of Into Mischief, Dayoutoftheoffice will become Hamm's first Breeders' Cup starter on Nov. 6 at Keeneland. This may be the Ohio native's first chance to show he has what it takes to compete at the World Championships, but Hamm is more excited than nervous about the opportunity.

“The thing I like most is I want our team to feel like we're getting somewhere,” Hamm said. “That's the biggest thing the Breeders' Cup means to us. Obviously, the next question will be whether you can do it again. The first time can be beginner's luck, so hopefully the entire team can buy in after this and making it to the Breeders' Cup will become a habit.”

His words might sound cocky, but Hamm doesn't mean them to be. He's simply that confident in his partners and in the program he's built from the ground up over the past 25 years.

Hamm owns Dayoutoftheoffice in partnership with Anthony Manganaro's Siena Farm, a somewhat unique business model at the upper end of the sport. It isn't all that unusual for Hamm, however; he is partnered on nearly 85 percent of the 200 or so Thoroughbreds in his care across all levels of the industry, from broodmares to stallions and from yearlings to active racehorses, and everything in between.

The partnership model may be unusual, but it has been a cornerstone of Hamm's success since the very beginning. Keeping an ownership stake in so many of his horses has allowed Hamm to both remain grounded and focus on doing what's best for the animals.

Hamm didn't grow up in a “racing family,” at least, not in the strictest definition. His father worked at General Motors during the day and trained Thoroughbreds from his Ohio farm on the side, keeping them fit via a jogging machine and shipping to tracks like Mountaineer to race on the weekends. He trained just over 100 winners through his part-time career, and taught Hamm a lot about how to make ends meet with the horses.

However, those lessons did not take root until well after college, Hamm said, laughing good-naturedly. As a young man Hamm was more focused on Saddlebred show horses. By high school, he became ensconced in football; Hamm played linebacker for Youngstown State throughout his university athletic career.

Those passions didn't leave a lot of room for Thoroughbreds in Hamm's schedule, though he'd still help out his father at the family farm when he had spare time.

After graduating with a four-year business degree in 1989, Hamm launched a construction company. He finally started to feel that pull back to the horses in the mid-1990's, and purchased his first racehorse at an OBS 2-year-olds in training sale in 1994.

Hamm spent $13,500 on a filly named Willowy Proof, but he admits he didn't know much about the racing industry back then.

“I was showing her to someone and they said to me, 'Oh, you have a Pennsylvania-bred,'” Hamm remembered. “I said, 'Okay, great. What does that mean?' And they told me there was extra money in Pennsylvania if I ran her there.

“My mom helped me get her ready, trailering her to Mountaineer to train in the mornings while I was working construction. It wasn't a business, then; I really just wanted to own a racehorse.”

When Willowy Proof made her first start at Philadelphia Park on July 25, 1994, the filly dominated a maiden special weight event by 9 1/4 lengths. Before Hamm even walked off the track, he was turning down offers of $100,000 for the filly.

“I just wanted to have fun with her,” he said.

In 1996, Hamm returned to OBS and bought four more 2-year-olds. Each of those four became a stakes winner, including Rose Colored Lady, a $20,000 daughter of Formal Dinner who would earn $139,294 on the track. That was hardly her best contribution to Hamm's future career, however.

He launched Blazing Meadows Farm in Ohio in the late 1990s to begin taking advantage of the state's breeding program when his horses were done running, and Rose Colored Lady rewarded Hamm with four stakes winners in her first four runners. Her fifth foal would be Too Much Bling, a three-time graded stakes winner who earned over $500,000 and is currently a sire in Ohio.

Hamm trained Too Much Bling through his first two starts, then sold the majority share to Stonerside Stable. Transferred to Bob Baffert, the horse made it to the Breeders' Cup Sprint in 2006 and finished sixth.

Looking back to 1998, Hamm was still operating the construction business by day and training/breeding racehorses on the side. He read an article about pinhooking, and decided he'd like give that a try.

Hamm bought two horses for $25,000 each at the Keeneland September sale. The first, a Cherokee Run filly, commanded a final bid of $250,000 at the next year's OBS Calder sale. The second, a daughter of Dehere, recorded the fastest breeze of the OBS April sale and sold for $150,000.

“I was sitting back at the construction office after turning $50,000 into $400,000, and I just thought to myself that maybe I could really make a living at this,” Hamm said. “I just remember thinking, 'Man, that's a lot of two-by-fours.'”

By 2007 Hamm was ready to make the move to the horse business full time and sold the construction company.

“I guess I always thought I might want to do it as a career, but I had to own all my own horses from the beginning,” Hamm explained. “I mean, who's going to hire a trainer who'd never trained a horse before?”

Success continued to build for Hamm over the following years, and he diversified his program from breeding to racing and sales both in Ohio and on a farm purchased in Ocala. He started several big-name runners in their careers, including multi-millionaire and champion Wait A While, but in keeping with his business roots, Hamm most often sold horses before their first graded stakes victories.

His success on the track has primarily come in Ohio, where he's trained over 25 state-bred champions and five Ohio-bred Horse of the Year title winners.

WinStar Farm noticed that success and offered Hamm the chance to partner on a group of mares and later, on a stallion in Ohio named National Flag, which has continued to snowball Hamm's efforts toward the top.

Those types of partnership deals are not particularly uncommon in the industry, especially the breeding side. The rarer success is in partnership deals on the racing side; typically, a trainer will take on a horse's expenses himself, rather than charge the owner a day rate, in exchange for a larger cut of the horse's earnings.

If the horse runs well and earns enough to pay his bills, the deal works. If the horse doesn't earn enough to cover his costs, it can quickly become a major financial burden for the trainer who made the deal.

“We've always bred some homebreds, and we did take some (tougher) deals early on,” Hamm said, explaining that even with horses in which he is not a partner, he doesn't use a day rate to make a profit, just to pay the bills; the horses' success should be the profit part of the business equation. “It allowed us to weed through clients and stick with the ones who wanted to be successful. Those people don't want a horse on the track at a low level, so you're already starting off ahead of the curve.

“From there, you have to be sincere about what you're doing and give every horse the same opportunity for success. You make those deals with people who are winners in life, then do everything right along the way.

“Is it always a gravy train? Absolutely not. When it's good, it's great; when it's not, it's not. You have to be in a position to ride out the tough times. For a lot of people who take horses on deals, they aren't able to diversify their interests enough to carry the bad years.”

Dayoutoftheoffice wins the Frizette under Junior Alvarado

Approximately six years ago, the group at WinStar mentioned Hamm's name to a co-owner of Siena Farm, David Pope. Pope reached out to Hamm and they agreed to partner on a group of yearlings.

One filly in that first group, Velvet Mood by Lonhro, would go on to win her first three races, including the My Dear Girl Stakes in Canada, so the partnership was off to a great start.

Siena does some commercial breeding as well as breeding to race, so Hamm would be given the opportunity to partner with the farm on yearlings that didn't make their reserves at auction and also on some that the farm thought might be particularly special.

The latter was the case with Dayoutoftheoffice. Out of the Indian Charlie mare Gottahaveadream, a half-sister to Grade 1 winner Here Comes Ben, Dayoutoftheoffice has been an exciting prospect since the very beginning.

“I guess like anyone else, I'm partial to horses that have a lot of size and scope,” Hamm said. “Like most of the Siena horses, we got her around September and took her the farm in Ocala to start training her. Around January or February we started thinking this horse could be really special, but it was a long time away from her first start.”

Dayoutoftheoffice has won each of her three career starts and should be a strong contender for the Breeders' Cup Juvenile Fillies on Nov. 6. Win or lose, Hamm can't wait to get back to the Breeders' Cup and prove that a multiple leading trainer/owner/breeder from Ohio can compete with the world's best.

“You know, whenever people partner with me, I tell them sincerely: 'If you lose, you're going to be one of the few who loses with me,'” Hamm said. “I'm self-taught, and I knew business before I knew horses, but now I do everything from A to Z. … Making it to the Breeders' Cup means a lot to the whole team, for sure, but we don't want this to be a one-time thing.”

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Breeders’ Cup Presents Connections: Birthday ‘Wishes’ Come True For Meg Levy

Meg Levy can't remember how she heard about the $500 Thoroughbred mare needing a home in February of 2017, but she's incredibly glad she decided to go see “Four Wishes” on the way to the Fasig-Tipton sale that afternoon.

