My Preakness Weekend: Highs, Lows and the Fragility of Life

As has been said many times about the Thoroughbred industry: it is a business with highs and lows; more lows than highs; the highs are very high and the lows are very low.

It was an emotional weekend of racing for me. The highs have been the results of two races. The lows, the thoughts of those not here to celebrate with me.

First, Dazzling Blue ran her record to three-for-three Friday with a, well, dazzling performance at Churchill Downs. Then, Sunday, Weehawken broke her maiden by three lengths at Woodbine.

I planned the mating of Dazzling Blue's dam, the Curlin mare Blue Violet, and I am the managing partner of Redd Road Stable, which, by design, owns exactly one horse–Weehawken.

Nineteen years ago, my late partner, Susan Knoll, after being a member of a partnership group, made the decision to begin her own small racing and breeding operation.

She was what the industry constantly needs, a person passionate about horses who, when they find themselves financially able, decides to race and breed.

At the 2004 Keeneland September yearling sale, trainer Larry Jones purchased three fillies for Susan. The least expensive of the group was a filly by Silver Deputy out of the Theatrical mare Gaslight, purchased for $12,000.

Though most yearlings sold at auction are not already named, that was not the case with this filly, who was named Speedy Edy, which Susan did not like.

Susan changed her name to Gasia, after Gasia Mikaelian, then a television newscaster in Houston, where Susan lived and practiced law. The name is actually pronounced goss-e-a, but those in the barn, and then track announcers, pronounced it geisha, so we let them have their way, and their say.

In Susan's colors, Gasia won six times, three of those races stakes: the Susan's Girl Breeders' Cup at Delaware Park, and the Bayakoa and Instant Racing Breeders' Cup Stakes, both at Oaklawn. She raced through age 4, earning $434.231.

Retired to Catherine Parke's Valkyre Stud near Georgetown, Ky., Gasia was mated to Pulpit, producing a colt in 2009. When it came time to breed her back, there was a new stallion taking up residence at Lane's End Farm. I begged Susan to breed to him. His name was Curlin.

I loved everything about Curlin: his pedigree, his race record, his conformation. I was totally convinced he would be a wonderful choice for Gasia.

Susan decided to breed Gasia to Curlin (his first-year fee was $80,000) with the thought of selling the resulting foal if a colt and retaining to race if a filly.

Gasia produced a filly in 2010 Susan named Blue Violet. The name was chosen for three reasons: she had been sent poems that began “roses are red, violets are blue,” violets were her favorite flower or plant; and there is a crayon in the Crayola box named Blue Violet. Also trained by Larry Jones, Blue Violet won four races and $237,356, including the Lady's Secret Stakes at Monmouth Park.

Straight off the racetrack, Blue Violet was one of the first through the ring at the 2015 Keeneland November sale. She was purchased by WinStar Farm for $350,000. Though she produced two winners from her first three foals, Blue Violet was slated to be sold by WinStar at the 2023 Keeneland January sale. But a funny thing happened. Her third foal, Dazzling Blue, by Into Mischief, showing at the time the catalog was printed as unraced, had won her first two starts including a stakes.

WinStar withdrew Blue Violet from the sale, and she has since produced a colt by Bold d'Oro and been bred to the farm's newest stallion, Life is Good, a grade I-winning son of Into Mischief.

In the fall of 2021, at a cocktail/anniversary party at the farm of Joe and Annie Markham, I was approached by Joe about forming a partnership among friends and acquaintances. Before the night was over, we had enough commitments.

I told Joe I wanted the stable to be named Redd Road because that is the location of his farm not far from the back entrance to Keeneland. He said that was fine as long as he could name the horse Weehawken, the name of the street in Frankfort, Ky., where our good friends Phil and Chris Perry grew up. Both are also partners in the filly.

As the managing partner of Redd Road Stable, I asked another old friend, Mark Casse, if he would select us a horse at auction and become our trainer.

At the 2022 Ocala Breeders' Sales Company's March auction, Mark bought a filly for us by Daddy Long Legs out of the Forest Wildcat mare Wildcat Gold for $85,000.

With her pedigree, we figured Weehawken would prefer grass racing, but that proved difficult last year. We entered at Ellis Park and rain forced the race to the main track so we scratched. When that happened a second time, we ran and she finished a credible third in her maiden voyage.

After a good fifth at Kentucky Downs, twice we entered turf races at Keeneland and twice we were excluded. We finally ran on dirt, where she tired badly going seven furlongs.

With Churchill Downs not an option because of issues with its turf course, we opted for the synthetic surface at Turfway Park, where she was beaten a neck in her first start there, and then ran third and sixth.

Because she had been in training since the previous summer, we sent Weehawken to Casse's training center in Ocala, Fla., for a few months freshening, then, at my suggestion, shipped her to Woodbine, where he has a large stable and she would have the option of synthetic or turf.

Sunday, after three months off, Weehawken broke sharply as usual, eased her way up the lead and, under Kazushi Kimura, coasted home three lengths in front.

The Redd Road silks were in the winner's circle for the first time, representing 18 partners, nearly all newcomers to the sport.

Honestly, I was confident Weehawken would win, this being her first start since our founding member, Joe Markham, lost his battle with cancer.

Redd Road Stable plans to send Mark Casse to next month's OBS sale to find us another runner. The stable was fortunate to enlist the services of Casse, but also his assistants, Allen Hardy in Kentucky and Kathryn Sullivan in Toronto.

Everything Susan raced or bred was in her name, primarily because it was her money. But, also because I was working at the time for an industry trade publication and wanted no appearance of a conflict of interest (each year I supplied my superiors a list of her horses, matings, etc.).

In retrospect, maybe this isn't really a story of highs and lows. The deaths of Susan Knoll and Joe Markham aren't lows but reminders to us of how fragile life is, how much our hearts are broken when we lose those we love. How we should enjoy each day, each experience…truly celebrate the highs. How decisions made at auctions, in racing and training schedules, in planning matings…can lead us into the winner's circle.

Dazzling Blue looks like something special; Weehawken's future appears bright. One is owned by a leading stud farm; the other by a new partnership of friends.

The industry needs both. Through its many highs and lows, the industry needs both.

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Valkyre Stud: It Starts With the Heart

The passing of Burt Bacharach last week evokes a couple of complementary tales that reflect instructively not only on the great man himself, but also on the different ways that different farms go about their business.

Back in the early 1980s Bacharach was staying in downtown Lexington, having been driven down from a concert in Cincinnati the night before so that he could visit his mares and foals before flying on to his next show.

Catherine Parke was still in her twenties, having barely established Valkyre Stud on a parcel of land near Georgetown, maybe 50 acres. She was waiting outside the hotel in her little two-door jeep, in her recollection about seven feet from nose to tail, when a gleaming white stretch limousine pulled up opposite.

Bacharach emerged from the lobby, understated in his blue jeans and gray sweatshirt. He looked at the limo, then at the jeep, walked over and gave Parke a hug. And suddenly here was this guy running up from the limo. Parke recognized the manager of a prominent Bluegrass operation.

“Mr. Bacharach!” he exclaimed. “I'm so-and-so of […?!] Farm. We'd love to take you around today, maybe see some stallions, whatever you'd like to do, sir! We'd love to meet you and talk about handling your business.”

Bacharach turned politely to the manager and his chauffeur. “Thank you, boys,” he said. “But I've already made my plans.”

Burt Bacharach | Benoit photo

“And off we went bouncing up to the farm in the old jeep,” Parke recalls. “And he had a peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich, and spent two hours with his horses. I think that farm must have paid the bellhops or somebody to let them know when prominent people were in town, so that they could entertain them.

“But that's exactly why Burt was with me. Same with the Moscarellis, his lifelong managers on the farm in West Virginia: they were hands-on all the time. He wanted to talk to the person that fed his horses that day.”

And, gosh, does the second story show that he got that with Parke! For it was her unstinting devotion to his Heartlight No. One (Rock Talk), champion sophomore filly of 1983, that not only assured Bacharach that his mares in Kentucky were in the right hands, but also convinced Parke herself that she had found her true vocation.

“Heartlight had cracked her pelvis in a workout and colicked literally every week,” Parke explains. “I had to give her timothy hay, and steam-crimped plain oats with just mineral on it. If she had sweet feed, or grass, she'd colic right away. So she had this big dry lot, almost three-quarters of an acre, and Burt built her a great big covered hayrack. And she could go in and out, between there and her stall, any time she wanted, day and night, because the more she moved, the better.

