During the Saratoga meet, I spend Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday mornings on Long Island before I drive back to Saratoga in time for the races. With five days of racing per week, it’s important for trainers to be present. But with a division of horses at Belmont Park, it’s important that I’m with them as well for training each week.
Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays are spent racing and juggling the children. Maggie and I don’t have any childcare assistance while we’re up in Saratoga, so life can be a little hectic. Thanks to the vitally important Faith’s House, the girls had a wonderful summer of attending various clubs and camps. We’d be totally and utterly lost without Faith’s House, which is part of the Belmont Child Care Association. Having them and the Anna House, which is at Belmont, Maggie and I are able to meet our professional duties during the summer months.
Grace and Willow adore going to Saratoga. They love their time at Faith’s House and, when they’re not there, enjoy going racing with me and occasionally sneaking onto the FOX production set with their mother.
Saratoga is a very high-quality place to be, but it also comes with rigors that affect us as a family. You can imagine these summer months take quite a toll on us. Sunday nights after the races, I drive back to Long Island while Maggie works 4 a.m. to 7 p.m., five, sometimes six days a week. On the dark days, when I’m not with her, she’s obviously responsible for the children for the whole twenty-four hours of the day. I sometimes have to take a step back and wonder how my wife manages to accomplish everything she does when we’re up there.
August had some real highs and some real lows for our barn. It was great to see Bossmakinbossmoves re-rally to win early in the month for Rainbow’s End Racing. This is a syndicate that started out with Bob Scavetta, Mike Iannaconi, myself, and a horse named Rosa Dorata. I’m excited to see them grow and develop and become a real powerhouse in New York racing. Saratoga wins are so important at every level because the competition is so incredibly tough. Bob and Mike have been very supportive of our barn since the start, so this victory was deeply rewarding. Several of their two-year-old purchases will start debuting in these later months of the year.
On July 26, after Donegal Momentum was beaten in the Amsterdam, we looked deeper at his pedigree and decided it was time to try the turf with this horse. He’d never disgraced himself on the dirt, but he comes from a female family that has a lot of turf, and he moves with a very accentuated action over the surface. So, on Travers Day, we took aim at the Allowance going a mile on the turf for three-year-olds.
He slightly fluffed the start, which in hindsight was a good thing because it meant he managed to get some cover. From then on though, when Javier Castellano shook the reins at him, the result was never in doubt, and honestly I believe he would have won by significantly further had the horse who finished second to him not repeatedly bumped him in the lane, causing him to lose his back end twice.
It was very gratifying to win a race on Travers Day. They are the most competitive races that you can come across. To do it with Donegal Momentum was extremely special. He’s a colt that I hope will go on to prove he’s of Grade One caliber, and a horse whose had to take up the mantel in light of a later tragedy amongst our three-year-old division.
The sales at Saratoga were very productive this year. The Select Sale as always is a wonderful group of 250 select yearlings. Fasig-Tipton did another fabulous job of putting on quite the show for two sales catalogs. We were lucky to pick up one horse in the Select Sale in a very competitive yearling market, and then three horses in the New York-bred Sale to start the yearling season off with a bang. As ever, thank you to Conor Foley who was helping to drive the bus at Oracle Bloodstock. I’m very pleased with the purchases we made.
Sadly, occasionally in this game, tragedies occur on the racetrack. We were on the unfortunate end of being the only tragedy during the whole Saratoga meet when The Big Torpedo, leading the Gr. 3 Saranac Stakes, horrifically had a fatal breakdown on his left front leg. For those of you who follow the barn closely, you realize that this horse and all our horses are considered family members. This horse held a very special place in a lot of people’s hearts.
The Big Torpedo exceeded every expectation that was ever made of him. He was a horse that put a smile on everybody’s face and tried his hardest to please every single day of his life. He was also a real character in the barn. He trained like a beast every day and then when the feed cart became visible, would shout the roof off the barn and let everyone know it was time to eat. He was only ever nervous about one thing and that was when he was asked to jog backwards on the racetrack. Axelle spent many many hours of her life accompanying him on her pony Summer to ease his nerves, and I know he was very grateful to both of them.
I feel terrible for Eric Cancel as well. Eric formed an unshakeable bond and love with this horse. To those of us who are on the younger side of this sport, horses like The Big Torpedo are hard to come by. To see his story brought to such a tragic end so quickly and in front of so many made the whole thing almost unbearable.
For those who want to know what it’s really like, I lay awake in bed for a week. Whenever I closed my eyes I was back behind that green screen on the turf course with one of the bravest horses I’ve ever been around. To have to witness that and the injury that Javier Castellano sustained meant that another part of our team was hurt as well in the incident.
The Big Torpedo will forever live in our memory. He was an outstanding racehorse who gave his all every time he was on the track. And he genuinely loved to run.
I’ll finish this blog on that note. My heart is heavy with his loss. I hope that in reading this, you dedicate a little of your time today to remembering the horse he was and how much he meant to our barn. Because as difficult as it was to write this, and as difficult as it may be to read about it, he deserves to be remembered.
