When Toby Edwards went to work for Irish trainer Arthur Moore in 1985 and listened to tales of a trip to the United States with steeplechase star *L'Escargot for the 1970 Colonial Cup, the facts barely made sense.
An Irish-based horse, trained by Moore's father Dan, who'd won the Cheltenham Gold Cup in March, traveled to Camden, S.C. -- by way of Nova Scotia -- in November for the first running of a $100,000 steeplechase? The future English Grand National winner started in a field of 22 that included not only the best American runners but *Crisp from Australia, *Ermitage from France, *Young Ash Leaf from England, *L'Escargot's rival *French Tan II and Irish Grand National winner *Herring Gull? In 1970? With star jockeys Tommy Carberry, Eddie Harty and Pat Taaffe taking on American stalwarts Joe Aitcheson, Jerry Fishback, Tom Skiffington, Leo and Michael O'Brien and Doug Small?
"I knew his father trained *L'Escargot and I remember watching him win the Grand National and the Gold Cup when I was a child," Edwards said. "We talked about *L'Escargot and he said one of his favorite trips was to the Colonial Cup. He traveled with the horse and talked about what it was like and how it went. I didn't know what Camden was then and I don't think I could have pointed to South Carolina on a map."
So afford Edwards some leeway if he pauses to appreciate the moment when the Colonial Cup returns to the racing calendar as a Grade 1 steeplechase Nov. 17. The meet's executive director can hardly believe it himself when you spell it all out.
"It's amazing how life is a circle," he said last month. "If you'd told me then that 30 years later I'd be living in Camden running that racetrack I would have said you were out of your mind."
Nevertheless, here Edwards is.
The Englishman navigates the return of one of U.S. jump racing's signature events. Founded by Marion duPont Scott and Ray Woolfe, the race was an end-of-season fixture from that inaugural event through 2016 -- crowning champions, showcasing future Hall of Famers and proving points with its 23⁄4 miles, 17 jumped-only-once fences, sprawling course and lucrative purse. The race, and the November meet that hosted it, halted after the 2016 running -- won by Maryland-bred Top Striker -- due to the financial constraints of putting on two annual race meets at Springdale Race Course.
Wildly successful from a sponsorship and attendance viewpoint, the spring Carolina Cup carried the more stately Colonial Cup autumn meet until it couldn't anymore. Faced with having to shelve both someday, Edwards' predecessor John Cushman advised his board to scrap the November race.
Toby Edwards
I'm the one who recommended to the board that we had to close it down or we were going to go broke," said Cushman, a Camden resident and retired champion steeplechase jockey who has seen every Colonial Cup.
"I was 10 years old when the first one was run. It was a big deal, a BIG deal. I was born into a horse-racing family, but I'm probably a better businessman than I was a horseman and there wasn't any choice. We couldn't keep absorbing those losses the race was producing."
For years, a raucous tailgating area called College Park fueled much of the Carolina Cup's attendance and the Carolina Cup Racing Association's revenue growth -- thanks to 200 busloads of college kids from the Carolinas and beyond and dozens of party tents. The atmosphere also brought safety issues, publicity, social-media posts and internet videos better left to the Spring Break movie or old-school Cinemax network and problems no one foresaw.
"College Park was fast becoming a major liability and the story about the races being told was not about the families and the fun or the horses, it was about what was happening in College Park which was out of control," said Edwards.
"What you found as an event organizer was that the story was being told live on social media and you had no ability to try to change that story."
The attention brought scrutiny from law enforcement, pushback from sponsors, negative notoriety. And changes. The association, which oversees both meets, stopped selling College Park tickets. The buses went elsewhere; so did the revenue they generated.
"Sponsors are concerned if their name is attached to an event that had a reputation such as College Park did," said Edwards, whose meet benefits the Health Services District of South Carolina. "It was the right decision, but financially it was a big hit."
Ultimately, the Colonial Cup took that hit.
"The reason it folded was purely economics, a lack of ticket sales, a lack of robust sponsorship," said Edwards.
A former steeplechase trainer and jockey based in Camden, he'd long been involved with the races in one form or another. When Cushman, executive director from 1990-2000 and brought back on an interim basis in 2017, raised the idea of taking the position Edwards listened. Sort of.
"I was hesitant," Edwards said. "I saw the challenges."
There was no College Park. The Colonial Cup came back as a spring feature in 2018, but there were no plans to continue it. The job was to make the spring meet a success, without an important revenue source, keep the Springdale course and training center operational and find firm financial footing to sustain it all.
He shadowed Cushman for months, used the challenges as motivation and then talked himself into accepting the job -- with a caveat.
"Toby, you need a goal. What's that goal going to be?" he told/asked himself. "The goal has to be bringing back that final day of championship racing in the fall, Marion duPont Scott's dream, the Colonial Cup."
All of it nearly ended less than two years later when South Carolina's first case of Covid-19 occurred in Camden just before the 2020 spring race meet. Edwards remembers an emergency board meeting to discuss the consequences of running the races, watching tents get erected on the race course and drawing the conclusion that canceling was the only real choice. Like many jump races, the Carolina Cup didn't happen in 2020.
Peter Winants Collection / Maryland Horse Library (2)
Marion duPont Scott, at the Colonial Cup in 1970, was the driving force behind the new race and is remembered as its namesake now. Below: The 22-horse field heads to the second fence of the first Colonial Cup in 1970.
The Colonial Cup’s original course map at Springdale Race Course. The 2024 race will be run
at 2 5/8 miles over Springdale’s standard hurdle course, which has a watering system.
The meet offered full refunds to sponsors and ticket purchasers. Some rolled them over to 2021, when the meet occurred in late May instead of late March, but vendors needed to be paid and the financial picture grew even more scrambled.
"That financially set us back, but we've now put together three very successful years and we decided that there was no time like the present," Edwards said. "Let's bring back the Colonial Cup."
The 49th running carries a $150,000 purse, Grade 1 status and is part of a six-race card worth $320,000 thanks in large part to corporate partners Mullikin Law Firm, Brown Advisory, South Carolina Blue Cross/Blue Shield, the City of Camden, the South Carolina Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism, Kershaw County, Woodford Reserve, Ford's Gin and a slew of others.
"We've had great support from our board, great support from people in our community and great support from the players in the game who helped us raise some of the purse money," Edwards said. "There's no doubt the town is excited and looking forward to it. It's fallen off people's radar a little bit and it's going to take us a couple years to build it back to get back on people's social calendars in the fall."
The race meet isn't new, but also didn't happen for seven years. The absence created a learning curve for organizers, potential sponsors, spectators, even horsemen.
"The hardest part is sponsorship because you're selling a dream and companies want facts and figures and numbers and return on their investment," Edwards said. "In the spring, we have all those numbers. In the fall, we don't. That's been a heavy lift to get sponsors to see our dream, but those things will, I'd like to think, be easier after we've got a couple years under our belts.
"We weren't going to bring it back for one year. We needed to figure out bringing it back to stay. I'm hopeful and confident we'll be able to pull it off."
Tom Mullikin, chairman of the Carolina Cup Racing Association board, pointed to key partnerships with helping ensure the Colonial Cup's return.
"There have been two fundamental pivots for us: the state has invested heavily in the property so we're making really significant capital improvements, and for we are getting broad engagement from the community," he said. "As important as the jockeys, trainers, owners are, having broad support with the community and the state is very important too."
Equestrian activites drive tourism dollars to the area, and the spring and fall races are a key component along with polo, horse shows, etc. Recognition from state, county and city governmenets of that importance, plus a rebranding away from College Park and toward more family activities, have changed the equation.
"The economics of the equestrian sector is incredibly important but it's a three- or four-legged stool," Mullikin said. "You've got to have the other pieces to it. We've got a formula now, and we're going to work it."
The Same, but Different
A traditionalist will wince at the second half of this sentence, but the return of the Colonial Cup is not the full return of the Colonial Cup.
The old, packed-pine fences went away after the 2010 running -- in favor of the standard National Fence -- and aren't coming back. That move was made to save money and ensure uniform jumping questions throughout the race and to the rest of the races on the schedule. One year, the pine trees harvested for the fences might produce stiff branches. Another year, far softer ones. The Cup Course required 17 individual jumps, a heavy lift no matter the construction, when every other hurdle course in the country features multiple laps of the same circuit.
The sweeping course with the longest backstretch, widest turns and largest infield in U.S. jumps racing won't be used this year, or the foreseeable future, and the distance has been shortened to 25⁄8 miles instead of 23⁄4. With help from the state, gifted the property when Scott died in 1983, Springdale installed irrigation on its main hurdle course last year. The move paid immediate dividends with healthier turf and better footing for horses. The budget didn't include the outer course, reserved mainly for two races per year, however.
"With the health and safety of the horses being paramount it was felt that to run it over the original layout -- including the outer course -- horses would be racing on irrigated ground, then to whatever Mother Nature gave us and then back on irrigated ground," Edwards said. "That was not in the best interests of the horses. Hopefully we will come up with the funds to irrigate that outer track . . . and bring it back to what it was."
That tall order will have to wait, for now, as simply bringing back the race and its host race meet were challenges enough.
The race will still help decide the Eclipse Award for North America's champion steeplechaser and provide one more goal for the top horses. Richer at $250,000, October's American Grand National in New Jersey served as the final Grade 1 stop on the schedule the last several years but racing continued for another month or more and the top horses typically didn't start again. Now, the Colonial Cup steps into a void, even as other Grade 1 jump races have joined the schedule at NSA meets and host racetracks. In 2023, the schedule included just five Grade 1 hurdle races. This year, there will be nine. The Colonial Cup and its 12 jumps will write the last chapter.
"It was an empty feeling not having it," said Edwards. "We're excited to give owners another opportunity. I hope all those horses that have run in the top three in Grade 1s up to now will show up and we'll have one hell of a fantastic race and people will someday talk about it the way we talk about the early days of the Colonial Cup."
A Signature Race from the Start
In 1969 former trainer and amateur jockey Ray Woolfe, who oversaw Springdale for Scott, proposed the idea of an important international jump race as a way to celebrate the 300th anniversary of a South Carolina settlement at what is now Charleston.
On National Steeplechase Day at Saratoga, South Carolina Gov. Robert McNair made an official announcement of the $100,000 race to be run in November 1970. Organizers raised purse money, invited and enticed foreign horses with travel stipends, built fences, expanded the course, sold the idea and then watched it all become a reality. Twenty-two horses made it to Camden for the race, run in a rainstorm Nov. 14, 1970.
The squad included American stars Top Bid, Shadow Brook, Tingle Creek, High Patches and a slew of others. Nine runners made their previous starts in other countries, none more acclaimed than *L'Escargot. Owned by U.S. Ambassador to Ireland Raymond Guest, the 7-year-old won the Cheltenham Gold Cup in March and had conquered America the year before with a win in the Meadow Brook Steeplechase at Belmont Park.
Nicknamed "The Black Kangaroo," Australian champion *Crisp made a stop in South Carolina on his way to England. *French Tan II and *Herring Gull added further class. Irishman Harty, the father of American-based trainer Eoin, rode *Big Valley II for English trainer Toby Balding. Taaffe, best known as the rider of the mighty Arkle, got the mount on *Herring Gull.
In the end, the Americans prevailed as Top Bid, Shadow Brook and Jaunty completed the first three positions. *L'Escargot and Carberry checked in fourth, best of the overseas runners. France's *Ermitage finished sixth, followed by *Crisp. Marylander Mikey Smithwick trained the winner, ridden by another Marylander Joe Aitcheson. Owner Lillian Phipps' horses finished first and third, taking home $73,000 (almost $600,000 by today's standards).
The first Colonial Cup's depth would become clearer with time. Aitcheson and Smithwick were inducted into Thoroughbred racing's Hall of Fame, along with Shadow Brook's trainer Sidney Watters Jr., plus jockey Jerry Fishback (fifth aboard *Encarnado) and trainer Mickey Walsh (10th with *Dictora).
“It’s such a magical race. Historically, it’s always been an important race and it’s just a hard race to win. It was unique and it was a distinguishing race . . . Hopefully, it’s here to stay.”
– Sanna Neilson, one of three people to win the Colonial Cup as a trainer and a jockey
After Camden, L'Escargot went back across the Atlantic and won another Cheltenham Gold Cup in 1971 and the Grand National at Aintree in 1975. Crisp won England's Queen Mother Champion Chase in 1971 and battled Red Rum in an epic Grand National in 1973. Conceding 23 pounds, Crisp led for most of the race and touched down over the last with a 15-length lead only to be caught in the final two strides and lose by three-quarters of a length. L'Escargot was third in that race, the first of three National wins for Red Rum.
America's Tingle Creek went to England and won 23 times, becoming a fan favorite as a blazing, bold-jumping 2-mile specialist over chase fences. The Virginia-bred is honored with the Tingle Creek Chase at his favorite track Sandown.
Then a seven-pound apprentice jump jockey, and student at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Kip Elser finished 15th on The Critter -- owned by Elser's father Henry and trained by Ronnie Houghton -- but felt like a winner just for being there.
