Early Voting To Stand At Taylor Made Stallions For 2024

Early Voting (Gun Runner), who got 120 mares in foal during his first season at stud last season before a rare condition led to his being removed from stud duties on the advice of veterinary experts, has been cured and will continue his stud career at Taylor Made Stallions in 2024. He covered his first book of mares in 2023 at Ashford Stud.

Winner of the 2022 GI Preakness S. for Klaravich Stables and Chad Brown, Early Voting retired with three wins from six starts and earnings in excess of $1.3 million. Though he successfully stopped his mares and though his sperm were fertile, he was later found to be unable to continue his career and was subsequently diagnosed with Anejaculatory Syndrome, an inability to ejaculate.

According to a release, a member of the Early Voting management team was acquainted with the work of a New Zealand-based veterinarian and scientist named Dr. Padraig (Paddy) O'Casaigh, who had treated males of the rarest species of birds in New Zealand–the Kakapo–for precisely the same condition. O'Casaigh had developed his diagnostic and treatment protocols along with Professor Sir Graham ('Mont') Collingwood Liggins FRS, a pioneer in the research of human fetal development and birth. O'Casaigh and Liggins together formed the Mont Liggins Trust to further fertility research.

“Early Voting has a very rare condition that is difficult to diagnose and treat,” said Dr. O'Casaigh. “Because of the work of the Mont Liggins Trust with the Kakapo and Tuatara (a native New Zealand reptile that is the closest living relative to the dinosaur), we have developed a very unique diagnostic suite for this exact scenario. I feel very fortunate to be involved and have had the assistance of our many international colleagues. It is such a credit to all the interested parties who have gone literally to the end of the earth for Early Voting's welfare.”

Added Taylor Made's Duncan Taylor: “We were contacted by Dr. O'Caseigh to stand Early Voting and we are very happy to have the opportunity.”

This story will be updated

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A Different Role but Still Made to Measure

Keeneland Breeders' Spotlight

When Saint Ballado came to the farm, Duncan Taylor recalls Les Brinsfield telling him to try Mari's Book mares.

“Mari's Book!” he exclaims now. “It's not like there were Mari's Book mares all around, out there in the population. But Les was a smart guy, very analytical.”

And it was easy to see the logic: Mari's Book was by Northern Dancer out of a Maribeau mare; and Maribeau, like Saint Ballado's sire Halo, was out of Cosmah–whose half-sister Natalma, of course, gave us the sire of Mari's Book. Plenty of genetic wheels within wheels there, then.

“So we bought this mare by Mari's Book, Goulash, [for Aaron Jones] and bred her to Saint Ballado four times,” Duncan resumes. “And we got like three stakes winners, one of them being Ashado. And it really made the stallion. But then Mr. McNair had a mare with very similar breeding, and I kept saying, 'You've got to breed her to Saint Ballado, got to!' So he did. And he got a swayback.” He chuckles. “Named it Duncan.”

Just one snapshot, this, of the breadth of experience that have given the Taylor brothers their plain-talking sense of how to make the best of a difficult game; and a wholesome, hard-headed scepticism about any theory or system purporting to make it easy.

And that, in turn, is why we've seized the pretext to visit two of them, Duncan and Mark, in a rather different capacity from the usual: to hear how the family ended up breeding an elite sprinter in Sibelius, winner of the G1 Golden Shaheen in Dubai.

Taylor Made is obviously far better known as the largest consignor in the business, and also for standing the likes of Not This Time, the sire of Sibelius. But anyone familiar with the energy and imagination they have always brought to their principal roles can only be curious to hear how they adapt their know-how to the kind of challenge that occupies the majority of their clients.

“Anytime you're big, you get exposed to more people, with more theories and more thoughts,” reasons Duncan, who formally handed over to Mark as President and CEO last year but remains a vital influence as Senior Consultant. “So you're able to soak those in, and get to talk about lots of different aspects. Where a guy that's out on his farm with his 15 broodmares, that's all he is focused on. He can read all the books, but–well, we're not even trying to hear stuff and we hear it.”

