Celebratory in all its doomed dilapidation, the Pimlico Race Course building shook as fans cheered for history.
Across a sloppy dirt track and a wet turf course in temporary hospitality structures, more of the estimated 40,000 in attendance marveled at the spectacle. Near the infield winner’s circle, used just twice a year, a hundred owners chanted their horse’s name as if he were a hockey goalie a minute from a playoff shutout.
And Audie Otto found a quiet place to appreciate it all.
Breeder of 2024 Preakness Stakes-G1 winner Seize the Grey, Otto stood by an infield picket fence and watched her horse.
“Oh look at him,” she said as the gray Arrogate colt walked on the turf course and 25-year-old jockey Jaime Torres encouraged all those fans for cheers. “He tried so hard, he didn’t get tired, he was so good today.”
Otto thought of her mother, Tolie, who died 13 months earlier. She named the family’s racing/breeding operation Jamm Ltd. for the first initials of her children – John, Audie, Michael and Matthew – and bred/owned successful Thoroughbreds while never keeping more than a half-dozen mares. Tolie Otto would have loved a Preakness win, her daughter said with a look toward the sky, “Mom, this is something.” A few yards away, Seize the Grey received the blanket of black-eyed Susans and circled for the NBC television cameras as afternoon turned to evening in Baltimore May 18. Behind her, “Seize the Grey . . . Seize the Grey . . . Seize the Grey” droned from some of the 2,570 partners in the MyRacehorse microshare ownership venture.
“This is the first Triple Crown leg that we’ve won and the first time we’ve even been here,” Audie said. “My mom and dad were friends with Charlie Cella, who owned Oaklawn Park, and he used to take them to the Arkansas Derby with a big group of people. They got the bug and got into racing.
“They are here. They are. I can feel them and I know that they are so tickled. I know that they are. I’m kind of speechless. What’s really amazing about it is I only have five broodmares, and here we are.”
The feeling was all around.
Based on qualifying points, Seize the Grey didn’t make the Kentucky Derby-G1 field two weeks earlier at Churchill Downs. Rather than waiting out the scratch list as an alternate, trainer D. Wayne Lukas aimed for the Pat Day Mile Stakes-G2 on the same card. Seize the Grey split horses in the stretch and won by 1 1⁄4 lengths to earn a spot in the 149th Preakness.
Sent off at nearly 10-1 for the $2 million classic, he went right to the front and turned aside all challengers including a big one from Derby winner Mystik Dan at the top of the stretch. Seize the Grey won by 2 1⁄4 lengths in 1:56.82 for 13⁄16 miles over a track labeled muddy but leaning toward “peanut butter” according to the winning trainer. Favorite Mystik Dan hung on to second by a head over Catching Freedom. Lukas, 88, won his seventh Preakness – 44 years after the first with Codex in 1980.
“It doesn’t get old, it’s still the same,” said the Hall of Famer, who spent another Preakness Week telling stories from his unparalleled career, and then adding to it. “In 1980, I had the first one here I ever ran, and it still feels the same . . . One of the things that was very significant to me today – and maybe it’s because I’m getting a little bit older – but as I came out of the grandstand and out across the racetrack, every one of the guys that were in that race stopped and hugged me and gave me a handshake. That meant more to me than any single thing.”
At the annual Alibi Breakfast two days before the race, Lukas told jokes about old age, country music, pajamas, hotels, jigsaw puzzles, elephants in rooms and anything else you could imagine – pausing to ask, “Are we supposed to say something about our horses?” Answering his own question, he turned to the race itself and said, “Nobody’s going to steal it.”
Well, nobody else.
Leading the Way
Morning-line favorite at entry time, California-based Arkansas Derby-G1 winner Muth was scratched after he spiked a fever at Pimlico the week of the race. The defection left eight starters, topped by Derby winner Mystik Dan. Fourth in the Derby, Catching Freedom wound up the second choice among a group that included one other starter from the first step of the Triple Crown (Just Steel, 17th). Muth’s Bob Baffert-trained stablemate Imagination, a Grade 2 winner in March, made the field along with the Grade 2-placed Tuscan Gold, Pennsylvania-bred Withers Stakes-G3 winner Uncle Heavy and longshot Mugatu (a son of Maryland stallion Blofeld).
