Featured Article - September 2009
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NEW MEXICO NOW
The Dash for the Cash
Ruidoso Downs' rich Triple Crown Trail for two-year-old quarter horses is chock-full of peaks and valleys. Robert La Rue rides along as owners, trainers, and jockeys chase the All American Futurity dream.
In the 10th race at New Mexico’s Ruidoso Downs on Labor Day, 2008, 10,000 pounds of expensive two-year-old horseflesh explode onto the track in quest of the $1 million winner’s share of the $1.9 million 50th All American Futurity, the most prestigious quarter-horse race in the United States. In the next 21 seconds, the 10 horses—who qualified for this race out of 4,956 two-year-olds—will do what they were born to do.
Soon into the race—440 yards of straightaway into the afternoon sun—it becomes clear that this is a two-horse contest.
Stolis Winner and Jet Black Patriot break clear and avoid the inevitable bumping and crowding that take place in the pack. They lock into a neck-and-neck struggle for the lead, the other eight horses trailing behind them. Midway, Stolis Winner’s rider, G. R. Carter, urges the big gelding on, and he moves ahead to win by half a length, eight-and-a-half lengths ahead of the trailer, Burner On. Only 1.376 seconds separate the first and last horses in the race.
Quick and simple as that. Or so it may seem to the $2 bettor in the grandstand who is having a fine, sunny, beer-and-hot-dog Labor Day holiday at the races. But the road to the finish line of the All American Futurity is bumpier than the track the horses run on—and it’s not all straightaway.
Chasing the Dream
The first step onto the track on this Futurity day was taken roughly three years ago, when a sire and a dam were selected to produce the runner. Bloodlines matter. As Louie Armstrong said of jazz, “If ya ain’t got it in ya, ya can’t blow it out.” Even the most tone-deaf horseman would agree with that. Despite some exceptions, good bloodlines make good horses, which is to say, horses with speed and heart equal winners.
All the 2008 All American entries have good bloodlines. Going back six generations, Stolis Winner’s pedigree shows 14 All American trials entrants, eight of whom advanced to the big race, and three of whom won it all. He was bred to be a champion.
Stolis Winner’s breeder, Jerry Windham of College Station, Texas, is also his owner. Windham bred two other horses in the Futurity, but Stolis Winner was his best hope to win it. “Once they got out in the middle of the race,” he tells an interviewer, “there was not a horse in the country that was going to pass him because he’s just not going to let them.”
If breeding provides the raw material for a foal to become a racehorse, that raw material must be molded, instructed, and disciplined from its earliest days, until it reaches a peak of physical conditioning and mental acuity on race day. The grooms, the exercise riders, the veterinarians—each has a hand in it, but it’s the trainer who manages it all. There’s the physical training—the endless galloping, gate training, and timed workouts.
There are the diets and medications and wraps for the legs. All fall under the trainer’s watchful eye and direction.
On another level, perhaps the most important, there is the special, quieter art of listening. Horses may not speak, but they are good communicators. A thoughtful, patient trainer can learn much about his charge just by paying attention—to the horse’s ears, its eyes, the heat or coolness of its fetlocks, its body language and attitudes. But it’s more than mere observation; it’s hearing what the horse is saying in its speechless way. A good trainer gets inside his horse’s head. Then he can get from the horse what he wants and, not incidentally, what the horse wants, too—to win.
A case in point: One day in July, I visit the barn of trainer Michael Joiner, whose colt, Imasurebet, finished eighth in the 2008 All American. When I arrive, Joiner is walking Jess My Moon, another of his horses slated to race later in the day. After a while he stops and runs his hands all over Jess My Moon’s body, feeling the horse and letting the horse feel him, to gain confidence from the experience in his hands. Jess My Moon is impatient. He rolls his eyes and his body is tense. Joiner seems oblivious to this. He begins talking in a steady, slow, soft monotone, his mouth close to the horse’s ear, and both the horse and the man are listening. He keeps talking for a good five minutes. Gradually, the tension leaves the horse.
Satisfied, Joiner leads him into the barn.
“That was impressive,” I say. “You kind of melted him.”
“He’s a stud colt and he bites. I was just trying to settle him down, get his head straight.”