“The problem was that I couldn't afford year-round night watch. So I got this sensor from Australia, a little radio transmitter you hooked to her halter. And if she lay her head down flat for more than three seconds it would send a signal that reached me anywhere on the farm. My bedroom was very close to her paddock and when this beeper went off, I'd run out in the middle of the night and give her a shot of Banamine. And after about 45 minutes she'd shake her head and get up. If ever I couldn't be there for some reason, someone was always in my house with that beeper.”

There were no holidays, anyway: every cent was going into barns and fencing and, a little at a time, mares as well. But the bond she developed with this precious animal was such that she feels as though she got more back than she ever had to give.

“Honestly, she was the smartest, most intelligent horse I've ever been around in my life,” she says. “If she started colicking in her paddock, she'd stand screaming at the gate. I'd run over and her eyes were dilating but when she saw me come running with that shot, she'd hold still and wait. I suppose it was a conditioned response, after a while she realized that when I gave her that poke on her neck she was going to start feeling better. Anyway she would just stand there quietly and as soon as she'd had the shot she'd go back down, because she was in pain. She survived two colic surgeries but not the third, by which time she was 18.”

But then Bacharach knew already that he could trust this novice. Their first dealings had been when he called Dick Broadbent's office, where Parke was working as a bloodstock analyst. She was trying to get started as an agent, too, but charged no commission for securing him a season once she gleaned that he had been offered terms elsewhere that were, shall we say, not quite disinterested.

Again, Parke got far more in return for her probity than she could ever believe she merited. “For me to have a champion filly on the farm, at that age, was surreal,” she says. “Of course I was starstruck, but Burt was always so kind. I'd get to go backstage and meet Dionne Warwick, front row seats, all of that. He let me accept his TOBA award because he was doing a concert. I wouldn't know about his other life, but I know how he loved his horses. He called all the time, wanting to know how Heartlight was doing, how the babies were doing. He was very involved emotionally with them all.”

Catherine Parke at Valkyre | Keeneland photo

Having ridden hunters since girlhood in rural Ohio, Parke had come to the University of Kentucky primarily in the hope of galloping racehorses at Keeneland. But the racetrack back then was a hostile environment for a young woman, and she soon gravitated towards farm work. On leaving school, she found cherished mentors in Henry White of Plum Lane Farm and then Broadbent. Usefully, the latter hated flying and Parke gained valuable experience by being dispatched far and wide on his behalf. She started out leasing a barn and run-in shed, with a mare of her own plus a single client.

“Then I had some people come to me from California, and they're like my parents now,” she says gratefully. “Bill and Betty Currin, and Pat and Bill Klussman. They said why don't you get your own place? So I did.”

Parke has lavishly repaid the fidelity of both couples. The Klussmans had Ava Knowsthecode (Cryptoclearance)—graded stakes-placed, albeit “her legs were just a little too short” to go as fast as she wanted—who produced Grade I winners Justin Phillip (First Samurai) and Greenpointcrusader (Bernardini) as well as the latter's brother, GIII Holy Bull S. winner and sire Algorithms. That secured a $1.2 million dividend through her yearling son by Tapit.

The Currins, meanwhile, had Wilshewed (Carson City), who similarly produced Grade I winner Stormello (Stormy Atlantic) and two other graded stakes winners, plus a seven-figure yearling of her own. Then there was Robert Spiegel, who bred dual GI Santa Anita H. winner Milwaukee Brew (Wild Again) from a mare who soon afterwards produced a Cozzene filly to become another million-dollar baby. (Her commission built Parke's office.) Another of the first horses to put the farm on the map was elite turf runner Riskaverse (Dynaformer), raised here for Peter Schiff's Fox Ridge Farm.

In Parke's own cause, meanwhile, the cornerstone was the purchase of the 10-year-old Silk n' Sapphire (Smart Strike) from William A. Carl, for just $40,000 at the Keeneland November Sale of 2008.

“Mr. Carl was an equine insurance executive, and a very nice man,” Parke says. “He only had a small broodmare band but my goodness, he was extremely successful. They started out as very light pedigrees but now you see his bloodlines everywhere.

“Well, when I bought Silky it still looked very light. At the time Smart Strike wasn't yet considered a broodmare sire. But I had a very limited budget. And when I looked at her, I loved her physical: big, strong, very correct.”

And there was a clincher. Just a couple of hours after she was due in the ring, her 2-year-old daughter by Pleasantly Perfect was to debut for Graham Motion at Laurel. Parke had known Motion since raising one of his earliest graded stakes winners, Bursting Forth (Alwasmi), for Sam Huff. So she made a call.

