Dream On! Shipping out for winter in New Orleans
Dream On! is the new racing blog focusing on a pair of 2-year-old fillies owned by Chet Miller and Susan Weiss' Glenmare Farm in Simpsonville, Ky., and trained by my husband, Pat Dupuy. The goal is to share the up-close experience with getting young horses to the races and beyond. Today: Shipping.
What happens when racing ends at Churchill Downs for the year?
Churchill, and its satellite Trackside training facility on Poplar Level Road four miles away, are open for training – even when the track isn't racing – from early March through Dec. 31. Churchill can accommodate about 1,300 horses and Trackside 500, with maybe a thousand or more of those horses being eight- or nine-month residents, while other outfits come just for the live race meets.
Louisville is an attractive city to live and raise families for horsemen, jockeys and those in occupations necessary to maintain racehorses, such as blacksmiths, veterinarians, feed and tack suppliers. So a lot of trainers prefer to set roots at Churchill (and Trackside) for most of the year, before heading out for the winter (and with some of the outfits also heading to Saratoga for a big chunk of the summer, while a few go to stable at Ellis Park).
Trackside used to be open for training all winter. Perfect Drift trained there for his run that saw him win Turfway Park's Jim Beam (now Spiral) Stakes before finishing third in the 2002 Kentucky Derby. At one stage, when Kentucky had whole-card simulcasting and Ohio did not – before slots took hold at other tracks in the region – Turfway's purses were better than those at Gulfstream Park, the Fair Grounds or Oaklawn, and a lot of Kentucky outfits opted to stay put for the winter and Trackside was near capacity.
That's just a fond memory now.
The double-whammy of cold winters closing the track for training for days and even weeks at a time and the decimation of purses at Turfway Park led to so few horses at Trackside that Churchill quit offering winter stabling five years ago.
So now everyone has to leave, whether to South Florida, Tampa, New Orleans, Arkansas or Turfway and maybe even some to New York.
And packing up a stable, whether one horse or 50, is not fun.
There is tack, equipment, feed and supplies – known generically as traps, with racetrack parlance for switching jobs known as
"moving your traps" -- that must go along, no matter the stable size. It's like going on a trip – no matter the days, there are basics you've got to pack.
The key is to start packing/boxing early stuff you don't think you'll need. Which then of course you will and have no clue where you stuck that something.
For a small outfit, getting transportation can be tricky. If you go on a big rig like Sallee, Brook Ledge or Creech, you have to wait until they have space, and even then you might not get all your horses on the same load. And then you might not all your traps on the load. And if you drive an SUV, or smaller car, how else are you going to get a washing machine or wheel barrel down the road?
Many of the big vans going to Florida or Louisiana leave in the afternoon and travel through the night. Because Pat also is driving down and must be there when the horses arrive, he wants to leave in early morning and travel through the day.
When there were just one or two horses to haul, Chet took care of van duties with his truck and two-horse trailer. Pat had three to move this time, and couldn't do it in shifts because all three horses (the fillies and Strike Impact) can be tricky to handle.
Fortunately there are outfits that accommodate just such people at Pat, like veteran horseman Hoppy Montgomery, who has a very nice four-horse trailer, leaving plenty of room for said washing machine (you may have no idea how much "laundry" a horse dirties each day with bandages for the stall, bandages for training, saddle towel, girth cover and rub rags). For the agreed-upon price, Hoppy had a driver and his rig take Pat when he wanted to go.
So Pat and I got up at 2 a.m. Dec. 2, got to Churchill at 3 to put out everything outside the barn to load for 4 and be on the road before 5. Fortunately Pat got an assist from a pal who works for another trainer loading everything onto the trailer.
When you're a small outfit, you often are moved to a different barn each year, wherever the stall office can fit you in.
Trainer Dallas Stewart, whom Pat has known since Dallas galloped horses for Pat's dad as a teenager in Louisiana, happened to have some extra stalls. Pat needed a couple more than what he was allotted to accommodate two new horses who'd be coming in.
Mario Torres – the former jockey who was promoted from assistant to stall superintendent at the Fair Grounds after the track burned down in 1993 and his boss left town – gave his blessing to Pat sliding into Dallas' vacant stalls. It's a great barn and great neighborhood, surrounded by Churchill trainers, with Neil Howard and Grant Forster on the other side of the firewall.
Anyway, on the other end to the trip, Pat fortunately had veteran horseman Mike Porter – who is galloping Pat's horses in training and helping him clean the stalls and caring for them – and a couple of pals who work for Dallas there to help unload the horses and the traps. (Mike had left three days earlier and also took some stuff down for Pat, like a pot to boil crawfish!)
It took all five of us because all three horses had to be walked and watered off at the same time. Everything else pretty much just went into the tack room to be sorted out later. These pals also had bedded down the stalls in advance, putting in the rubber mats that keep horses from digging and adding straw, which is a huge help.
Getting settled in – what goes where, hooking up the ever-important washing machine, realizing you need track maintenance to put up boards in the stalls to hang chain hay racks (that's a real old-school deal) – takes several days. But this will be the horses' home for the next four months, returning to Louisville at the end of March,
Unpacking is worse than packing, in my opinion. But then, I've got boxes since we moved into our house in 1994 that have yet to be unpacked.
Up next: A stakes for Looker – and rider change for both fillies.
Previously: