Stories about your favorite retired racehorses. For archived stories, click here.
It was arguably the package deal of a lifetime. In 2007, breeder/owner Don Wilson agreed sight unseen to purchase a pregnant 6-year-old Smart Strike broodmare, the foal at her side and her yearling filly for $80,000 from Bob Bathen’s Bathen Thoroughbreds. Wilson was confident he knew all he needed to know about his new acquisition: she had The X Factor.
Barbara Luna has always considered herself “a reincarnated Southern belle.” So magnetic was the pull to head below the Mason-Dixon Line that Luna put down roots literally a few miles from where Generals Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant met and signed the documents which ended the Civil War in April 1865.
In the summer of 2009, Wendy Uzelac didn’t want to look at, think or hear about another horse. Still grieving the sudden loss of her off-the-track Thoroughbred in a paddock accident that March, she was nowhere near ready to even contemplate his successor.
Jaguar Hope stole the photographer’s heart when she first saw him running for a $4,000 claiming tag at Great Lakes Downs near Fruitport, Mich., in 2007. Then 9, the son of Turkoman was big, elegant, nearly black and, to Wendy, the very embodiment of the ideal Thoroughbred. Within a year, he was hers – but her happiness was all too brief.
"Literally, he just walked out and I was like ‘DONE! I am in love with him!’ ”
You might automatically believe that the very newly married Mary McGlothlin was telling the tale of the first time she saw her husband, former professional polo player Darin Martin. You would be wrong. Rather, the object of her total devotion for the past 15 years has been the quirky bay gelding who became one of the most recognizable names in American steeplechasing – Bubble Economy.
These three are the retired herd. They spend their days grazing and chilling and just generally owning the place, as far as they’re concerned.”
The “place” is Bob Manfuso and Katy Voss’ Chanceland Farm, and “these three” are pensioners Grand Slalom, 28, Baste, 23, and Artist’s Way, 22. As Chanceland’s above-quoted broodmare manager, A.J. Hesketh-Tutton has looked after the trio she calls “a happy crew” for several years.
The tale of Royal Champagne and Mary Dubbink begins on a very familiar note. Young, horse-crazy girl is taken to the track by her doting granddad, igniting a love of Thoroughbred racing that deepens and endures with each passing year.
“But I never rode,” Mary explained. “I remember thinking when I was very young, one day I’d love to own a Thoroughbred. I didn’t know what that meant or where I was going with that, but I just fell in love with the breed.”
Doug Fout was playing beat the clock. The Middleburg, Va.-based trainer was in England on a shopping trip for an owner – nothing unusual for Fout, who has ventured to Europe, South America and New Zealand to procure steeplechase horses. But in this case, the deadline allowed him just 24 hours to jump on a plane and decide on a horse he couldn’t see or sit on ahead of time. That, for Fout, was beyond his normal method of operation.
The barter system. Most horsemen, at some point, have put it to use. And it came into play 15 years ago when transplanted Irishmen Robbie and Joe Walsh – no relation – shook hands over a foal who ran until age 11 and earned nearly a quarter-million dollars.
Jump jockeys by profession, Robbie was riding out and helping Joe, who was by then working for Annie Jones in Unionville, Pa. Joe had some stalls and paddocks at Jones’ farm and owned a few mares. In 2002, Joe sent Alejandra’s Love (by Lord Carlos) to the Foligno stallion Fleg, standing nearby at his friend Charlie Lyman Jr.’s Maui Meadow Farm in West Chester, Pa.
An earner of $156,892, Fleg’s lone stakes win came in the race named for Lyman’s father, the General Charles B. Lyman Handicap at Philadelphia Park in 1995. Alejandra’s Love ran just twice, breaking her maiden in her first start and banking $6,780. On May 24, 2003, she foaled a gray colt Joe Walsh christened Azulyekit (As-you-like-it).
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