The daughter of More Than Ready had been abandoned by a previous owner after running up a board bill. She had a Revolutionary foal on the ground and was in foal to the same sire, as well, but Four Wishes wasn't likely to be particularly commercial – the mare's catalog page was not inspiring, and she'd raced five times without ever finishing better than sixth.

It was Levy's birthday, though, and something told the founding owner of the Bluewater Sales consignment agency to bring the mare home. Three and a half years later, the $500 rescue mare has turned into a fairy tale success: Four Wishes' Laoban filly, Simply Ravishing, won the Grade 1 Alcibiades at Keeneland on Oct. 2.

“You just can't make it up, truly, we all need a good story right now,” Levy said. “I was lucky enough to be there when she crossed the finish line! Keeneland is kind of strange and spooky without people there, but you can move around so freely and be really close to the racetrack, and we kind of ran with her to the wire.

“Four Wishes really had all the negatives: she couldn't run a jump, and they always say never buy a mare with two blank dams, well, she had them. … It sounds kind of cheesy when I tell the story, but we'd never had anything happen like that for ourselves.”

After purchasing Four Wishes in February of 2017, Levy sent the mare to Stone Gate Farm in New York in the hopes of making her Revolutionary foal somewhat commercially viable. After the mare foaled a colt that April, Levy decided to send her to first-year sire Laoban on her husband's breeding right.

Four Wishes and her colt came home to Kentucky in the summer, and the following April her Laoban filly was born in the New York.

Levy's son, Ryder, saw the filly first. He sent his mother a text message with a photograph of the filly out in the field.

“Looks like a bunch of early breeders awards to me,” he wrote.

Those words proved prophetic down the road, but there were more bumps in the road before Simply Ravishing's long-predicted success.

Four Wishes' Revolutionary colt was not accepted to the New York-bred sale and brought a final bid of just $8,000 when sold at Fasig-Tipton October in 2018. He wound up headed to Peru, and Levy doesn't know whether the now 3-year-old has yet raced.

Four Wishes was bred to Daaher next, also on a breeding right, but she suffered a dystocia due to the foal's large size, and sadly that foal did not survive. The mare was badly bruised, Levy said, and was given a year off from the breeding shed to recover.

All that happened shortly before Levy was preparing to send Four Wishes' Laoban filly to the 2019 Fasig-Tipton New York-bred sale.

“Laoban foals were really selling well, and they were all pretty athletic looking,” Levy remembered. “I was already at the sale, and the crew at the farm was loading the horses on the trailer to ship them up to me. They sent me a text, as people sending me bad news tend to do, that once she got on the trailer she really wasn't happy and kicked the wall so hard she tore up her hind foot.

“She was going to be just fine, but obviously she had to get off the van and couldn't go to the sale. I was really disappointed and admittedly pretty grumpy about it.”

Levy re-entered the filly in the Fasig-Tipton October sale, and hoped that her impressive physical would be enough to draw the right kind of attention.

“As she was growing up, she just was so simple,” Levy said. “She was always stunning, always in motion, always the right weight, always shiny, always correct. There was none of this messing around business with awkward stages; she just stood out.”

Though she lacked a commercially attractive pedigree, the filly's good looks were enough to draw the attention of trainer Ken McPeek. His final bid of $50,000 was enough to land the filly.

“She was just the kind of filly Kenny likes, real athletic-looking,” Levy said. “He doesn't care about the page so much, and I knew he'd give her every chance.”

Levy had known McPeek since the time she had galloped for John Ward, and then worked with him at 505 Farm. When Levy first opened her consignment business in 1999, McPeek was one of her first successful customers.

Oddly enough, it was with another filly who had two blank dams on her catalog page. This filly had trouble passing the veterinary inspection; of 12 vets who scoped her airway, only McPeek's vet gave the filly a passing grade.

McPeek landed the daughter of Dehere for $175,000 at the 2000 Fasig-Tipton July sale, and the following year Take Charge Lady won Keeneland's Alcibiades.

Take Charge Lady had great success on the track, winning a total of five Grade 1 races and $2.4 million, and she went on to immeasurable success as Broodmare of the Year and dam of two Grade 1 winners, Take Charge Indy and champion Will Take Charge.

The similarities between the two fillies' storylines are the kind of thing that just can't be made up, Levy said, laughing. She remembered attending the 2001 Alcibiades and cheering Take Charge Lady to victory.