And that ties into a parallel conviction: that the best breeders, historically, have been able to weave many different strands of horsemanship together.

“I'm not knocking anyone else,” stresses Duncan. “But in my lifetime, just watching what's gone on, there's been two or three people that you just thought really knew what they were doing. John Nerud was one, Alec Head was another. There was a guy named Bob Bricken at Elmendorf that was a guru of breeding. And, like Tesio himself, what did they have in common? They basically had a 360-degree view of every horse. They knew how to train, knew how to raise horses. And they were around every single one, watching and looking and trying to figure out what worked best where.”

Mark Taylor | Keeneland

“Nobody is going to breed a terrible stall-walker to a terrible stall-walker,” agrees Mark. “Nerud, if he trained the sire and the dam, would know that this filly had a lot of talent but wasn't so good between the ears. So he'd need to give her something to balance that out. But a lot of these people doing matings on a computer, honestly they may never even have seen the mare or the stallion and they certainly have no idea about any of these other characteristics.”

And even when a Nerud or a Head noticed a recurring motif, they didn't make sweeping extrapolations.

“Say they see a Nodouble mare coming through this, this and this, and they could all run,” Duncan says. “Well, if I brought up a Nodouble mare that looked the exact opposite, they would know: 'Just because that S.O.B. is by Nodouble, it isn't the Nodouble that I want. I want one that looks like this one over here.'”

And seeing the bigger picture cuts through the whole program. “When you have control over the entire operation, you're not sending your horse to Trainer X,” Duncan says. “Because Trainer X is thinking, 'I could probably back off this horse and he would be okay later on, maybe win a stake or two. But he might be my only chance ever to win a Kentucky Derby. So I'm going to keep training hard on him.' And then he breaks down.

“Whereas if Nerud had him, he'd have said, 'Nope, we ain't running in the Derby. Back to the farm, and give him all he needs.' Because when that horse hits, it affects the value of eight others in his operation.”

The Taylors' own remarkable story, of course, attests to the fruitful combination of nature and nurture. Their father Joe literally wrote the book on farm management, having supervised Gainesway for 40 years; and any congenital flair for horses was further underpinned by the discipline and faith of their upbringing. And whatever they have in common, even this closest of clans are hardly cookie-cut, whether in aspect or outlook.

Duncan Taylor | Keeneland

“Well, we had eight in our family,” muses Duncan. “And you can see a common look. But we're all different–and it's a 100% nick. It's the exact same with horses. The evolutionary scheme of genetics has so many variables.”

No guarantees, then, but nonetheless there are plainly rewards available if you put the work in. Another thing Duncan did when Saint Ballado arrived, for instance, was create a scoring system on every mare ever bred to his full-brother Devil's Bag.

“Let's say the ancestor was Buckpasser,” he explains. “Anytime Buckpasser was in the first six generations, I said, 'Okay, was it a stakes winner or not?' So if it was one-for-49, I know I don't like a lot of Buckpasser in there. And so on, for all the relatives. I had them in an alphabetical order and knew the rate that they hit at. And as Saint Ballado came through the ranks, we started keeping the same statistics. You're trying to see which ancestors are going to go with the horse, and sometimes you'd find others carried along the same way.”

But only sometimes.

“And what you find in this business is that most people want a simple answer,” he continues, in exasperated tones. “If there's 12 pies here, they want to be told that this one will taste best because it has half the ingredients my grandmother used, and she baked a hell of a pie. But the other half of the pie, we don't know what the damned ingredients are. And when I eat it, it doesn't taste like grandma's. But that pie brings more.”

“It's the microwave mentality, unfortunately,” Mark adds. “Whether it's accurate or not, they don't care, they just want something they can understand. So I get into fights all the time with people that just get fixated on one tool, which a lot of times will send you in totally the wrong direction. To me, if you look at what works on 'blood' then you find a lot of times it makes sense as a physical mating, from a conformation perspective.”