"It was some kind of a kick," said Elser, better known as a bloodstock agent and 2-year-old consignor now. "With all the international horses, good horses from here and there, it was wonderful. It was a big, huge field and a big, huge deal. The week before, when those international horses showed up, that was something.
"The Critter was an outsider, but had won a good race at Belmont that year. The fences and the distance suited him if the company didn't."
A Camden resident, Elser feels the impact of the race regularly and pays credit to Scott for making it happen. Born in 1894, the great-granddaughter of the DuPont Company founder owned and bred Thoroughbreds for the flat and jumps, winning the 1938 English Grand National with Battleship. In the U.S., she campaigned flat champions Mongo and Proud Delta. Her Soothsayer won a steeplechase title in 1972, the year he captured the Colonial Cup. She started Virginia's Montpelier Hunt Races, run for the 89th time this month, at her home and stable's training headquarters. Scott owned the Camden Training Center, a separate facility to Springdale, and in 1953 bought Springdale from Mrs. F. Ambrose Clark.
When Scott died in 1983, she bequeathed Montpelier (once the home of President James Madison) to the National Trust for Historic Preservation along with $10 million as an endowment. Similarly, she left Springdale to the state and created the racing association to run the meets for charity. The Colonial Cup carries her name now, but she was always the force behind it
.
"Mrs. Scott was such an amazing lady and her foresight to pull that off, a big, end-of-the-year international race," Elser said. "Her foresight to leave the grounds there to the state, it's not just generous, it's being incredibly insightful along with the generosity."
Scott's brother William duPont Jr. once owned the Fair Hill property in Maryland and Pennsylvania, now home to the Fair Hill Training Center, Fair Hill racecourse, and some 7,000 acres of preserved land in Maryland and Pennsylvania.
The Modern Cup
That first year made history, but there was more to come. Four-year-olds Inkslinger and Soothsayer, who ran on the undercard in 1970, finished first and second in the 1971 Colonial Cup. The next year, Virginia-bred Soothsayer got his revenge, with Maryland-bred Inkslinger second. Both would go on to race successfully in England. Trained by Peter Howe for Scott, Soothsayer started in four Colonial Cups -- winning that 1972 running, finishing second (by a neck) in 1971, second again (by a nose) in 1973 and third in 1975. The neck and the nose arguably cost him two more championships and a spot in racing's Hall of Fame.
Future Hall of Famer Cafe Prince won in 1975 and 1977. Grand Canyon, representing New Zealand, won in 1976 and 1978. He too went on to success in England. American Hall of Famers Zaccio (twice) and Flatterer (four times) swept the race six consecutive years, from 1981-86. Lonesome Glory won three times in the 1990s on his way to the Hall of Fame. McDynamo won three in the 2000s before becoming a Hall of Famer. Good Night Shirt ruled the 2007 and 2008 races, and joined the others in the Hall.
In 47 November editions, the winner became that year's champion steeplechaser 26 times. The race tested stamina, speed, jumping ability and any other measure of a good steeplechase horse.
"I always felt like the Camden course was a really fair course," said Sanna Neilson, who won the Colonial Cup as a jockey and a trainer. "You needed traveling speed, you needed to be able to lay up close if you had to, you needed to be a really good jumper because there's a lot of jumping."
Riding as an amateur, Neilson steered Mistico (Chi) to victory for trainer Jonathan Sheppard in 1992. Nine years later, the Neilson-trained Pennsylvania-bred Lord Zada won the race in 5:05.60, the second-fastest time in history. Two years after that, McDynamo won the first of his three (the others back-to-back in 2005 and 2006).
McDynamo won pretty much everywhere Neilson sent him, but he showcased his stamina over the frequently soft course at Far Hills in New Jersey where he won seven years in a row and flashed his speed at Camden where he won three of his five starts.
"He had a high cruising speed, and could quicken," Neilson said. "He was known for his stamina, but he was a fast horse. All three of the horses I won the race with were really good jumpers, really efficient horses who loved to jump. You have to have that for sure. Horses that could win that race are hard horses to come by."
Individual horses aside, the race stood up through various eras of the sport even if no one was quite sure what to make of it in the beginning.
"It's clearly been missed and so sad that it's been missing," Neilson said. "It's such a magical race. Historically, it's always been an important race and it's just a hard race to win. It was unique and it was a distinguishing race. It was the last race for those good horses and gave one last chance to put your mark on the year. Hopefully, it's here to stay."
