In nine days he will run in the most important race of his life, but on this day – Thursday, Oct. 25 – Glorious Empire is just another horse.
With exercise rider Selvin Hernandez aboard, the Irish-bred gelding wears a green and white quarter sheet to ward off some autumn chill and walks with a groom down the dusty road that cuts through Fair Hill Training Center. At the corner, a left turn leads toward the Cockerham youth camping site and a right turn goes past a pond and up the hill to more barns and the tracks. Released by the groom, Glorious Empire goes straight, through some brambles and scrubby bushes, under a tree and up a hill. He breaks into a canter, half-forward, half-sideways and tosses in a buck or two for the sheer joy of it.
His trainer, Chuck Lawrence, laughs from behind the wheel of his Dodge Ram pick-up truck.
“Come on you big devil, don’t throw him off in front of Joe now,” says Lawrence, turning left. “Todd Pletcher would be freaking out about now.”
Maybe, maybe not, but Glorious Empire – perhaps North America’s best hope in the $4 million Breeders’ Cup Turf at Churchill Downs Saturday – is stepping into a 100-acre (estimated) Maryland field that leads to another one probably twice its size. After that flying start, he canters up a hill and disappears over the top.
Lawrence turns left toward an area referred to as Four Corners because, well, it’s four corners in a field and follows the road uphill in hopes of catching the latter stages of his stable star’s exercise. At the top of a long hill, Lawrence turns the truck around, parks in the knee-high grass and steps out. Down the hill and across the field, a tractor comes into view while mowing a path for mountain bikers and trail runners. But for 10 minutes, there is no horse.
“I hope this is where he was talking about,” Lawrence says of Hernandez. “. . . We went to the wrong damn field . . . Hopefully he didn’t buck him off . . . He could be lost for two days out here . . . All right, come on big horse. This is a helluva story. The trainer doesn’t even know where the horse is training. To be honest I try not to mess with him usually. I let Selvin do his own things.
“Oh, here he comes.”
Glorious Empire follows a similar path to that tractor, but canters past, turns gradually right and heads uphill. He puffs out big breaths, but it’s easy for him. There are no bucks, no shenanigans, just a horse putting in his work. He motors past, all the way to the top – not quite to Pennsylvania, but he could see it – pulls up to a walk, turns and strikes a statue-still pose while looking back down to the valley from where he came. On top of a hill, on a sunny morning, it is indeed a Glorious Empire.
“Oh it’s a beautiful field,” Lawrence says of the training area used by some at Fair Hill including a set from Tom Proctor chugging up the hill a few minutes later. The training center has two tracks, one dirt and one the Tapeta synthetic surface, but the adjacent fields might be just as important. The 300-acre facility is within the boundaries of a 5,600-acre state natural resources property with hay fields, trails, hills, woods, dirt roads, creeks, Mason-Dixon Line stones, loads of history and enough options for even the most finicky of Thoroughbreds. It’s a different world compared to the average American racetrack setting.
“Where you going to take him at Philadelphia Park or somewhere to slap at the sparrows as the old-timers might say and have a little fun,” says Lawrence, whose early experience with sparrow slapping came on the farm of steeplechase legend Burley Cocks.
Cocks would have loved Glorious Empire. The son of Holy Roman Emperor won four of his first six starts (all at a mile or shorter) in England in 2013 and 2014, then won in Hong Kong the next year under the name Quarternion Eagle. Last of 14 in his next Hong Kong start, he missed more than a year and bled in his English return at Newmarket in July 2016. Shipped to Canada and put on Lasix for a start two months later, Glorious Empire finished fifth in the Ontario Jockey Club Stakes going 6 furlongs on Woodbine’s synthetic track. He made five starts for American-based trainer Tom Morley in 2016-17, bleeding and getting claimed for $62,500 in May 2017.
For trainer Carlos Martin and owner Matt Schera, Glorious Empire won a $50,000 claimer at Saratoga that summer only to bleed two starts later at Laurel Park and miss the rest of the year. Schera moved the horse to Lawrence at Fair Hill, hoping to find a panacea to the bleeding and some stress-related behavioral issues.
“He’s a lot different than when he came in,” Lawrence said. “You see the picture of my daughter kissing on him and things? You would not have done that when he first got here. He was a little bit mean.”
He was also fast. Lawrence thought about a turf sprint stakes at Penn National, and opted for the 1-mile Henry Clark at Laurel in April. In his first start in nearly seven months, Glorious Empire finished sixth. He hasn’t lost since – romping while risked for a $65,000 tag at Delaware Park and then winning the Grade 2 Bowling Green going 1 3/8 miles and Grade 1 Sword Dancer going 1 1/2 miles at Saratoga (the second and third graded stakes wins in his trainer’s career).
Lawrence credited Fair Hill, the natural horsemanship adjustments of osteopath John Beachel and plenty of others with the improvement, but – ultimately – it came down to Glorious Empire himself. The trainer still worries about the bleeding, and manages it carefully, but training Glorious Empire is all about balancing speed, ability, health, attitude and opportunity.
“We had talked about running him for 35 (thousand), we ran him for 65 and we were weighing the options,” Lawrence said. “The more I trained him, the more I liked him. He’s been one of those horses that everybody who had him liked. I think the thing that probably helped was training at the track you probably do a lot more speed-type works, just thinking about it. We do that, but try to do it at the end of a mile for endurance building but also a settling type of thing.”
After the Win and You’re In Sword Dancer, Lawrence skipped an October start in favor of staying home. Sharp and steady, Glorious Empire worked twice in September and four times in October including a mile in 1:40 on the Tapeta Oct. 20 (the last 5 furlongs in a minute flat, according to Lawrence).
“Any time you have a horse that has the speed that he has, if you can control it, that’s the challenge, that’s the thing,” Lawrence said. “He’s a happier horse. He can still be mean, but it’s a good mean. He’s playing now.”
In the field and everywhere else.
NOTES: Glorious Empire ships to Churchill Downs Tuesday. Julien Leparoux has the ride aboard the earner of $852,147.
Photo: Glroious Empire heads back to the barn (that’s him in the center).