Sibelius wins the G1 Golden Shaheen | Erika Rasmussen

But we're forgetting why we troubled these gentlemen in the first place. And this Sibelius (targeting his first start since Dubai in the GII True North S. at Belmont on June 10) is a nice story, bringing together some of the most cherished stalwarts of this remarkable family firm.

He's out of Fiery Pulpit (Pulpit), an unraced half-sister to graded stakes winner Clamorosa (Seattle Dancer), acquired as a 7-year-old for $55,000 at the Keeneland November Sale of 2011. There's quite a gang involved: Pat Payne, who might almost be another brother; Jeff Hayslett, who's been working here for over 30 years; and two of the farm's oldest clients, in Louis Brooks and Sam Pollock.

“This mare is a good example of any breeding success that we've had,” Mark says. “Because most of the mares we own are in partnership with customers. We've never aspired to go out and say we're going to build some world-class broodmare band, become great breeders. It's more just coming alongside partners, who like to be commercial breeders. And in this mare's case, it was an interesting group. Pat was a partner of ours. Jeff was our farm manager and then our first Thoroughbred Advisor. The Pollocks have probably been with us 30 years, and the Brooks family maybe 40. The first yearling I ever took to the sales ring was a Secretariat filly [co-]bred by Louis.”

(That was the old July Sale at Keeneland in 1983: Wayne Lukas gave $525,000 for her and, as Fiesta Lady, she ended up a Grade I winner.)

Fiery Pulpit had managed to produce a minor stakes performer by Broken Vow, a son of Unbridled, so they tried her with Unbridled's Song. The result was a $400,000 Keeneland September colt who won seven times. Next came a colt by Graydar, this time a son of Unbridled's Song: Peter O'Callaghan bought him as a Keeneland November weanling for $185,000, and he became a hard-knocking, 11-for-48 campaigner. Then a colt by Will Take Charge made $250,000 at Keeneland September.

 

The late Unbridled's Song, a cornerstone of Taylor Made's stallion barn | Taylor Made

“Before we got ahold of her, her babies weren't bringing anything at all,” Mark notes. “But just by knocking on this Unbridled's Song thing, she became a slot machine, paying off every year.”

Typically, however, the one exception was her foal from the first crop of Not This Time–who has turned out to be her best runner. Offered as a short yearling at Keeneland January, he was a $62,000 RNA and it was a similar story after he had been moved on, returned at $75,000 in the same ring that September. Bottom line, however, is that Sibelius currently has a 19-7-3-3 record: pretty robust, for a horse that didn't vet.

“He was a beautiful horse,” Mark emphasizes. “Just sesamoiditis. We got him sold privately. It's like Duncan's just been saying about breeding theories. Vetting, X-rays, they're a tool, get you part of the way. But people want to be told that it's simple.”

That said, commercial breeders nowadays tend to think about the ring sooner than the racetrack–a reality in which Mark cheerfully acknowledges complicity.

“My winning post is making money,” he accepts. “The one thing I don't have the luxury of doing is breeding something that might come out ugly, and the market's going to reject it, but it might be a great racehorse. I can't afford to do that. I'm trying to breed a good-looking horse.”

Sadly it feels as though age may be catching up with Fiery Pulpit herself. She required colic surgery and, donated to one of the Taylor Made sales team who has a small farm, successfully conceived to Catalina Cruiser. After Sibelius won in Dubai, Mark called and said: “Hey did you see that? She just got a Grade I winner!” Unfortunately the reply was: “Didn't you get my text last night? She had a dystocia, the foal died.”

 

 

 

So much can go wrong, at any time. But just as people shouldn't pretend that the game is easy, nor should we make the simple things complicated. A lot of it is common sense.