“I knew so little [about industry protocols] back then,” said Levy. “I ran across the rail to get to the winner's circle for the photo, and I'm sure everybody in there was like, 'Who is this girl?'”

A more seasoned veteran now, Levy was still emotional after Simply Ravishing's big win in the Alcibiades. Her son Ryder, now 29, had been such a huge fan of the filly's from the very beginning, and he'd surprised his mother by asking the farm manager to name Levy the sole breeder for the first time in her career.

McPeek stayed in touch about the filly through her early training, sending videos of Simply Ravishing's progress ahead of her first start.

“I thought, 'Well, she looks pretty good,'” Levy recalled. “I had taken our farm manager to brunch on that Sunday that she ran for the first time, and I missed her race and then my phone just started blowing up when she broke her maiden at Saratoga.”

After her maiden victory on the turf, McPeek stepped Simply Ravishing up to New York-bred stakes company. The race came off the grass, and the filly won by several lengths.

“I thought, 'Wow, this is pretty crazy,'” Levy said. “When he entered her in the Alcibiades, though, I thought, 'Hmm, could this really happen?'”

Apparently, Wishes do come true.

Simply Ravishing winning the Darley Alcibiades

Simply Ravishing won the Alcibiades by 6 1/4 lengths, completely dominating the competition in an impressive gate-to-wire performance. She's likely to be one of the favorites in the upcoming Breeders' Cup Juvenile Fillies on Nov. 6 at Keeneland.

“After this filly won, I actually ran into the guy who'd had Four Wishes at a reining show,” Levy said. “I tried to ask him about her first filly, by Revolutionary, but I guess he sold her as a riding horse prospect and didn't remember much more than that.”

Levy posted a snapshot of Four Wishes' story on social media following the Alcibiades win, and has enjoyed the excited reaction of so many of her friends. One major Kentucky breeder even told Levy's husband that after learning about the story, he went out and rescued a mare himself.

Four Wishes was bred to Speightster for 2021, and Levy is excited to see what the future will bring with her miracle mare. The entire story reminds Levy of a conversation she had with breeder Helen Alexander when she first got into the business.

“I remember asking her to lunch years ago, because she was someone I've always respected from the very beginning,” Levy said. “I asked if I could pick her brain, said, 'I'm trying to find my way and I really need some advice.' She just kind of said, basically, 'Breed your mares well, take care of them well, and they'll take care of you.' She actually called to congratulate me after Simply Ravishing won!”

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Breeders’ Cup Presents Connections: Grace Encourages Cancer-Stricken Trainer ‘To Keep On Fighting’

The odds were certainly stacked against trainer Shelley Brown last Sunday night at Century Mile in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. A sudden, devastating Stage 4 cancer diagnosis just a few weeks before the G3 Canadian Derby meant that Brown watched the races from her couch over 800 miles away in Winnipeg, exhausted after a weekend in the hospital for treatment.

Her entrant, the 3-year-old gelding Real Grace, had won just one race, the Derby Trial at Assiniboia Downs back in July. He'd not returned to the winner's circle in three subsequent starts, making the running early and fading in the stretch, and was facing the longest race of his career in the 1 1/4-mile Canadian Derby.

The race's post time, nearly 11 p.m. in Winnipeg, meant Brown had to fight through her exhaustion to stay awake if she wanted to watch it live.

Sent to post at 18-1 odds, Real Grace led the field from gate-to-wire for a gutsy neck victory that lifted his trainer's spirits beyond what she'd even considered possible. It was her first graded stakes win, and it was also a win in the biggest race at her home track.

Brown watched via her smartphone as Real Grace entered the winner's enclosure. Track announcer Shannon Doyle said: “Congratulations Shelley, we are all with you.”

Amazing Grace, indeed.

The weeks leading up to the Canadian Derby had been some of the darkest weeks of her life, Brown explained. The 47-year-old was diagnosed on Sept. 3 with cancer, Stage 4, learning that it was in her lungs, bones, stomach, ovaries, breasts, and lymph nodes. Doctors told her that left untreated, she had between three and six months to live.

Considering that Brown had only gone to the hospital that morning for what she'd thought was a torn rotator cuff in her shoulder, the diagnosis was a complete shock.