That afternoon, Jess My Moon won his race.
Eric Curtis, trainer of Jet Black Patriot, says that he treats all horses as individuals, then adds with a grin, “JBP is a laid-back horse. We have the same temperament. In the mornings, he just likes to graze and take it easy after galloping. I keep him company in the pasture.”
Chris Zamora, rider of Burner On, takes the colt out each afternoon to run cold water on his legs and let him play with the hose. “They get bored,” Zamora says. “I do this with him every day. It’s good for his attitude. We’re buddies.” He kisses Burner On’s nose. “There’s a little devil in him. He was hard to break.”
“Our devils wear horseshoes,” says Chris’s wife, Jamie, the horse’s trainer, whose fingernails are painted purple, the official color of the Zamora Racing Team.
New Mexico Horse Racing? When, last May at Churchill Downs, Mine That Bird sprinted past 18 horses in the long stretch to win the 135th Kentucky Derby, the brown gelding warmed the hearts—and filled the pocketbooks—of many admiring New Mexicans. Owned by Double Eagle Ranch and Buena Suerte Equine, in Roswell, and trained by Bennie "Chip" Woolley Jr., of Bloomfield, Mine that Bird became the first New Mexico-based horse to win the Run for the Roses. The three-year-old was based at Sunland Park most of that spring before pulling off the second-biggest upset in Derby history at 50:1, rewarding bettors with a whopping $103.20 payoff for every $2 bet. The win not only sent shockwaves through simulcasting parlors throughout New Mexico, but gave the state's horse-racing industry a big shot in the arm. New Mexico is home to five racetracks, which host six racing meets throughout the year: Sunland Park, on the Texas-New Mexico stateline; Ruidoso Downs, in Ruidoso; Zia Park, in Hobbs; SunRay Park, in Farmington; and The Downs at Albuquerque, which hosts its own races as well as the New Mexico State Fair meet this month as part of Expo New Mexico. All five tracks feature both thoroughbred and quarter-horse racing, and a full complement of wagering both straight (win, place, show) and exotic (daily double, quiniela, exacta, trifecta, superfecta). For racing dates and more information, visit the tracks' websites.—Walter K. Lopez |
Heath Taylor trains Stolis Winner, Jess Zoomin, and Mighty Corona, who respectively finished first, third, and ninth in the All American. Taylor, who holds a bachelor’s degree in business, has a big operation: 55 full-time employees and, at any given time, 120 to 160 horses under training at facilities in Texas and Louisiana. In the 18 years he’s been training, Taylor has become one of the leaders in stakes wins and money earned—more than $20 million.
Compared with the operations of Joiner, Curtis, and Zamora, Taylor’s is mammoth. Yet his approach to training differs little from theirs. “It all comes down to preparation and luck,” Taylor says. “A horse is not a machine. Not a tractor. You don’t just fix it to run. You bring out its best with work, patience, and respect for the animal. It seems we’ve brought along Stolis Winner so that he’s developing and maturing at just the right time. But if you for a moment think that you have all the answers, you’ll get surprised. Training is like life: If you think you know everything, you stop living and start dying.”
No, you never know everything, and surprises, some of them devastating, can pop up along the way to the finish line. On July 26–27, 2008, for example, the rains came to Ruidoso. A 100-year flood—the remnants of Hurricane Dolly—sent the Río Ruidoso surging over its banks and sweeping through the town, eroding great slabs of earth, ripping down trees, and shattering buildings. The river normally meanders picturesquely through the infield of the racetrack, but on this day the entire infield became its bed, and onlookers feared that racing might be ended for the year. Decisive action by the track’s owner, R. D. Hubbard, saved the day, and cleanup crews had the track in racing shape less than a week after the incident.
Racetracks are repairable. Other things are not.
Hitting the Triple Crown Trail
Three major futurities are held each summer at Ruidoso Downs: the Ruidoso, the Rainbow, and the All American. The Ruidoso offers the smallest purse ($500,000 this year), the Rainbow is next ($650,000 estimated), followed by the largest, the All American ($2 million estimated).