Seize the Grey exited post five in the clear as fellow Lukas trainee Just Steel jumped to the right and into Tuscan Gold. From the outside stall, Imagination left running for Frankie Dettori. Past the finish line the first time, Seize the Grey and Imagination vied for control. They hit the first turn together, Imagination wide and strong, Seize the Grey inside and relaxed on a long hold through a quarter-mile in :23.98. Behind them, Mystik Dan stalked on the rail alongside Just Steel. Seize the Grey led by 2 lengths after a half in :47.33 – handling the mud and finding a comfort zone.
“I thought when they’re going down the backside that it would be very hard to catch him,” Lukas said. “The one thing that really surprised me, though, is when I walked across the track after the race, I was amazed at how deep and sticky it was. Watching them run over it, the way he did it, I thought he just skipped over it.”
Midway through the final turn, Brian Hernandez Jr. gave Mystik Dan some rein and he closed the gap to draft into second while pushing Imagination and Just Steel wider. Behind them, Catching Freedom revved up.
Seize the Grey led by about a length at the quarter pole, as Mystik Dan tipped out for a bid and looked primed to keep his Triple Crown bid alive.
He switched to his right lead as the field crossed the mud marks left by the starting gate and took aim. Seize the Grey responded and led past the eighth pole. Mystik Dan made one final play in the last sixteenth, but never threatened as Catching Freedom rallied latest of all for third.
“I was going to do whatever Imagination was going to do,” said Torres. “I knew he was going to go to the lead. I think we looked at each other and he said, ‘Well, you go’ and I went so I took the lead. He’s such an amazing horse. He just relaxed for me, and he felt the other horses coming close and he was just looking at them. As soon as I asked, I had a lot of horse. That was like from the quarter [pole] to the wire, he gave me everything.”
Seize the Grey won for the fourth time and earned $1.2 million for the victory. Purchased by MyRacehorse for $300,000 at Fasig-Tipton’s Saratoga select yearling sale in 2022, he won the second start of his career at Saratoga nearly a year later with a front-running upset of future Belmont Stakes-G1 winner Dornoch July 29. Third in the off-the-turf Skidmore Stakes in mid-August, Seize the Grey completed his 2-year-old campaign with a fourth in the Iroquois Stakes-G3 in September and a third in allowance company at Keeneland in October.
The Preakness winner opened 2024 with an allowance win at Oaklawn Park in February, finished third in the Jeff Ruby Steaks-G3 at Turfway Park in March and was seventh in the Blue Grass Stakes-G1 at Keeneland in April. Lukas replaced Nik Juarez with Torres and Seize the Grey produced in the Pat Day and the Preakness. Seventh in the Belmont Stakes, he finished June with the four wins from 11 starts for $1,839,938 in earnings.
In the Beginning
Those trips to the Arkansas Derby with Cella surely planted a seed, but Tolie Otto’s Thoroughbred connections came from a variety of directions via St. Louis and elsewhere.
She was part of a group of friends including owners/breeders Nancy Vanier, Jerry Amerman and Shirley Taylor each with ties to Mill Ridge and its founder Alice Chandler. Taylor and Tolie Otto owned Existentialist together and the mare produced eight foals, six winners, and two seven-figure sales yearlings before selling for $1.2 million herself in 2000. Tolie’s husband John played polo and rode show horses, and the family lived for a time at the Bridlespur Hunt Club near St. Louis. Horses, though not necessarily racehorses, were always part of the family and especially so during the annual Bridlespur Horse Show.
“It would be magical as a little girl,” said Audie Otto. “I’d go to sleep one night and the pasture and fields were empty and I’d wake up the next morning and there would be all this activity and horses.”
The pursuit came naturally thanks to family ties to Anheuser-Busch, the Wallace Pencil Company and a food-service management business with contracts throughout the Midwest including St. Louis University, Busch Stadium and the Cincinnati Reds.
“Mom came from a very affluent family,” said Audie Otto. “She did whatever she wanted, but was very unassuming. You wouldn’t have known. Dad came from a nice family as well. He was a polo player, a really good show jumper with lots of trophies and what have you. I don’t know how he got started riding. It was just part of his life. He started the food-service business with his brother-in-law, but he always said he’d have been happier walking hots on the racetrack.”
Tolie Otto moved to Lexington, Ky., to be closer to the Thoroughbred world and connected her daughter to the business and the 900-acre Mill Ridge, which has operated as a breeding, foaling, stallion and sales-prep farm since its formation in 1962. Stallions Oscar Performance and Aloha West fill the roster now, following Gone West and Diesis (GB) among others.
Breeder of Epsom Derby winner Sir Ivor, Chandler died in 2021 but her influence still percolates on the farm through her son Headley Bell and grandson Price Bell and clients such as Audie Otto.
“It’s completely about the horses, I wouldn’t do it otherwise,” said Audie. “Mom and I had a very complicated relationship, it wasn’t the closest, and when I became an adult, I consciously looked for something that would connect us. It became horses. That was somewhere we could meet. When it came to horses and the business, I respected her and trusted her and that became the place where we connected. Horses can do anything. They really can.”
In 2007, Jamm spent $450,000 on maiden broodmare Shop Again at Keeneland November. The Wild Again mare, in foal to First Samurai, needed a $45,000 maiden claimer to get her first win (after 13 losses), but won four races including a stakes at Remington Park in 2006 while earning $122,274. Her half-sister, millionaire Miss Shop, won a Saratoga Grade 1 three months before the sale. In addition, Shop Again came from a deep female family tracing through the storied breeding programs of Hobeau Farm, Arthur Hancock III, Ogden Mills Phipps and Wheatley Stable.
The First Samurai foal, a filly, sold for $330,000 as a yearling. A 2009 Gone West filly won once for her breeders. A 2010 Pulpit colt turned into Grade 1 winner Power Broker. A 2011 Tiznow filly, Fierce Boots, won a stakes for Bobby Flay. A Malibu Moon filly, Fast Retailing, sold for $1 million. Jamm kept Shop Again’s 2013 filly by Smart Strike. Named Smart Shopping, she won her debut at Churchill Downs for trainer Brendan Walsh in November 2015, placed in a stakes the following winter and was retired two starts later.
She joined her dam in the broodmare band and tried to add to the family legacy. Her 2022 yearling went to Saratoga as part of the Mill Ridge consignment, with his place in the last crop of Arrogate (who died in 2020) and that female family the only sales pitches.
“He was the third foal out of the mare, she hadn’t had any production yet so he was kind of in that gap year,” said Mill Ridge general manager Price Bell. “He always carried himself really well and the idea was to go to Saratoga where people can look at him, take him in and enjoy him. We often go to Saratoga and sell very few horses over the average of the sale, but we have sold a lot of good stakes horses out of there because you’re given the confidence from the Fasig team to bring good horses. They tell us to bring racehorses and give people a chance to see them.”
Roderick Wachman and MyRacehorse saw Seize the Grey and went to $300,000 – $168,217 below the average, $75,000 under the median and $2 million less than the sales-topper and eventual Derby and Belmont-placed Sierra Leone.
“We as consignors are constantly weighing the question of ‘Where does this horse stand on the biggest platform?’ ” said Mill Ridge managing partner Headley Bell. “You’re going to be scrutinized at Saratoga, but people could see he was a late-April foal, and that he was still developing. It allows you to get in front of people who aren’t making a list of horses. They’re there to look at horses, individual horses.”
When she found out who bought her horse, Audie Otto purchased five shares, so she wound up a co-owner and breeder of a classic winner a little more than a year after her mother died at 87. The pipeline includes a 2-year-old Justify—Smart Shopping filly who will go to Brendan Walsh, plus an Oscar Performance—Shop Again yearling colt headed to Saratoga this summer.
“Headley helps us decide what to keep and what to sell, and I remember we had another Arrogate at the time and [Seize the Grey] was a standout,” she said. “I don’t typically race the colts, but I like to race a little bit more than Mom did and I’m in the middle of building my portfolio from within. The accomplishment is sort of mind-boggling. To have this be one of my first decisions I made on my own kind of leaves me speechless.”
Much like she was while standing in the Pimlico infield late on Preakness Day.
“That’s one of my favorite moments – where we were – the fact that everybody was so focused on the winner’s circle that we got to have that time and that space and getting to see him come back and get the blanket of flowers put on him,” she said. “That to me is what it’s all about. Getting to be in that kind of moment. What a cool customer he was through it all. I was so proud of him.”