“For someone to look at you and tell you that, there's a million emotions,” Brown said. “I thought, 'What am I gonna do? I've got horses here, horses in the States, property, horse trailers. … I can't even tell you. I just totally went numb.

“Your brain can be very hard on you. As soon as I got the diagnosis, I didn't want to get out of bed. I felt helpless, overwhelmed, and I just wanted to shut down.”

Brown had 40 horses in training at Assiniboia Downs, and had sent several, including Real Grace, to her friend and former employer, trainer Rod Cone, at Century Mile. She was planning to ship the rest of the string to Century Mile after the Assiniboia meet ended.

Instead, Brown found herself in a downward spiral, researching treatments and treatment centers online, awaiting test results, and trying desperately to understand how the cancer had progressed so quickly without her knowledge.

“As a horse person, we make a lot of excuses,” Brown reasoned. “There's always kind of a way you get banged here and bumped there. I was unbelievably tired, but I kept telling myself there were only three more weeks (until the meet ended at Assiniboia), so I was kind of begging myself to finish off the meet. Of course with COVID there wasn't a ton of help, so I often had to pitch right in. I thought, 'Well, I'm just working really hard and I'm tired from racing three nights a week, it's just the amount of work and racing, and that's why I'm so tired.'”

The days after her diagnosis were a blur. Her longtime assistant kept the barn running, and the news spread around the backside quickly. Just four days later, a friend on the backstretch set up a GoFundMe account to help cover Brown's medical bills.

(https://www.gofundme.com/f/u6f5p-cancer?utm_source=customer&utm_campaign=p_cp+share-sheet&utm_medium=copy_link_all)

Assiniboia even helped to set up an auction for Brown's tack, equipment, and several horses. She wanted to sell off everything, but other horsemen convinced her to keep a few things, some saddles and bridles and a few of the better horses, as a way of giving herself hope moving forward.

“I guess my whole life I've sort of felt like a lone wolf,” Brown said, her voice heavy with emotion. “It was never going to be easy for a woman to be in a male-dominated sport. I've held my own, but even in my personal life I've never really felt like I fit somewhere or belonged together. But, how the horsemen have come together for me through this, to see that, some of them I think we'll be friends for life through this. They've been so amazing and so helpful and so assuring, and these are people that I never expected. I just realize now that I'm not alone and these people are so important to me.

“If there was any doubt before, the question has been answered. These are my family.”

Since her parents had already passed on after battling cancer, Brown reached out to her brother and sister for help with the day-to-day things, like transportation to her doctor's appointments. Both responded immediately, but there wasn't much to do besides wait.

As a lifelong, hard-working horsewoman, and the first female trainer to ever win a training title at Assiniboia (2017), Brown said sitting back and doing nothing was an especially difficult mental challenge.

“Horses are seven days a week; when you commit to this, you commit to a lifestyle,” Brown said. “I guess if I could change anything, I would have listened to my body sooner.

“Now I look back, and I think, 'Oh my gosh, this started a long time ago.'”

She had seen her family doctor several times over the past few years. Last year, she felt a strange sensitivity on her spine, but he told her it was nothing. She asked to be sent for a mammogram, but he insisted she didn't need one. Earlier this season, she'd gone to see him when she felt short of breath for no real reason, but he told her she was just out of shape after gaining weight over the winter.

Sadly, it's not an unusual story for women's symptoms to be overlooked by their doctors.

“I think had I really listened to my body, I would have seen more signs,” she said.

Fast-forward to the week of the Canadian Derby, and Brown was still struggling with her frustrations. Biopsies had been sent away to labs for testing, but she was still awaiting an appointment with an oncologist since the test results weren't back yet.

Logically, she understood that doctors could not implement a treatment plan without understanding the exact kind of cancer ravaging her body. Emotionally, knowing that she had spent three weeks of what was possibly her final three months just waiting around for results was starting to get to her.

Brown had looked into the options, and knew the finances weren't in her favor. She'd decided that a combination of conventional and holistic medicine was the way she wanted to fight the cancer, and treatment centers in Mexico and the United States were both quite expensive.

Mexico was cheaper, of course, but she'd have to drive herself there and wouldn't have any sort of support system in place if things took a turn for the worse. And what if she got sick on the drive down to Mexico? Then she'd be in a U.S. hospital, and the bills would just keep rolling in.

