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Originally founded in 2003 by former Boston Globe film critic Michael Blowen, Old Friends today cares for more than 100 horses across three states whose racing and breeding careers came to an end. A “living history museum of horse racing”, the farm attracts nearly 20,000 tourists annually. Thoroughbred People talked to Michael about the operation

TBP: How did you get involved with horses and how did Old Friends begin?

MB: An editor at the Boston Globe where I used to work invited me to Suffolk Downs one day. I went a few more times and just fell in love with the sport.

I thought if I learned more about horses themselves I could become a better handicapper and so I apprenticed myself out for a couple of years to a claiming trainer at Suffolk Downs. He was known as the King of the Fairs. He would get old horses with some back class ready for a couple or races, but then they would disappear off the scene. It was the disappearing part that I wondered about, they used to tell me that they had found homes for these horses at riding academies in Maine.

The truth of the matter was that they were just going to the meat buyer. A lot of owners are kept in the dark by trainers about what really happens to their horses when they finish racing.

I did some stories on some of these horses, one of them was a horse called Saratoga Character who ended up in a wonderful program that the Thoroughbred Retirement Foundation ran. I got connected to them, one thing led to another and when I retired from the Boston Globe the TRF asked me to become their Operations Director.

It was a wonderful experience with wonderful people. I discovered however that nobody in the horse retirement business was interested in taking pensioned stallions because they were considered too much trouble, too temperamental and too tough to handle. I thought maybe if we started rehoming some stallions we might be able to get a public following and people might pay to visit them and help support the operation.

TBP: How did you go about getting land and a facility?

MB: We started out leasing some land and then leased a little more, then we picked up the 52 acres in Georgetown which we now own. We always need more land as we usually have a waiting list. I just signed a lease on a property next door to us which is 47 acres, and there is another opportunity to get another 100 acres, which would be great. 

TBP: Do you sometimes get horses that you retrain to go on to become riding horses or to compete in other spheres?

MB: If we have a horse sent here that can be retrained we will send them over to New Vocations in Lexington who do a great job in that area. Likewise, if they get a horse over there that is proving to be a problem and can’t be retrained they will come here.

TBP: Tell us about the New York operation of Old Friends, and how it came to be named after Bobby Frankel.

MB: Cabin Creek in New York is very successful, it’s run by Joanne Pepper and her husband Mark with a lot of wonderful volunteers.

I didn’t personally know Bobby Frankel, but the first great stallion we got here was a horse called Ruhlman, who Charlie Whittingham trained after Bobby had him. Ruhlman came to us with a real reputation, Peggy Whittingham told me that he was the only horse Charlie was ever afraid of. When he got here he was very tough, but after a few months he mellowed. He would roll over on his back and let you scratch his stomach and all kinds of things.

Bobby won the Woodward Stakes with Ruhlman and I ran into him at Saratoga just after Ruhlman had come to us. I said “Mr. Frankel, my name’s Michael Blowen. I have your great horse Ruhlman at my farm.” He said “That’s nice” and just walked away.

About two days later he taps me on the shoulder and says “Aren’t you the guy with Ruhlman? I loved that horse, he was the toughest horse ever. I was really sorry I had to send him to California but I am glad he was successful out there.”

That was the longest conversation I ever had with him. Then when Bobby died, Dottie Ingordo, who worked for him, called me and said that Bobby had left Old Friends a lot of money and most of his trophies.

He donated well into six figures to us. He was a New York guy and that’s how Old Friends at Cabin Creek, The Bobby Frankel Division came to be named in his memory.

TBP: How many horses and staff do you currently have?

At the farm here in Georgetown we have 104 horses and over in New York there are 13. We have five paid employees. The rest are all volunteers. Our Georgetown farm manager Tim Wilson does a phenomenal job. 

TBP: Was it a long process to become registered as a 501c charity?

MB: Yes, it was really a big hassle, I think it might be worse than getting audited by the IRS! We jumped through a lot of hoops to get it done and it took about two years.

TBP: How has the funding flow been since you started?

MB: Well there have been some very tough times when we have come close to becoming financially obliterated, but people came through with money for us at the right time fortunately. We are on a reasonable financial footing now, but it’s a constant challenge.

TBP: Tell us about some of the best known horses you have had at Old Friends.

MB: When Silver Charm came here after his breeding career in Japan, thanks to Beverley and Jeff Lewis and the JBBA who have been tremendously helpful to us, it was one of the greatest days of my life. I’ve been in love with Silver Charm ever since 1997 when he won the Derby and the Preakness and just got beat in the Belmont to miss the Triple Crown. Now he is in my back yard it totally freaks me out! We have had other horses here who won big races, like Black Tie Affair who won the Breeders Cup Classic, Precisionist who won multiple Grade 1s and went to the Hall of Fame, Sunshine Forever, Marquetry, Tinners Way, Williamstown, Commentator. Interestingly, even though they came in all different shapes and sizes and from different training regimens, they all had one thing in common. They were all smarter than most other horses.

TBP: How do you generally raise funds?

MB: Well one of the best things to happen to horse racing in the past few years has been the creation of the Thoroughbred Aftercare Alliance. They put together a fundraising program with many great ideas. They raise a lot of money and they accredit aftercare facilities and organizations very thoroughly and very well.