“Basically, when we're breeding a mare, we're looking at the value and we're looking at the conformation,” Duncan says. “And not only the conformation of the two horses. If the mare's had foals before, you look at those too. Because she might not be toed-in herself, but three of the first four foals have been. So you're not going to breed to one that toes in.”

Maybe you'd have bred her to Unbridled, though, as he toed out somewhat. Duncan, indeed, remembers the team more or less having to beg people to support the horse pending his first runners.

“And then Unbridled's Song comes out of his first crop, and Grindstone,” he recalls. “Well, if Unbridled's Song had died foaling and Grindstone broke down before the Derby, maybe he'd have been in Turkey or something.”

The margins are always so fine. Duncan remembers deciding that Mutakddim mares might work with California Chrome, whose damsire was a half-brother to that horse's dam. That was a Mari's Book type of call. But sure enough, just about the best runner Chrome left behind was Cilla, whose second dam is by Mutakddim.

“Of course all the knockers of my theory can say, 'Cilla's out of an Into Mischief mare, you can breed anything to that horse,'” he admits. “But Mutakddim, I picked a random horse. Most of his horses are in South America. And he ends up in the pedigree of California Chrome's best horse. So there's something to it. But if you bred every Mutakddim mare to California Chrome, it still might only be three or four out of 100 foals. And then two of them, the trainers mess up, and another one gets loose on the track.”

Current Taylor Made stalwart Not This Time | Mary Ellet

Back we come, then, to the holistic approach. Because it's no good getting everything else right, and then having the whole thing unravel because you haven't matched the horse to the right trainer.

“If you want someone to coach a bunch of egomaniacs that all want to be the star, and turn them into the Bulls, you get in Phil Jackson,” Duncan reasons. “Somebody else is coaching them, it probably would never have happened. Same with trainers. The mating's one key factor. But you could have the smartest mating in the world, and you have a bad trainer or a bad foaling man, it's never going to come to fruition. So you need a team.”

He mentions one highly successful program. Could just be lucky, maybe, but he ticks off the quality of its land, farm management, sales scouts, trainers. “And if that gets a stallion from 10% stakes winners to 15%, that's a hell of a change in the economic value of that stallion,” he says. “Because he becomes the superior horse.”

Conversely, some stallions face adverse odds from the outset. At a given market level, they will only tend to get mediocre mares–and that won't just tell in the genes.

“Mortality and conception rates are hugely important to a stallion,” Mark says. “With lesser stallions, the conception rate tends to be just not as good because most of their mares come from farms that don't have the same resources or organization. So from the very beginning that stallion has more to overcome.”

“There's so many variables,” concludes Duncan. “But if that's a curse, it's also a blessing. Because if it was easy to do, these rich people wouldn't be intrigued as they are. They know it's hard, and that's just what keeps everybody interested.”

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Mark Taylor Joins Keeneland Board

Mark Taylor, president and CEO of Taylor Made Farm, has been named to Keeneland's Advisory Board of Directors. Longtime Keeneland directors Louis Lee Haggin III, Charles Nuckols III and Duncan Taylor will move to emeritus roles on the Advisory Board.

“We welcome Mark Taylor to the Keeneland Board, where his lifelong experience in the horse industry and his business acumen will be invaluable as we navigate future opportunities and challenges,” Keeneland President and CEO Shannon Arvin said. “We also thank Louis Haggin, Charlie Nuckols and Duncan Taylor for their decades-long service and commitment to the Board.”

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Duncan Taylor: With Him, You’ve Been Family, Part II

Taylor had worked Saratoga one summer for the pioneering Lee Eaton and, as early as 1978, dipped a toe in the same water. A first seven-yearling consignment at Keeneland included a first stakes winner—since followed by 126 Grade I winners raised or sold, including 10 last year alone.