Another trainer, Hazel Bochinski, happened to see Brown's GoFundMe page and sent her a message on Facebook recommending a local treatment center in Winnipeg. It offered several of the holistic treatments that Brown hoped to try, as well as a pay-as-you-go plan.

Now Brown had part of a plan in place, at least, but she still had to wait for the test results before she could start any treatments.

On Thursday, Cone called to check in on her and ask if she'd be attending the race on Sunday night. Unfortunately, Brown had been admitted to the hospital once again, this time with a partially collapsed lung.

“They tried to drain the lung twice, which is so painful because they cut in between your ribs,” Brown explained. “They couldn't drain it and so they weren't able to get fluid off. The pain was intense.”

Brown insisted she be let out of the hospital over the weekend, and felt better Saturday, well enough to take a drive with her siblings.

“Sunday, I wasn't well,” Brown said. “Of course, the race is so late, 11 p.m. at night local time. I don't have a lot of energy. I told my brother, 'The only way I'm going to stay awake is if I watch all the races, see how the track is playing.' With each race I got more discouraged, because my horse is a frontrunner and the track was not playing speed at all.

“I was actually able to stay awake, and I can't tell you the feeling I had to watch that race, watch that horse go to the front. I saw Synergy coming, the heavy favorite, and I thought he would blow right by us. My horse had to dig deep … Actually, the race was showing on a slight delay, because at the eighth pole my best friend's text popped up on screen, 'OMG you just won a Derby!'”

In fact, Real Grace held on through the wire to win by a neck over Something Natural and Rail Hugger. Cone was beyond thrilled as he led the Mineshaft gelding into the winner's circle, the three-time Canadian Derby-winning trainer calling Brown's victory the best win of his life.

Real Grace digs deep to win the G3 Canadian Derby

“No matter what happened, nothing could have made me happier than that race,” Cone told CBC Radio's Edmonton AM. “We did everything for Shelley and we were just overwhelmed.”

(https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/upset-victory-in-canadian-derby-inspires-horse-trainer-battling-cancer-1.5742728)

“All credit to Rod Cone,” Brown said. “If I would have had it in me, I would have loved to have been there. I bought this horse because I believed in him. We were disappointed (when he finished fifth) in the Manitoba Derby, so to win this one was so meaningful. I was a groom in Alberta growing up, so to be able to go back there and win such a prestigious race, it really just put the wind back in my sails.

“When there's no reason to get up in the morning, it was the one thing that made me go, 'You know what? This horse was 18-1, and he showed me what you can do if you just fight.'

“The next day I was a whole different person. It made me feel like, 'Don't you dare give up.' It was almost like a sign to say, 'This is what you can do.'”

On Monday, Brown finally had her first appointment with the oncologist, and her renewed sense of hope led to a surprising development. There was a drug, Ibrance, developed to treat her type of cancer. It was designed for post-menopausal women, so she'd have to be sent through medically-induced menopause first, but the drug was showing promising results.

“They feel like it can buy me three years,” Brown explained. “I was so happy to hear that. I thought, 'I can tie up loose ends, figure out how I want things done, instead of being in such a rush.' Of course, it isn't a guarantee, but now there's a chance.”

According to Brown, Ibrance is designed as more of a blocker that stops the cancer's progress, rather than killing the cancer outright. She plans to combine it with holistic treatments for the next three months, which the GoFundMe account will help pay for, and she has a backup plan in place to head to Mexico if the current plan doesn't seem to be working.

“When someone virtually hands you a death sentence, I can't imagine how, person to person, that would affect somebody,” Brown said. “Now I have possibly three years to work with, but the thought of the chance, maybe in that three years they can come up with something else, it at least that gives me hope to keep on fighting.”

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Breeders’ Cup Presents Connections: Forster Readies His ‘Favorite Player’ For Dirt Mile

By his own admission, Grant Forster is not a “big fish in a small pond” kind of guy. He was extremely successful at Emerald Downs in the early years of his training career but made the decision to move to Kentucky in 2007 to “take on the sport's biggest players.”

Forster's stable was reduced by the move, but 13 years later the trainer is preparing to saddle his first Breeders' Cup starter. Gulliver Racing, Craig Drager, and Dan Legan's Pirate's Punch, a 4-year-old son of Shanghai Bobby, will be one of the top choices in the Grade 1 Dirt Mile on Nov. 7 at Keeneland.