We also sell “shares” in our horses. You can buy a share in Derby winner Silver Charm for a hundred bucks! That works really well. We have also been successful in getting grants from various foundations and organizations and there are a lot of wonderful individuals who help out. Bob Baffert donated $50,000 and came down to the farm to see Silver Charm the Tuesday before the Derby. His jockey Gary Stevens came to see him too.

TBP: Old Friends does a fantastic job but there is obviously a limitation on the number of horses you can take. What can be done about the broader problem of the many horses who can’t be accommodated by organizations like Old Friends because they simply don’t have enough room or funds?

MB: This is a huge problem but there are some interesting things currently going on that might help. There is a group that is getting together that is being organized by the Gaming Commission. They are seriously considering making horse aftercare taxes a condition of getting a pari-mutuel gaming license in New York. I have had some preliminary discussions with them and I am hopeful. Jack Knowlton, who owned the 2003 Kentucky Derby winner Funny Cide, has been very involved in aftercare programs and has helped get this meeting put together.

One of the best ideas I have ever heard came from the jockey Richard Migliore. He said look, you can’t create rehoming facilities for the thousands of horse who need it in the Bluegrass, because the land is too expensive. So instead, you go out to places like Montana and Wyoming where land is cheap and buy thousands of acres. You put up housing and you offer that housing to retired jockeys, trainers, veterinarians and grooms so that they can live out their retirement and volunteer to take care of the horses. It could be a tourist attraction too.

TBP: Do you have many visits from kids and schools?

MB: Yes we do, the kids love coming here. In particular, some troublesome kids who get kicked out of school come to visit and it does them a world of good. Horses can do so much for people, they don’t just need someone on their back to be useful. I think we are just scratching the surface of what they can do.

TBP: What is the process when a new horse arrives at Old Friends?

MB: When a horse arrives here we segregate them and quarantine them for three weeks so they can get acclimated and get the lay of the land. That usually means they spend half the day in a stall and half the day in a round pen. Then Tim Wilson our farm manager does some evaluating and figures out who might make friends with who. It’s quite amazing, Tim has a real knack about matching horses up. Cat Launch and Rail Trip are best friends. Game on Dude is inseparable from a horse named Yankee Fourtune. After a few more months we re-evaluate and review how they are getting along.

TBP: When a horse’s time does come along, what happens?

MB: They are usually euthanized humanely out in their paddock. I actually never believed it and I thought this was apocryphal, but they really do tell you when they’re ready to go.

I don’t think we have ever euthanized a horse too early, but I think we have euthanized a couple too late. You think you are doing the best trying to keep them alive but sometimes it’s a mistake. We’ve had a couple of older horses undergo colic surgery and if it doesn’t work the last few hours of their life can be very rough.

We had a wonderful old horse here called Ogygian. Before he died, he just sat down in his paddock one day. I called the vet and all Ogygian’s friends and the volunteers who looked after him. We all gathered around him in his paddock and you could tell that it meant a lot to him. He was very relaxed. He knew exactly what was going on and he was ok with it. It was very peaceful. It did his caretakers a lot of good too.

TBP: Do you still get to the races and handicap?

MB: I do, but I am now an even worse handicapper than I ever was, because I can’t be objective. I look for horses who are related to those we have here and I am obviously biased towards them regardless of their chances!

TBP: Where were you born and raised?

MW: Brisbane, Australia. I have family down there and some family in Sydney too. I’ve actually seen more of the US than I have of Australia, having been here since I was 24.

TBP: What are the big racetracks in Brisbane?

MW: There are two main metropolitan tracks, Eagle Farm and Doomben, which are across the street from each other, and there are a whole host of smaller tracks within the remaining area.

TBP: How did you become interested in race calling?

Radio broadcasting of racing is very big in Australia. I had a lot of exposure to listening to race calls, it interested me and I found myself mimicking the callers and wanting to emulate them.

My grandfather gave me a horse racing game called “The Melbourne Cup”, I still remember the ten plastic horses, rolling the dice and betting the false money, but I derived the most enjoyment from calling out the horses’ names as we pushed them around the board. I decided the dice were holding me back so the next thing I did was to make paper cutouts of the horses’ silks of that era, each one measuring about an inch to an inch and a half. I accumulated about a thousand of them, grouped them into categories for different types of races and distances and would push them across the floor shouting the call at the top of my lungs into a tape recorder. It probably drove the neighbors crazy. I was set on becoming a race caller.

TBP: So how did you go about getting into the business?

MW: I wrote a couple of letters to established race callers in Brisbane and they invited me out to Eagle Farm and Doomben to meet them. They sometimes had a spare booth up in the grandstand and they would let me practice calling races into a tape recorder.

When I was 17 I got my first chance to call a public race live over the public address system at a track about an hour and a half outside of Brisbane on the provincial circuit, a place called Kilcoy. It was April of 1983. It must have gone reasonably well because I was asked to call the following race as well.

I had left high school and was working at a bank when the first opportunity to call a full card came a couple of months later. It was the most humble and basic of beginnings, it was way out in the middle of Australia in the outback at a track called Brunette Downs in the Northern Territory. People would converge from hundreds of miles around for this annual weekend of racing. The horses were a mix of thoroughbred and quarter horses. It was on a dirt track, which was unusual in Australia, it was bigger than US tracks though with no outside rail. The journey involved a flight in a normal commercial airliner, then the last leg was in a three seater plane for a couple of hours. The opportunity came my way because the original caller couldn’t do it and the next choice didn’t want it because they didn’t like flying in small planes. I didn’t even have a tent to sleep in when I got there, I slept at a cattle ranch under the stars.