“It was a natural extension of what we were already doing: a lot of customers you boarded for needed to sell,” Taylor says. “And I thought, well, if Lee Eaton could sell a horse for $100,000 and make $5,000, that's more than I could get boarding a horse for a whole year. At that time people were charging commission for RNAs. They probably hated me but the first thing I said was, 'Hell, you can't take a guy's horse over there and run it through the sale, and it goes through for $200,000, and you want $10,000 when he didn't even sell his horse!' So we needed a minimum commission; and then if we sell, we get paid. Well of course our customers loved that, and now everybody does it.”

Success, however, brought its own challenges. Taylor remembers customers waiting in line at the sales, wanting to talk reserves, discuss the action on their horse. But he sought some expert counsel, and was told that Taylor Made—which had meanwhile also opened a stallion operation, starting with the arrival (or strictly the return) of Unbridled's Song in 1997—had developed in isolated “silos.” The solution they came up with was assignation of Thoroughbred Advisors to different clients, maintaining continuity across the board. “From problems come opportunities,” Taylor remarks. “Every customer now had their point person. And that was what allowed us to continue to grow, while keeping that family feel, that family touch.”

Even with such delegation, the brothers maintain a conspicuous front-of-house presence: if the help are wearing the tie and livery, so are their bosses. “We want them to share the kindred spirit of the family,” Taylor says. “We're not on any pedestal, we're in there beside them working. And the fact is we're not just one business owner but five of us trained by the same master, united so that when I win, Frank wins, Ben wins, Mark wins and Pat wins: we all win together.

“It's all about those innate, core values that have helped us, whether in terms of scale, or how we keep our dominance. We're always looking to get better, internally, externally, not because it's some big strategic plan but because it's in our nature to ask how can we do that better.”

First of three key values, he suggests, is honesty. “It's not that I never told a lie in my life, but if I ever did, I felt like crap after; beat myself up forever,” he says. “And then we want to care for our customers and their horses and each other like family. And the other thing is to always look for a better way, so that just because we're doing something now doesn't mean we'll be doing it two or three years from now.”

Fasig-Tipton photo

But while Taylor Made will unquestionably continue to absorb his ardor as it faces the future, it's up to the wider industry to heed some no less imaginative and dynamic input in doing the same. For Taylor is grieved by the obstinacy with which our sport resists the kind of adventure that has long sustained own business.

“I'm full of ideas,” he says, sounding rather exasperated. “I don't know if they're any good, but I've told them to every track executive I can and there's something about this business, people don't seem to use common sense.”

His opening premise is simple: purses go up when handle goes up, and that's obviously key to doing the best we can for horse owners. But too many racetracks have been so obsessed with becoming a casino that the core product is neglected, and offered with bad grace.

“Say we were in the popsicle business,” he says. “It's like we have the licorice popsicle stand and say: 'If you don't like our licorice, we don't want you as a customer. We're not going to give you cherry, orange, grape, we're not going to give you the flavors everybody loves. We're just here to sell our licorice, screw you, go someplace else.'”

Any novice who does try the track is bewildered. “It's like you need to learn Chinese or Russian to play the game, and it's going to take you too long to learn it,” Taylor complains.

While not a gambler himself, and therefore not presuming to design alternatives himself, he is appalled that the wagering product has basically remained unchanged for a century. “No bets for people who just want to bet and have fun,” he says. “They don't care about learning how to handicap. Like the slot machine player versus playing at the craps table: one is intellectual; the other is. 'Let's bet and have some fun.'

“And I'll tell you the problem with not being customer-focused. In 1890, Dan Taylor was born. That's my granddad. Everybody had a horse, everybody loved horseracing, that's the culture he grew up in. In 1924, Joe Taylor my dad was born: the car's just invented, but Joe rides a pony to school, and you go to the Hawthorne Derby in Chicago and there's 100,000 people watching. Everybody's still part of that horse culture. In '56, Duncan Taylor is born. And it's all about the damned car. Out of 100 kids in my class at Lexington Catholic, about four liked going out to the track. Go forward 30 years, and my son Marshall is born. And the kids in his class know as much about a giraffe as they do about a horse. As the horse's usefulness diminished, as a mode of transportation and an agricultural tool, so we have lost our competitive advantage.”

Taylor deplores a complacency he traces to the long years when horseracing was the only gambling game in town. “We're like the little kid at the table, whose mom always brings him food, never makes him work,” he says. “And he turns into a big fat kid who doesn't know how to do anything and can't get a job anywhere. With the monopoly we had, we got lazy and fat, we got a bad culture and never thought about the customer.”

Who, after all, is that customer? Not the horse's owner. “Because he's like the sports player, providing the talent,” reasons Taylor. “He's Wilt Chamberlain, he is putting on the show. The customer is the one who comes to the races, who's betting on the owner's horse. Yet we look down on him like he's a tramp and an idiot, we don't esteem him at all. And no business can treat customers like second-rate citizens and last very long.”

Taylor said he suspected that some people don't actually want to expand the sport's reach: that they don't want to build our industry into Mount Everest, but are happy just to be kings of the anthill. But he looks around the game and sees people of prodigious wealth and influence, amply competent to reboot betting technologies and run racetracks altruistically.

“I still think we have a great product,” Taylor stresses. “That's the thing, we have something so special. How much better to be around these beautiful horses, with a really good atmosphere, than sitting pulling a lever in some dungy casino with lights going on and off.”

According to Taylor, the person who has done most to evangelize our walk of life is Michael Behrens of MyRacehorse.  “Those 60,000 people he signed up now have a reason to try and 'learn the Russian',” he said. “They have a hook. Our entry level to have horse ownership was way too high before. A percentage of those 60,000 will become millionaires, even billionaires. Who knows? One of them could be the next John Magnier.”

A new generation: Brooks Taylor, Logan Payne, Marshall Taylor, Katie Taylor, Joe Taylor, Alex Payne | Laurel Donnell photo

Or even the next Duncan Taylor. Happily, for Taylor Made, and for our industry, he isn't going anywhere. He'll still be in the office every day, mentoring his brother Mark in the role he has relinquished, and everyone else on the team; and he'll never stop aspiring, both for the good name of one business and for the viability of its trading environment.

“We're not perfect at Taylor Made, by any means,” he said. “I'm sitting here now, retired from being CEO, but I've a lot of thoughts how we can improve still. You know, I'm not the greatest horseman. I'm not the greatest businessman. I'm not the greatest anything, really. But I have a streak in me that I just try really hard, whatever I do, to keep focused, keep working. I think that's really been my gift to the company: I've always looked out for it, and always tried to keep the big picture in mind.”

But the real key, he emphasizes, remains the same as it was the brothers sought to live up to the example of Daddy Joe: doing things the right way, doing things together, sharing that Taylor-made family feeling.

“There are so many people that have worked with me through the years—customers, team members, vendors, family—that have been part of Taylor Made's success,” he says. “I am thankful for each one of them. The person I owe the most to is my beautiful wife Carol. She has been a lot like my mother, always putting our family first. She has raised five beautiful children, and that's worth more than all I have accomplished.”

As a new cycle opens in this remarkable dynastic tale, then, an apt final word is offered by Taylor's brother and successor as CEO. Mark Taylor recalls how John Gaines, such a pivotal influence on their father, celebrated Daddy Joe not just as the complete horseman but also as “an agronomist, builder, geneticist, caretaker, nutritionist, salesman, entrepreneur, executive, promoter, accountant, arborist, midwife, dealmaker, diplomat and handyman.” Joe, Gaines said, was “truly a man for all seasons but anyone who knows him understands that his real business is helping people.”

That was the template, and Mark feels that is exactly how his brother has presided over Daddy Joe's legacy. “In many ways, Duncan has been all these things and more for our family, our team members, our customers, and their horses,” he says. “Our plan is to free him of many of his prior duties as CEO, while harnessing his drive for customer service and innovation heading into our next chapter.”

To read part I of this story, click here.

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