“You know, Cathie, I quite like this filly,” Motion told her. “I think she can run a little bit.”

Knowing his understated style, that was good enough for Parke. Sure enough, Shared Account not only won that same day but went on to become a Breeders' Cup winner, besides since producing another one in Sharing (Speightstown).

“It was just meant to be,” Parke says. “And when I bought her, Silky was carrying a Pleasant Tap filly. We sold her for $475,000 as a yearling and she became [graded stakes winner] Colonial Flag. So that truly was a life-changer for me. I was able to pay some debt down, and buy her half-sister Champagne Sue (Elusive Quality). And then Silky had a $1.2 million yearling.”

But there was more to come. Champagne Sue produced that good 2-year-old of a couple of summers ago, High Oak (Gormley). And Silky's final gift before retirement, a 2019 filly by Hard Spun, has proved beyond price.

“When she had a filly, there was no way I could sell,” Parke avows. “Silky was still very healthy but had this issue retaining fluid. It was very difficult to get her in foal. But Dr. Karen Wolfsdorf, who's just a brilliant reproductive veterinarian, wouldn't give up. We did a lot of procedures and she got in foal fine, carried the foal fine, and foaled easy as could be.”

The Hard Spun filly showed such an immediate and astonishing competitive instinct that Parke had to provide her dam with a raised feed tub.

“She would kick at her mother and run her off the feed tub when she was, oh, 30 days old,” Parke marvels. “Silky's 16.1 and a big strong mare but that baby, she was tough.”

Needless to say, the filly was sent to Motion—via Robbie Harris in Ocala, who Parke salutes for teaching even this feisty youngster to relax. But the filly's ardor remained intact.

“She got turned sideways in a couple of races as a 2-year-old, got slammed really hard, but she got up and came running,” Parke recalls. “She's got no quit in her. It's just the blood, isn't it? She has the ability plus the heart, just pricks her ears and runs.”

Her name is Sparkle Blue, and Motion brought her through the ranks to round off her sophomore campaign on the brink of the elite: winning a graded stakes at the Keeneland fall meet before overcoming a rough trip for third in the GI American Oaks at Santa Anita.

“Graham hopes that she'll be even better at four,” Parke says. “She's changed tremendously since she was young, I don't know if it's the sire, or because she was a May foal. But you keep thinking you're going to wake up and it's all a dream. I've sold plenty of good horses for my clients, and enjoyed watching them run. And I've sold some good ones on my own. But you don't ever expect anything like this, it's just been an unbelievable gift.”

The experience has been “wonderfully” enhanced by George Strawbridge, who doesn't typically engage in partnerships but attests to Parke's standing in our community with his willingness to make an exception this time. Both are thoroughly in tune with Motion's patient style and Sparkle Blue has duly been indulged with a winter break, for a potential resumption at the Keeneland spring meet.

“And I can't say enough about Graham,” Parke emphasizes. “He's a great horseman, genuine and kind, a great communicator: really the kind of person we want to showcase our sport. Which is important, as we try to clean it up. I am an eternal optimist, and really think that we're turning the corner in some very important ways.”

True, she is dismayed by certain trends within bloodstock. When she started out, in 1978, she could sell foals out of ageing stakes producers. But now she finds that an ageing mare is no longer 18, but 13. And she's depressed by the difference in the kind of stallions used by clients who sell their foals, as opposed to those who want to runners to build a family. She misses the days when trainers would scout the sales themselves, and deplores the agents and pinhookers frightened to buy a nice foal by even a second-crop sire.

By this stage, however, she has long established what works for her farm. It has always housed around 30 mares, as a number that permits hands-on management, and doesn't accept the familiar mantra that youngsters need only to be left “to be horses.” Horses leaving her farm should be mentally equal to the regime that awaits them.

“I don't shed raise, I don't hothouse, but I do like to bring everything in once a day,” she explains. “In the afternoon they eat outside, they get to be competitive and bump each other around. But in the morning they come in, they get temped, they eat. Because someday they're going to have to be in a stall, and I don't want them to think of that just as somewhere they get vaccinations and their feet trimmed. I want them to lie down and find their stall's kindness.”

If she's noticed a pattern at all, it's that those whose personalities change after weaning tend not to cope at the racetrack.