I had to take a couple of sick days off my bank job to go up there and a few eyebrows were raised when I got back with my tan….  Over the next couple of years I got more part time opportunities at the tracks around Brisbane, and then an opportunity came up to go and work at the radio station that was dedicated to horse racing. It was mainly a behind the scenes job but it was a foot in the door, I started to get rostered on to call some greyhound and harness racing as well as the odd thoroughbred race, on Saturdays I’d be at the main racetrack assisting the team.

Then out of the blue came a life changing phone call from the race caller who I had most idolized growing up, the main race caller in Sydney, Johnny Tapp. He was offered the job at Hollywood Park in 1990 which he declined. He did bring his family over for a working vacation and called for three weeks, but by his own admission he felt he was a bit long in the tooth to make a move of that magnitude, so when they asked him if he could suggest anybody else he recommended me. I didn’t realize he was even aware of me! So arrangements were made and I came over to California in the Spring of 1990. I’ll never forget the first call I made at Hollywood Park, as I was calling them past the finish line Tappy was slapping me on the back.

One of my favorite memories of that first meet when I came over in 1990 was a classic renewal of the Hollywood Gold Cup with the great reigning horse of the year in Sunday Silence meeting Criminal Type, who would become the horse of that year. They were stride for stride in the last three eighths of a mile, Criminal Type won by a nose and I thought to myself that it was a long way from Brunette Downs and Kilcoy and the other places I used to knock around, so that was a very memorable race.

There was some pressure at the time to not call close finishes, but I stuck my neck out and fortunately got it right. I like to make the photo call if I have a strong feeling about it. If you know the angle and the horses are in stride you can be more confident about it, it’s when they are out of stride that it’s usually better to stay out of it.

TBP: How did that first experience work out?

MW: Within a year my Hollywood Park tenure was sadly over, I had the rug pulled from under my feet as there was a big upheaval and controversy over the ouster of Marge Everett, who was the lady who brought Johnny Tapp and myself over. It was a very bad, nasty, proxy fight. Fortunately I was contacted by Bay Meadows so I came up to Northern California. Then Golden Gate expressed an interest and for a while I had the Northern California circuit to myself.

Then in 1993 a similar thing happened at Bay Meadows to what had happened at Hollywood Park. I had never imagined that politics could reach the person in the booth on the roof and I found myself looking for another track, as Golden Gate by itself wasn’t really enough.

I went to Retama Park in San Antonio to call their inaugural season in ‘95 for a spell and then I was contacted by Arlington Park and I went there for two years, where I had the chance to call Cigar’s record breaking win for consecutive wins when he won the Arlington Citation Challenge. Arlington was a beautiful, opulent track and then the owner closed it down.

I went back to Hollywood Park and Turf Paradise was a part of that deal too. Then I went to Lone Star Park for five years, working concurrently at Fair Grounds in Louisiana.

TBP: How are race callers hired and paid?

MW: It’s normally a per diem contractor arrangement and is seasonal of course. I don’t get paid if I am not working unfortunately.

TBP: How was your spell at Los Alamitos this past July?

MW: Los Alamitos was very enjoyable and very challenging because of the configuration of the track and the different angles compared to a track like Golden Gate. It has the longest home stretch in the country and they angled the backstretch differently to other tracks. There are some challenges with glare from the sun in the late afternoon too, but it keeps you on your toes and it’s nice to get yourself out of your comfort zone. It was also very nice to get reacquainted with Southern California.

TBP: What is your process as a caller to memorize colors and recognize horses?

MW: The focus is the jockey’s colors. It is helpful to have the colored saddle cloths too but you are taking a big risk if you rely on them alone because if you get a horse directly outside another in a bunched field you might just get a flash of the jockey’s cap and the saddlecloth can be totally obscured, so I always make myself learn the jockey’s colors. The equipment can also help, different color bridles and shadow rolls etc.. I repeat each horses name many times in the post parade as I watch them.

TBP: For me a great race caller calls the race in a very informative way as if it is for people who cannot see the race, which is your style in my opinion, as opposed to some callers whose style revolves around the idea that they are calling the race to people who are watching it with them.

MW: Well my style is really the old school Australian style because it was done mostly for radio, using that descriptive nature for an audience who cannot see the race, so that’s what I do.

TBP: You are also known for the odd humorous quip, but in my experience when you do that it never comes at the expense of the call.

MW: Well thank you, I never want to be branded as a comedian and the accuracy of the call is paramount. Occasionally if a call can be embellished and give people a chuckle then why not, as long as you always keep the priorities straight.

 

TBP: How is racing different in Australia to here in the US?

MW: Horse racing is much more part of the general sporting culture in Australia, there is a vast network of betting shops, they are always around the malls and these days there are betting terminals in the pubs, bars and clubs. People have much easier access to horse racing. The equivalent of the Daily Racing Form is available at all newsagents and everywhere newspapers and magazines are sold.

TBP: In Australia you have bookmakers competing with each other at the tracks offering different odds on the runners.

MW: Yes, there is the tote system like we have here but there is also the option of betting with a bookmaker at the track and getting a fixed price. It adds a lot to the atmosphere, color and excitement of a day at the races. Apart from the fact that people can’t take a fixed price with our tote system, one of the big issues here is the way the odds change after the race starts. It is very disconcerting and you wonder how and why in this technology age, it happens. In Australia even back in the 1980s the odds on the tote system changed instantaneously and they never changed after the start of the race. The US is supposedly the leader in computer technology, so how is it that we are still seeing such fluctuating odds after the start of the race? The whole idea of betting is to know what odds you are getting and to determine value and choose to bet when the odds are in your favor.

TBP: Do fillies race against colts in Australia?

MW: Yes very often, it’s no big deal for a female to beat a male horse in a race.

TBP: I also understand that there is a much broader variety in race distances in Australia.

MW: Yes there is and I would love to see more distance races here in the US. I wish more tracks had a seven furlong chute and could accommodate those races. There are incremental distances below six furlongs and above a mile, yet it’s a quantum leap going from six furlongs to a mile. I would really like to see more long distance races, there are no races for stayers here and they are very popular in other parts of the world. You never know how much potential is left untapped in some racehorses here, with no long distance races being run.

TBP: What is the race day drug situation in Australia?

MW: There is no tolerance for it whatsoever. It is well policed and the penalties are severe. There is no Lasix, there is nothing allowed on race day. There is a controversy over cobalt at the moment, but that situation demonstrates how non tolerant the Australian authorities are of race day drugs.

Horses breaking down in Australia is a rarity. The horses run more regularly than they do here and that gives fans the opportunity to latch onto horses and follow them and become fans. It is turf racing of course, perhaps that is easier on them than the dirt. Horses appear more sporadically in the US and the premature retirement of the good ones is a blight on the popularity of the game, although that is an international problem with the money available in breeding these days. It doesn’t give fans a chance to follow their favorite horses, and that’s how a lot of racing fans are born.

There were a couple of champion geldings running back when I was a kid that absolutely were the catalysts for me becoming hooked on racing. It’s a pity that there aren’t more incentives for older horses in the prize money program and structure here in the US, but even then it would be hard to compete with the stud fee numbers.

TBP: Is calling races on the Tapeta surface at Golden Gate different to normal dirt?

MW: Well when it rains, yes it is, because a horse can come from dead last through the field to win with completely clean silks, so from a completely selfish perspective I like it – it’s nice to be able to see the colors clearly! Winners also seem to come from all different positions in a race, you don’t get the kind of one dimensional speed bias that you often get on a dirt track.

TBP: Is there anything else that would make life easier for you as a race caller?

MW: I am very fortunate that I am doing what I always really wanted to do. One thing that I would enjoy though would be if owners of horses with tricky, strangely spelt names would get in touch with me so I could get the pronunciation right. I am not hard to get a hold of and I hate to get it wrong, so that would be very much appreciated!

Up and coming trainer Simon Callaghan has made a huge impression on the Southern California racing scene since he arrived on these shores from England eight years ago. If it wasn’t for a horse called American Pharoah, he would have already won a Kentucky Derby with Firing Line. Simon talked to Thoroughbred People about his experiences since coming stateside.

TBP: How did you first become interested in racing?

SC: My father, Neville Callaghan, was a trainer in Newmarket, England so I was interested in the horses and the sport from very early on. I became an exercise rider and assistant trainer to my father. I also rode as an amateur jockey in the UK in around twenty races and had a few winners.

TBP: What was your first experience of racing in the US?

SC: I came to the USA on a temporary basis to work for Todd Pletcher at Palm Meadows in Florida and Belmont Park, New York. I was here for about 12 months. It was amazing to work with Todd’s team and so many top class horses. I picked up so much good information and learned a lot from the experience. When I returned to England I took over the training operation there from my father who retired.

TBP: What was the catalyst that resulted in your move to the US?

SC: I was really interested in training over here after my experience working for Todd. I had some good owners/clients in the UK who had some well bred turf horses and we were interested in bringing them over here on a permanent basis to run in turf stakes races in California with the intention of earning some good money and black type. We had some early success with horses like Dubawi Heights and Belle Royal winning Grade 1 stakes races. It was tough at first to get new clients based here because I was somewhat labeled initially as a turf trainer, it took two to three years for that to change, but now things have transitioned. I still have turf horses of course but there are plenty of dirt runners owned by my US clients in the barn now.

TBP: How difficult was it to adapt to training here as opposed to the UK and what are the main differences?

SC: In England the horses are trained at training centers and private facilities in the countryside away from the racetracks, whereas here in the US most horses are trained at the racetrack. Horses work in company with/against each other in England rather than alone against the clock. Here in the US we train and run on the same racetrack for the most part so the timing and clocking is more relevant here than it would be in England, where horses don’t train over the tracks they run on. In the UK and Ireland the tracks are all very different shapes and sizes, uphill, downhill, left handed, right handed etc. and there are more different types of ground conditions. There are quite a lot of differences but you just learn to adapt.

TBP: Tell us about your current training operation, approximately how many horses do you have in training at the moment?

SC: We have 45 horses in training now. Every year we have been growing and getting new clients. I’d like to get to around 6o horses here in California and then maybe have a string on the East Coast as well.

TBP: Do you have a particular style of training, if so how would you describe it?

SC: I don’t like to train my horses too hard for their first runs, I like to leave something in the tank to work on and see my horses improve over time. My horses typically don’t win first time out, they generally progress and move up from there first runs. Horses like Fashion Plate and Firing Line are examples of that.

TBP: What parts of training do you enjoy the most?