“It's obviously super exciting,” said Forster, 46. “Everybody in horse racing, whether you're a jockey, a trainer, a groom, wants to be associated with a horse in the Triple Crown or the Breeders' Cup. Now, not only do we have a horse in the Breeders' Cup, but we have a live chance to win.

“Winning a race like that would really be big for my career. We're a smaller stable but we've been fortunate; it always seems like we've had one stakes horse in the barn. We've won some nice graded stakes, and we've placed in nice graded stakes, but we've never won a Grade 1, never competed in the Breeders' Cup, so to do that, that's why we're all here.”

Pirate's Punch won the G3 Salvator Mile at Monmouth Park last Saturday by two lengths, returning to the winner's circle after a disqualification from victory in the G3 Phillip H. Iselin at the New Jersey oval on Aug. 22.

“When he crossed the wire first in the Iselin at Monmouth, the Breeders' Cup really entered the conversation,” Forster said. “The horse he beat, Warrior's Charge, was one of the top contenders in the division. Even though we were disqualified, we felt we had the best horse on that day; we looked him in the eye and beat him.”

Warrior's Charge returned to finish a disappointing eighth in the G3 Ack Ack at Churchill Downs on Sept. 26 after setting a wicked early pace, but Pirate's Punch showed he has not regressed off the Iselin effort. His Salvator Mile victory was accomplished in easy style, with jockey Jorge Vargas, Jr. allowing the gelding to ease up in the final sixteenth of a mile.

“It was a nice redemption,” said Forster. “He has consistently improved, and his confidence is at an all-time high. He's just a lovely horse, loves to train, loves attention, and loves people. As he's accomplished more he's gotten more proud of himself, and he thinks he's king of the world now!”

It's a good feeling heading into the Breeders' Cup, even with all the uncertainty of 2020.

Forster, a native of British Columbia, Canada, has long hoped for a shot at the top of the sport. A son of two Canadian horsemen, he attended the University of Arizona Race Track Industry Program and began his career as a media relations specialist at Emerald Downs in 1997.

Three years later, Forster found himself really missing the day-to-day contact with horses and returned to working for his British Columbia Racing Hall of Fame father, Dave Forster, as a groom at Emerald. He worked his way up to assistant trainer and took out his own license in 2003.

Forster earned several leading trainer titles at Emerald and saddled the winners of three consecutive editions of the Washington Oaks, as well as the winner of the 2005 edition of the G3 Longacres Mile. He was also successful during winter meetings at Oaklawn Park in Arkansas.

“I had some wonderful years there and trained for wonderful people,” Forster said. “I felt like I'd accomplished everything I could out there, though, so to me it was more exciting to be based in Kentucky.”

So far, the top horse in Forster's stable has been the 2008 mare Brushed By A Star, by Eddington. She was a $10,000 yearling at the Keeneland September sale, but earned $441,991 on the track with wins in the G2 Chilukki and G2 Molly Pitcher Stakes under Forster's care.

Still, Pirate's Punch has worked his way into Forster's heart in a way none of his previous trainees has been able to touch.

Pirate's Punch, Jorge Vargas Jr. aboard

“If I was a coach in high school basketball, he'd be my favorite player,” Forster admitted. “He's run well for us every time, just his consistency on the track is remarkable. He's also an unbelievably kind horse. He loves to work with people, he loves being around people. He just wants them to pet him, but not in any kind of needy way; he just is a very social horse.

“He lives in the first stall on the corner, nearest the office. He's an absolute savage for carrots! We go through many many bags of baby carrots each week, and we're more than happy to provide those for him.”

Pirate's Punch was first in training with Jeff Mullins in California, but moved to Forster's care after breaking his maiden for a $30,000 tag at Ellis Park in July of 2019. The gelding immediately stepped up to win an allowance race at Indiana Grand, then finished third in the G3 Super Derby at Louisiana Downs.

Now, Pirate's Punch has a record of five wins, three seconds, and four thirds from 17 starts for earnings of $332,751.

“We got him at just the right time,” Forster said. “He'd been gelded, broken his maiden and gained some confidence. He's just continued to improve ever since.

“When we got him, what he had accomplished and what he turned into, hopefully it's a strong commercial for our program.”

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