“So the mind, to me, is very important,” she reflects. “They can be great-looking athletes, but even from our really good families we've had some that were too nervous and frantic. One of them was really gorgeous, but ended up mean and didn't train. They were all with good trainers, they just couldn't hold up at the track. So, long story short, I think disposition just as important as conformation.”

But she acknowledges that different things work for different people; that some investors, unlike Bacharach, are actually happier getting into that big white limo.

“It's relationships,” she says with a shrug. “Like there are big banks, small banks. I mean, I'm like my little bank in Georgetown. I've lost one client in 40 years—and we actually topped a sale that day! But he just said he needed a big fancy farm, somewhere to take people. I said, 'Well, I have a very pretty farm, but I don't have parties.' But that's okay. That's what suited him. And thank God we have the big corporate farms. We need them, to keep the stallions here. But everyone else I've worked for, from day one, wanted to talk to the person that saw their horse.”

She named it Valkyre “because that was where the maidens waited for the war heroes to come home.” Of course her venerable ladies are still here, too, cherished in retirement: Ava Knowsthecode, Wilshewed, Silky. But last week a fresh cycle began, with an auspiciously smooth foaling: nine o'clock in the evening, no assistance required, a healthy foal. And Parke was as excited as when the whole thing first began.

Back in those early days, she remembers a limousine ride to the Derby with Bacharach. (It wasn't always that jeep, then!) And he fell quiet for 20 minutes, working out a melody that had just come to him. It turned out to be That's What Friends Are For. And the eventual lyrics couldn't be more apt, if you could ask “Heartlight” or any of the other horses blessed by Parke's care over the past 45 years.

Keep smilin', keep shinin'

Knowing you can always count on me.

'Cause I tell you that's what friends are for

For good times and bad times

I'll be on your side forever more.

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Bloodlines: Freshman Sire Race Beginning To Pick Up The Pace

The freshmen sires of 2021 are pipping like chicks ready to break out of their shells. They've incubated long enough, and breeders, owners, and stallion managers are ready to see the results, as well as the racing public. After a year for gestation and a further two and half years of growth and preparation, the first-crop racers by these new sires are coming to the races, and some are getting their pictures taken.

Nine freshmen sires have had a black-type winner so far. Ashford's formerly Irish-based Caravaggio (by Scat Daddy) leads the group with three stakes winners, and Horse of the Year Gun Runner (Candy Ride) leads by earnings with a pair of stakes winners from his base at Three Chimneys. Unified (Candy Ride) stands at Lane's End and is in the mix with a pair of stakes winners also.

Practical Joke (Into Mischief; Ashford), Mohaymen (Tapit; Shadwell), Shaman Ghost (Ghostzapper; Adena Springs North), Bal a Bali (Put it Back; Calumet), and Eagle (Candy Ride; Valor Farm) each have one black-type winner, and Gormley (Malibu Moon; Spendthrift) is the latest to join the group of stakes sires after his High Oak won the Grade 2 Saratoga Special by 4 1/4 lengths over Gunite (Gun Runner) on Aug. 14.

Bred in Kentucky by Catherine Parke, High Oak is the fifth named foal and first stakes winner for his dam, the Elusive Quality mare Champagne Sue. Parke said, “When you get a super good-looking colt, and it goes to a trainer like Bill Mott, the sky's the limit,” and High Oak came along just when his dam needed the boost from a high-class stakes winner.

“This is such a good-looking, strong mare. She's a full 16.1 with a big, strong hindquarter, and she reproduces those looks. She's had several nice-looking foals,” Parke said, “including her first,” a Mineshaft colt who sold for six figures as a yearling and a 2-year-old, then won four races in Japan and earned $428,185.

Aside from that, Champagne Sue might be thought a hard-luck mare. “She had a barren year, then lost a foal,” Parke recalled. “We had a couple of years when I'd have given up on her, but for that pedigree.”

Champagne Sue is a half-sister to G3 Affirmed winner Golden Itiz (Tiznow) and G2 Prioress winner Sapphire n' Silk (Pleasant Tap).

The latter is the dam of two stakes winners, and all told, the second dam, Golden Tiy (Dixieland Band), has five daughters who have produced stakes winners. Most importantly, one of the winning half-sisters is Silk n' Sapphire (Smart Strike), whom Parke bought in 2008. The mare produced Grade 1 winner Shared Account (Breeders' Cup Filly Turf) and Grade 3 winner Colonial Flag (Pleasant Tap).