SC: The two year olds are one of my favorite parts of training, I love working with the young horses whose potential is unknown and bringing them along, I really enjoy that part of it all.

TBP: What parts of the job can you perhaps do without?

SC: I think the hardest part is making the phone call to the owner about an injury to their horse. I am very informative and upfront with my clients but that’s definitely one of the most unpleasant parts of the job.

Apr 29, 2015; Louisville, KY, USA; Exercise rider Humberto Gomez works out Kentucky Derby hopeful Firing Line trained by Simon Callaghan at Churchill Downs. Mandatory Credit: Jamie Rhodes-USA TODAY Sports

TBP: What sort of character was your Kentucky Derby runner up Firing Line, and did you know that he was something special before he ran?

SC: He was a gentleman to be around, very classy with a good mind. We knew from day one that he was a really good horse. We bought him at the breeze up sales for $240,000 and when we got him back to the barn his first piece of work was just spectacular so yes, we knew he was potentially top class.

TBP: Slim Shadey was a good horse who you had some great wins with shortly after you started training here, what was he like to be around?

SC: He was great, a big good looking dark bay horse, we won two Grade 2 stakes with him and he ran second in a Grade 1. He was a bit of a quirky character, very strong and tough to gallop in the mornings, he enjoyed being on the lead and didn’t like it so much if he was taken on early. 

TBP: Of the other horses you have trained so far please tell us about some of your personal favorites and about their characters and personalities.

SC: Byrama was a great mare, she won a Grade 1 for us. She came a long way from breaking her maiden in England. Judy In Disguise was another great find by Aron Wellman of Eclipse partners. Fashion Plate was a very nice horse, mellow and sweet, it was very satisfying to find her at auction and see her do well as a racehorse. She won two Grade 1s, the Las Virgenes Stakes and the Santa Anita Oaks.

TBP: Do you find it harder to keep horses sound here racing on dirt tracks than on the turf in England?

SC: Yes. Races here are run at a very fast pace from start to finish whereas in England they go slower early and finish faster. Over here you have to be tougher on them in training for them to be able to compete in faster early pace races, the turf and pace of racing in England is far kinder to them physically than the dirt tracks here. There is a much higher attrition rate here than in the UK.

TBP: You trained successfully in England completely without Lasix. Where do you stand on the Lasix debate?

SC: I would be perfectly ok with it if Lasix was banned on raceday. You are however definitely at a disadvantage right now if you run a horse that is not on Lasix against horses that are on Lasix. It needs to be a level playing field, but I could and would happily train and run horses without it if everyone else did.

TBP: When you were training in England what % of your horses running without Lasix would bleed in a race and how would you treat it?

SC: I’d say less than 5% would ever bleed. We would treat it by giving them some time off and turning them out for some R & R.

TBP: What is your opinion of what has happened with the synthetic track situation?

SC: The climate was the problem in California with the fluctuating temperatures from morning to afternoon. I was excited when they first went in as I felt it would be good for some horses, but the temperature was the problem for the rubber based surfaces they put in in Southern California. I think the Tapeta has performed a lot better than any of the other surfaces however. In an ideal world it would be nice to see a racetrack have all three – a turf, a dirt and a synthetic track.

Trainer Simon Callaghan walks Kentucky Derby runner-up Firing Line in the stakes barn at Pimlico Race Course in Baltimore, Wednesday, May 13, 2015. The Preakness Stakes horse race is Saturday, May 16.(AP Photo/Garry Jones)

TBP: How do you feel about the state of racing and its customer appeal here in the US?

Here the really big events are as good as any major racing events in the world, but apart from that there are a lot of empty racetracks on the normal days. We need to be appealing to younger people and making it more of a social occasion. We could do with taking more breaks and time off as could the horses. I think it would help field sizes in the long run.

TBP: How many two year olds do you have in training this year and could you give Thoroughbred People the names of a couple you like?

SC: Yes we have around twenty two year olds this year. A couple of horses for people to look out for are a nice two year old by Friesan Fire called On Fire who should come on for their first run, and a Giant’s Causeway colt who Coolmore own, called Canada.

Jeff Seder has been a pioneer in the field of equine biomechanics and the study of the physical attributes that makeup an exceptional racehorse. After developing a fascination with horses in his twenties, Jeff went on to create EQB and has since advised successful clients like Ken Ramsay, Bob Baffert and Ahmed Zayat on their purchases. He talks to Thoroughbred People.

TBP: How did you become interested in horses? 

 JS: When I was 26  I went on a date and took a ride on a rented horse. I had a great time, so I started getting serious about it and I decided I wanted to get involved with something that had to do with horses. I was too big to be a jockey and I didn’t have any connections at all. I said to myself, I have business knowledge, knowledge of the sciences – I was pre-med at Harvard and in the top 1% of my class. I thought I could bring statistics and science to horse racing.  

I was in law school and had to do a thesis. My thesis advisor was Archibald Cox, who you may remember from the midnight massacre and the Nixon Watergate scandal. I had to go to see him about a thesis topic. He asked me what I was interested in. I looked down at the floor and said “Horses”….  I thought he was going to kill me… Instead he turned around, grabbed a book from behind him and dropped it on the desk. Dust flew off it. He said, “This is the Statute of Massachusetts that governs horse racing. It’s a perfect combination of business and law. I don’t think anybody here has ever looked at it, why don’t you do that?”  So that’s what I did for my thesis and I learned a lot.