Wes Giles, who trains some 60 horses at facilities in Farmington, Ruidoso, and Sunland Park, came to Ruidoso last May with high hopes for a fine season. He brought with him a two-year-old filly, Fast Prize Zoom, who set a world record in the West Texas Futurity at Sunland Park in April. Another of Giles’s horses, Feature Ten, finished second in that race.
Giles is a careful, hands-on trainer (he rides his own horses in the post parade because he likes “to see how they’re warming up, maybe learn something that could be corrected”). He held Fast Prize Zoom out of the Ruidoso Futurity to let her rest. Likewise, Heath Taylor held out Stolis Winner. Jess Significant, trained by Carl Draper, won the Ruidoso Futurity but wasn’t a factor the rest of the meet. Giles’s Feature Ten was third, and he, too, faded from prominence.
At the Rainbow trials, Fast Prize Zoom is the top qualifier. Second best is Stolis Winner. But when the Rainbow Futurity rolls around two weeks later, Stolis Winner was on top and Fast Prize Zoom finished an undistinguished fourth.
The next morning, I go to Giles’s barn. Standing forlornly in the middle of the barn is Jill, Wes’s wife, and his partner in all he does. Tears wet her cheeks.
“What’s wrong?”
“They just came and took Zoom away,” she says. Dissatisfied with the filly’s performance in the Rainbow, the owner, Ed Smith, took her from Giles’s care and gave her to another trainer, Heath Taylor. He had done it abruptly, without ceremony, and it was final.
Later, as Giles compulsively pulls weeds around his barn in an effort to occupy himself and control his frustration, he tells me, “Jockeys and trainers are the first to go. Some people can’t handle getting beat.
You race long enough, you get beat. If you can’t take it, you shouldn’t be in this business.”
He pauses. “I still have some good horses—Feature Ten and Ravin Corona.”
Feature Ten fails to qualify for the All American. Ravin Corona wins his trial but breaks a leg crossing the finish line and has to be destroyed. Nor did Fast Prize Zoom qualify for the All American. Taylor, who had no better luck with the filly than did Giles, says, “She may be tired. She’ll be heard from again.”
Giles says, “I feel bad for the horse, but maybe that owner wasn’t smarter than everybody else.”
Michael Joiner understands Giles’s predicament. “It’s a roller coaster. Four years ago we won nearly everything up here, but you can’t do that every year. I lost 10 horses this year, some from colic or bleeding, some because of injuries.”
The All American Futurity
Bumps in the track surface, curves in the straightaway—they disappear in the raucous benediction of the screaming, grinning mob near the Winner’s Circle at the 50th All American Futurity, where Heath Taylor, whose horse has just won $1 million, can hardly catch his breath for laughing; where jockey G. R. Carter,
a champion gymnast in high school, backflips off his mount, then continues backflipping 30 yards down the track, where a woman in a glittery, spangled vest and hat shouts hysterically, “Omigod! Omigod! Omigod!”
And Stolis Winner, a big, sweaty, rangy bay gelding, stands like a rock at the center of it all, thinking perhaps of a pail of oats back in the dusty quiet of his barn.
Afterword
For the first time in the 50 years of the All American Futurity, the winner was disqualified. Stolis Winner’s post-race urine samples tested positive for caffeine, a substance banned in New Mexico horse racing. Stolis Winner was unplaced, Jet Black Patriot was declared the winner, and the $2 million purse was redistributed. Stolis Winner’s trainer, Heath Taylor, has appealed the ruling.
At the appeal, scheduled for December 1, 2009, at Zia Park in Hobbs, Taylor says he will have his day in court. He has not yet testified, but looks forward to making it clear “on behalf of myself, the owner [Jerry Windham], and the horse, that we are 100 percent innocent. I respect the New Mexico Racing Commission and appreciate this opportunity. This is the business I love, and I am deeply saddened to be associated with anything negative about it. I want to clear it up.”
Meanwhile, Stolis Winner, after a layoff to recuperate from an injury, is back in training at Ruidoso Downs. According to Taylor, he is doing well.
IF YOU GO: The 51st annual All American Futurity takes place on Labor Day, September 7, 2009.
For info: (575) 378-4431, www.raceruidoso.com