Parke bought Champagne Sue in 2010 and sold High Oak as a foal in 2019 for $37,000, the fifth-highest price for a weanling by Gormley. The colt resold as a yearling at Keeneland September for $70,000, the ninth-highest of 75 Gormley yearlings. Champagne Sue is back in foal to first-season sire Instagrand (Into Mischief).

Winner of the G1 FrontRunner in 2016 and the G1 Santa Anita Derby in 2017, Gormley covered his first book of mares in 2018 at Spendthrift and was immensely popular with breeders, many of whom scooped up seasons that gave them a lifetime breeding right in the horse. To secure a breeding right, mare owners had to sign up to breed a mare to the horse at a stud fee of $12,500 for the first two seasons. Of those, 57 completed the program and now own a lifetime right in an upwardly mobile freshman sire. Typical of the A.P. Indy sire line, Gormley is a sizable, lengthy horse who performed best at a mile and up, and a large part of his foals seem to be cast in this type with good size and scope.

High Oak won the Special going 6 1/2 furlongs and looked stronger at the end than at the midpoint of the Saratoga Special, which suggests he could improve when racing at longer distances.

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In addition to Gunite's second in the Saratoga Special, champion Gun Runner is one of three freshmen sons of leading sire Candy Ride with a stakes winner. Both Unified and Gun Runner have a pair of stakes winners. Eagle is the third son of Candy Ride, and he stands in Texas at Valor Farm. His daughter Eagle Express won the Pan Zareta division of the Texas Stallion Stakes at Lone Star. Eagle has eight foals in his first crop, whereas Gun Runner has 103 and Unified has 88.

Unified's daughter Behave Virginia won the Debutante Stakes at Churchill Downs on June 26, with Gun Runner's daughter Wicked Halo third. Unified added his second stakes winner on Aug. 15 when Roger McQueen won the Ellis Park Juvenile, and Gun Runner's son Costa Terra was third.

Last weekend, Gun Runner had his first two stakes winners when both Wicked Halo and Pappacap won. At Saratoga on Aug. 8, Wicked Halo won the G2 Adirondack Stakes by 3 ½ lengths, and the previous day, Pappacap won the G2 Best Pal at Del Mar by 4 3/4 lengths. Thanks to this positive stakes activity, Gun Runner sits atop the freshman sire standings with $802.863.

While Candy Ride is riding high with three well-regarded freshmen, both Tapit (Mohaymen and Divining Rod) and Malibu Moon (Gormley and Stanford) have two sons each in the top 15 at this point.

The lengthening distances and increasing competition will continue to illuminate the merits of the sires and their offspring, while providing fascinating racing in the coming months.

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INQUIRY Presented By Iowa Thoroughbred Breeders And Owners Association: Back To School

Whether it's backed by a diploma or a lifetime of experience, just about anyone in the horse racing industry could profess themselves to be an expert in something.

In this edition of INQUIRY, we ask the folks on the sales grounds to choose how they'd share that expertise with the world by asking the question, “If you taught a college course about horse racing, what would it be called?”

Catherine Parke – Valkyre Stud

“'Training A Racehorse, And Its Care.”

 

 

 

 

Tommy Eastham – Legacy Bloodstock

“It would be called 'Nonverbal Communication,' or 'Being Sensitive.' Communicating with this beast (the horse) without being able to go up and talk to them. Probably the biggest thing I see people miss with their horse care is it's not a 'to do' list. It's more of an art. Before you make a plan, you need to take a look at that horse, figure out its emotional state, try to figure out what's bothering it. The best way is to communicate with it.”

 

 

Conrad Bandoroff – Denali Stud

“'Horse Racing Economics.' You could look at how the market for horses mirrors the stock market. You could do some analytical data into economic trends in the horse business, and just showcase how large of an industry it is, and the size and scope of it.”

 

 

 

Katelyn Jackson – Elite Sales

“'Save Ground: How To Pick Your Spot.”'

 

 

 

 

 

Alfred Nuckols, Jr. – Hurstland Farm

“'Risk and Reward.' The class would be about trying to evaluate pedigrees. I like proven horses, but the risk market and reward market seem to be with a lot of these early horses, so I guess what you need to do is teach about these nice horses with pedigrees coming off the racetrack that everyone wants to breed to the first year.”

 

 

 

Bob Feld – Bobfeld Bloodstock

“It would be 'Handicapping 101.' For anyone in this business, it's the gambling and action that really drives the whole machinery.”

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