Then in 1976, the East Germans burst onto the scene in the Olympics. That little country won more medals than anyone else. It used to be just between Russia and the United States, now these guys come along. The US wanted to do something about it and have a response to it. There was a change in the tax code which meant you could claim tax deductions for doing research to help Olympic athletes in sports medicine. It didn’t last long, but I grabbed the opportunity while I could and got a foundation established.

I started working with the coaches of the USA figure skating team and the luge and bobsled teams. I rounded up biomechanics  experts and ended up doing half of the Olympics Committee’s biomechanics work on sports medicine. We took high speed cameras and analyzed what people who were winning were doing differently, and what we were not doing. I learned to benchmark the champions.  We worked for the luge team for one season. They had never previously been in medal contention. After we worked with them, suddenly they were in medal contention.

I decided I wanted to do the same kind of thing with horses, but if I had known then how long it would take and how much it would cost, I would not have started.

 TBP: Was anyone else doing any similar research at the time?

JS: No, data like this on racehorses just didn’t exist then. There are plenty of people out there doing similar things now, but they don’t have our databases and they don’t have our years of experience. There are a lot of cheap imitators.

TBP: So how did you go about embarking on the study of biomechanics in horses?

JS: I built the first portable ultrasound machine and the first heart rate monitor for horses that you could take into a stall that worked well. I had it custom shipped from Hitachi. This was before personal computers of course. I used defense department contractor parts for it and wrote in machine language right down to the actual pluses, minuses and zeros to get the thing to work.

I started building up data from looking at horses hearts and spleens. Some of the leading veterinarians in the world who told me what I should expect, were not even close. They would show me a jar with a horse’s heart in it and tell me it wouldn’t go as fast as a human’s heart, because of how big it was.  Then we discovered that racehorses’ hearts were going 200+ beats a minute or faster coming down the stretch. The horse’s heart can go faster than the human heart and it can change gears immediately. A horse’s heart can be going at 26 beats a minute at rest in a stall. If you go to the stall and snap your fingers, you won’t see that the horse has moved a hair, but the heart rate will have jumped to 120. It can change gears that fast and go that fast.

There were other big differences in what was different about horses from humans. The way they react to drugs is different. Morphine is a depressant in humans, but it’s a wild stimulant to horses. The spleen doesn’t do the same thing in a horse that it does in a human. In the horse, over evolution it became able to do the same thing as the blood doping that was outlawed in the Olympics, when Russian athletes were giving themselves transfusions of red blood cells. Horses do that naturally, evolution gave it to them, but we don’t do that ourselves as humans, so we weren’t aware that it was something that was going on in horses.

We also didn’t know that horses were cooling themselves by panting. They pant as well as sweat. When we were studying their lungs doing blood gas analysis we had to build a mask and put the horse in a pool, have computers analyze everything and have the device try to catch all the air they could. The device is called a spirometer, it looks like a huge water heater and it’s supposed to catch all of the air. It didn’t, it caught about one second’s worth of air. We started using multiple spirometers and that didn’t work. Then we used a weather balloon, and that didn’t work. We looked at each other and asked ourselves what is wrong with this picture, where is all the air from the lungs going, why are these horses moving so much air? The answer was they were cooling themselves with it.

In the beginning not only did we not have the equipment to get the data, we didn’t know what we were looking for. I had to film horses in slow motion and digitize everything. I hired professors from MIT in engineering and statistics from Rutgers, doctors from Harvard and veterinarians from the Lubow Center.  There were people giving me their theories, “Here is why Secretariat was a great horse.” They were good theories, but they were wrong. No one had any real data on what made great racehorses.  I spent years and years building that database.

TBP: Had any similar research been done on other animals?

JS: Any biomechanics literature and studies that was out there mostly came from the Fatigue Labs at Harvard. They put anything from iguanas to alligators, to gazelles to elephants, on treadmills and they developed equations to describe the four-legged animal’s ways of moving and their energy use. After that, they could then take a fossil footprint of a dinosaur and figure out stuff like how tall the dinosaur was, how much they weighed and how fast they could go. Some of this was then being used to consult and advise people on racehorses’ strides.

I gathered and digitalized data on thousands of racehorses. I followed every split of every race these horses ran through the end of their three year old year. I actually published it, but it was hard to get it published and accepted because I wasn’t a vet. They thought I was just a greedy guy trying to make money, but the only way I could legitimize what I was trying to do was to get my findings published. They were still sure I didn’t know what I was talking about, even though I had so many consultants who were luminaries in their field.  

We spent a long time, we spent a lot of money, we built mountains of data and we learned a lot. I discovered that while the biomechanics studies that had been done on wild animals were useful to distinguish between a gazelle and an elephant, they were worthless to be used for horses and to distinguish between a claiming horse of moderate ability and a top class stakes horse.  We learned that the really good racehorses are fundamentally, physically very different from the average racehorse, even when they are a yearling. 

TBP: How did you start marketing this and making it a commercial venture?

JS: I am a terrible marketer and also I had no horse people working with me from inside racing who could help me out. Then I hired Patti Miller who had been one of the first women jockeys in the United States. She was very smart and just as crazy as I was and she was a traditional horse person. She was fascinated by what I was up to, but when we’d get together, she’d look at some aspects of what I was doing, say “that’s ridiculous” and tell me why. 

