The last time Michael Trombetta brought a horse to the Breeders' Cup, Wet Your Whistle nearly posted a 26-1 upset in the Turf Sprint held at Keeneland in 2020.
Thus, when Arzak posted a 12-1 upset of the Grade 2 Woodford Stakes on Oct. 7 over the same turf course in Lexington, Ky., it felt a bit like déjà vu.
“That was a pretty thrilling second,” Trombetta, 56, reflected on the 2020 Breeders' Cup, “especially coming off of the year we'd had with COVID.”
The coronavirus pandemic turned the entire world on its head in March of 2020, and left many Thoroughbred industry participants scrambling when most of racing was shut down. For the Maryland-based Trombetta, it was four months before live racing was able to resume.
“I had 80 plus horses at the time, and it was four months with nowhere to run them,” Trombetta said. “We hope we never see anything like that again in our lifetime.
“It was very strange, because I'd come to work, breezing horses, trying to get them ready even though I wasn't sure what I was getting them ready for. We kept thinking, 'Well, maybe we'll race in a week or two,' but it kept going for four months. The whole situation was just awful.”
Trombetta counts himself lucky to have had owners who stayed supportive during those long dark months, allowing him to remain in the sport that had captured his imagination as a young man.
“My dad owned some horses when I was a teenager and I got some exposure to it that way. I liked the sport and I liked the horses, and I got an opportunity to start working with them a little bit,” Trombetta said. “I was walking hots when I was 13 years old and I was grooming horses by the time I was 15. When I was in school I did school, but when I wasn't in school I was at the track.”
By age 18, he got his trainer's license and had a few horses at Pimlico. Trombetta's first winner came in 1986 with Amant De Cour at Atlantic City Race Course in New Jersey.
For the first 15 years of his career, Trombetta split his time between the racetrack and his brother's demolition company. He'd work at the track in the mornings, then the building sites in the afternoon, and return to the track in the evenings to check his horses.
The MTHA Trainer of the Year in 2005, Trombetta burst on the national scene with Sweetnorthernsaint, an ex-claimer turned Grade 2 winner who went off as the Kentucky Derby (G1) favorite in 2006 and ran second to champion Bernardini in the Preakness (G1).
For his career, Trombetta said “The Saint” meant everything.
“That was a turning point for me,” he said. “That's when we went from just doing this job to everybody kind of getting a chance to know who we were, and that meant the world to us. That just put fuel on the fire that I could have never expected.”
Trombetta built up his reputation year by year, saddling his first Grade 1 winner in 2012 when Next Question captured the Nearctic at Woodbine. Win Win Win took him back to the Kentucky Derby in 2019, and won the G1 Forego for Trombetta in 2020.
Following the pandemic, Trombetta went on to have some of the strongest years of his career in 2021 and 2022, bettering his own earnings record each season. He has now saddled the winners of nearly 2,200 races, with career earnings approaching $80 million.
Still, his memories of those days in 2020 will never be forgotten.
“It just makes you understand that you don't know what's around the corner, both from a physical health standpoint, and a business standpoint,” said Trombetta. “I have some horses that won some big races that year, and I still have the pictures on the wall where everybody in the picture is wearing a mask, even the jockey.”
Among those winner's circle pictures is likely one of Wet Your Whistle, who won the G3 Belmont Turf Sprint Invitational prior to his runner-up finish in the Breeders' Cup.
“It makes you aware that anything can happen,” Trombetta said.
As it happens, Arzak was purchased during the 2020 June OBS sale of 2-year-olds in training. Out of a Tapit mare and sired from the first crop of Not This Time, Arzak breezed in :10 flat and commanded a final bid of $575,000 from owner Marc Tacher. It was the third-highest price for a Not This Time juvenile at that sale.
Tacher picks out his own horses, Trombetta explained.
“He has a very good eye for what a nice horse looks like,” the trainer said. “I've been training for him for six or seven years now. His stable manager, Freddie Cruz, used to work for me, and we bumped into each other in Tampa one winter. Freddie introduced me to Mark, and the next thing you know, he sent me a few horses.”
Arzak was able to debut just four months later, and broke his maiden at second asking, winning a maiden special weight at Woodbine by three lengths. The intact horse would go on to win his first stakes race at age three, then his first graded stakes early in his 4-year-old season. He set a track record at Woodbine in April last year, but seemed to go off form in the latter half of 2022.
“He started the season really well last year,” Trombetta said. “Then, we gave him some time off over the winter. But I think that some of the races can be a little deceiving. It's not always really clear if he doesn't break well, or encounters traffic trouble, or is only beaten a couple of lengths for everything.”
Returning from the layoff, Arzak may have needed a couple of starts to “knock the rust off,” but by his fourth start off the bench, Arzak was coming from behind to win an allowance race on the turf at Saratoga.
The Woodford was his fifth start of 2023, and though Arzak is capable of going wire-to-wire, he settled back and made a big late run to win the Woodford by two lengths.
Now, the Breeders' Cup is on the table.
“If all is well, the owner wants to go to the Breeders' Cup,” Trombetta said. “If he trains good the next couple weeks, he's scheduled to go out to California on Oct. 30. So he'll work this weekend and next weekend at Keeneland, then we'll decide.”
If he makes the trip, Arzak will be Trombetta's fourth Breeders' Cup starter. While the trainer is certainly excited about another chance at the top level of the sport, he's no longer quite as phased by the spotlight.
“It's just like when we get a chance to go to Triple Crown races; it's the highest level of what we provide in the sport,” he said. “To get a chance to participate in it is such an honor, because you just never know what's around the corner.”
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