We started to marry the practical with the theory and the data and we found out stuff that no one else believed was true, not even the doctors and the vets. But it was true.

TBP: So how did you start and get to use your studies and tests in practice?

JS: I had a neighbor, George Strawbridge. I got to know him because Pattie Miller went foxhunting with him two or three times a week. He gave us the chance to find him a few new racehorses at a two year old sale, using our technology. The first year we did it for him we got him Forever Together who won an Eclipse award for champion sprinter. Then the next year we bought him Informed Decision as a two year old in training. Informed Decision breezed an 11.1, so she wasn’t an obvious horse in the sale to everybody, but my my tests she was pretty near perfect. She became a sprint champion and won five Grade 1s. So I had those notches on my belt.

Then around 2007 a guy called me up who was just getting a name in this industry, Ahmed Zayat. He said he would give me a chance to go to the yearling and two year old sales with him. That was a big turning point. We bought and developed five stallions and had two horses that ran second in the Derby. Then American Pharaoh came out of it, as we had bought American Pharoah’s dam, Princess Emma using my methods and testing.

Then there was Ken Ramsey. He doesn’t buy multi-million dollar horses, so people look at Ken, a top owner and breeder for ten years, and wonder how does he do it?

First of all, he works hard. Second, he is a genius in pedigree. Third, there’s us. He’s been buying mares that have had all of the physical attributes in the elite top 2% range that we had spotted previously, but who didn’t achieve their full potential on the racetrack through injury or what not, but who still had a huge heart and excellent mechanics and scored high in all of the stuff we measure. You have seen what Ken has done. He’s killing them with his home breds. 

TBP: Tell us about American Pharoah

Well he wasn’t a horse that a traditional horseman would miss.  He was drop dead gorgeous, you didn’t have to be a genius to see he was a good looking horse, but in addition to that, what we knew about was all the hidden stuff that we test for that he scored off the chart in. He went to the sale at a time when Zayat was looking to sell some assets but he got a cut on his ankle, it had become infected and become a little swollen. We said you are not going to get your price on this horse because everyone is scared of that ankle and that swelling. Ahmed ended up buying him back at $300,000.

 

TBP: When do you get the chance to first analyze a horse?

JS: We analyze horses at the farms as they are growing up as babies and before they are broken. Then we go to the auctions before they sell to inspect them again. 

TBP: Tell us how the process works, beginning to end.

JS: First, we do all of the traditional stuff.  We have Pattie Miller go and look at the horse. Second, we start doing testing on the horse, looking at their internal organs, shapes and types and their cardiovascular system. Third, if we get there because the horse is looking good, we look at slow motion films of the horse training.

There are a lot of things a lot of horses do that make them much more prone to injury, which many really good horses just do not do. You cannot see these things with the naked eye because the action and movement is too fast. Regular video will not provide the details on the subtle things going on and on the pressure points in the legs etc., because it is 34 pictures a second and does not allow you to see as clearly as you need to. We can see these things because we film at 500 pictures a second in high definition. We look for things that predispose a horse to injury but we also look at the things that tell you how fast the horse is. We need to know how easy as well as how safe racing velocities are for the horse. These are two different areas and we have two completely different analyses types for them.  

For the organs we use the ultrasound. Originally, we had to order different transducers specifically for us so we could get the right depth and the right resolution. We ended up taking what was the traditionally accepted veterinary exam of a heart and throwing it out. We changed the equipment and the way it was done and we changed what people looked at and where they looked.

You also need enough horses and data to compare one horse to another horse within 30 days of it’s chronological age and close to it’s weight, height, and sex. You can’t compare an 800 pound 14 month old filly with a 1000 pound 17 month old colt, it doesn’t work.

TBP: When you go to a sale do you have enough access to the horses to do successful ultrasound testing?

JS: We do now because we are spending millions of dollars at the sales. It’s not invasive. At the sales we spend the time and the money and research everything in depth. We look at every horse.

We don’t even look at the catalog until after we look at the horse. Pedigree is the science of probability that dictates what you will get before the horse is even born. Once the horse is born, you have what you have. Even if something is a low probability event, that doesn’t mean it won’t happen. Rare things happen. It’s our job to catch these things when they do.

 TBP: Do you score or grade horses using scales or percentages?

Yes. We run through a variety of many tests. If horse gets an A+ in five of them and a B in just one of them, we will take him off the list. We’re looking for the hole in a horse rather than what’s great. Very few horses pass all of our tests. Usually only about 2% of the horses in an auction will pass. My job is to find that 2%. If there are 300 horses, I would probably have a final list of six horses.

TBP: Who can access the results?

I keep all the results secret. Everyone contributes but the individual team members don’t know, only I know the results. They are only available to a few clients at each sale. They know who they are and they know who the other clients are and we come to an agreement over who gets what. I tell them that they are going to have preferences but if I have a list of six horses, it doesn’t matter which one they get because statistically they are going to have equal probabilities of being good horses. One or two are going to be really great and I don’t know which one or two they are, but the odds are the same for all of them so people shouldn’t care which they get, although they often do of course.

I think if people check EQB’s track record, and actually check not just every good horse but every horse that we’ve bought, they would see that our percentages are really unusual. Regarding the statistics, there is a lot of information but not all of it is reliable. Some statistics and factors are much more powerfully predictive than others. I think a big mistake that people make is that they grab any new thing that comes along, or they fall in love with one or two variables, which may be real but they might not be as statistically predictive as some of the other factors. I think that is the heart of the matter of how you pick a horse. 

TBP: I assume American Pharoah would be top 2%?

Oh heck American Pharoah was top 0.5%. Everybody knew he was a good horse. He’s beautiful. What I had to add there, was the information about his heart, spleen, and lungs and some other biomechanical stuff. But yes, he’s as good as it gets. If you draw a bell-curve over all of the variables, he’s way off the edge of it. He’s a rare physical specimen.  

TBP: Why did Ahmed Zayat even put American Pharoah through the sales ring?

He made all his money in Egypt. Then the Arab Spring came and for a while there, I think they tied up a lot of his money. He’s alright now, but for a few years there it was touch and go as to whether they would take all his money or not. He had a couple of rough years. I think he thought he was going to get a million dollars for American Pharoah and he might have done that until the cut and the inflammation on the ankle, then the prospect of the million dollars went out the window. Everyone was telling him to take the horse home, including us.

TBP: What is your opinion of synthetic tracks?

35 years ago, a Doctor from MIT and I went out and tested racetracks. He developed a small computer that would tell you what the spring constant was of the track. We tested a lot of racetracks. What we found out was that racetracks were very inconsistent. They had potholes, ruts, hard and soft spots, they had places where the drainage was different, there were many bad inconsistencies.

So why would the solution be a different surface? What about making the base better? In my opinion it was the bases that were the problem. Then they went and changed the surfaces.  

In California at Santa Anita, it was my understanding that the drainage required was going to cost too much and they didn’t want to do it. So they didn’t do it correctly and of course it didn’t drain right. Then they punched holes in the asphalt under the cushion to try and fix it. Around those holes, the asphalt crumbled and then you had both draining issues and asphalt in the cushion. Some of the asphalt worked its way up into the synthetic track surface.

They sent a guy out from the University of Maine with his ground penetrating radar and he found all of this. The report was supposed to be confidential but then it leaked out and people wouldn’t ride there. Then they threw out the track.

Now is that the synthetic track’s fault? Or a series of blunders in the execution of it? It wasn’t fair. Most of the synthetic tracks, as long as they had a good base, had better safety statistics, unless they screwed around with the maintenance or something.

TBP: You were looking at acquiring Laurel Park in Maryland a few years back. What happened?

I raised the money to go do it. I got to the day of the auction and the court canceled the auction on the day because they said that no one there had enough money. I was pretty sure we were going to get it. How they could decide that there was not going to be anyone there, when there were obviously enough qualified bidders, I don’t know. They didn’t know who I was, but they knew who the others were who were there.

I had spent almost a year and hundreds of thousands of dollars in due diligence. I had studied racetracks for years. I really thought we were ready. We just didn’t get the opportunity to do it. Since then there hasn’t been another track like that available. When there is one, we’ll go after it.

TBP: Do you feel that it is dangerous to have Casino’s linking to and supporting racetracks?

Absolutely. Fifty years ago, racetracks were the only place you could gamble. Now the gaming industry has become immense and racing is just a small piece of it. The racing is also the most expensive and complex piece of it. It is cheaper and easier to make money for an operator from a slot machine. So why would they want to continue with the racing then? The only reason they’re continuing racing is because they have to, to keep their license. So if that requirement disappeared, so might the racing.

Having said that, a niche business can be terrific. Racing could become the high-end, sophisticated niche within gaming. A racetrack can also make money by itself without a casino – if it’s done right. However it’s not going to do that as long as the people who are running it have no expertise in that niche and consider it to be an albatross. And that’s where we are at with that.  

TBP: Another problem is that there is no incentive or advantage offered from a betting perspective to go to the track.

JS: No there isn’t, in fact it’s the other way around now. People placing bets off track are getting the rebates. So it actually ends up being cheaper for them to bet online away from the track. But look, people can still do that in other countries, they can bet online off track as well, but they go to the races because it’s fun. It’s not enough fun here. 

TBP: Where are you on Lasix and the drug debate?

JS: I wouldn’t want to go to zero in training because I do not think that is good for the horse. Some of the horses legitimately train better with a little aspirin or a little this or that. It can be safer and more comfortable for them. Testing has gotten pretty good. The problem isn’t with the testing or rules, it’s with the enforcement of them. It’s so haphazard. When trainers get banned, their assistant just takes the license over temporarily. Enforcement is the problem and it has always been a farce.

You will fail to curb drug use if you don’t do any police or enforcement work. You go to some of these minor racetracks and everyone knows who’s cheating. The trainer doesn’t get caught because between him and his vet he can get around the testing.  Even if he does get caught, it doesn’t matter because the enforcement is so bad.

TBP: Do you think we know less about horses now than we did a century ago?

Well one of the interesting things I think we have learned is that the horses this new technology horses is picking, look like the pictures of the great horses that we see in the books from 100, 150 years ago. It may well be that what has happened since then, when most people had horses and they were part of their everyday lives, is that a lot of the common knowledge base has just been lost. Some of what we are doing now is rediscovering it. I think we are bringing it back home. The technology is discovering the things that they knew back then.  I think people underestimate the body of knowledge that was out there when horses were everywhere and virtually everyone had them.

TBP: How good is American Pharoah?

I think he’s good as there has ever been, even though he lost the Travers.  Secretariat was beaten several times.  As you know, the race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong.

 

Learn more about Jeff’s company EQB at EQB.com