That’s Why

Saratoga still creates the perfect racing canvas as 2024 meet arrives

Why Saratoga?

You can ask anyone in Thoroughbred racing that question and get an answer. Nobody hesitates, not for long anyway. People know why.

“It’s the blue-ribbon meet of America, it’s like the Royal Ascot of America, the Cheltenham of America,” said Bruce Jackson, a former trainer and now co-owner of Fair Hill Equine Therapy Center in Maryland. The Englishman first went to Saratoga in 1985 when, with about 10 minutes’ notice, his boss Jonathan Sheppard said the van was leaving and Jackson should be on it. “I think it’s just the best, the best of the best, all coming together and sorting it out on the track. It just has certain intangibles about it that make it special.”

Jackson got on that van with Over Indulged, a Texas-bred entered in a maiden hurdle race at Saratoga Aug. 1 and some other steeplechasers. Bred (in Texas) and owned by Will Farish, Over Indulged won going 2 1/16 miles. Ten days later, the Sheppard-trained Storm Cat – future, breed-shaping stallion – made his debut.

“That was quite an introduction, it was terrific,” Jackson said. “We stabled at the Annex. All the steeplechase horses were back there. Jonathan had a load of flat horses as well. That was in Storm Cat’s day, it was only the four-week meet then so it was even more special or unique.”

Jackson won one race at Saratoga as a trainer, with New York-bred 2-year-old Scientist in 2008, but more quickly recalled a tough beat from 2006.

“Clifton Park,” Jackson said. “He debuted at Saratoga and led all the way until the last little bit and just got beat. He was 25, 30-1, something like that, and I still remember the commentator halfway down the stretch saying, ‘Clifton Park . . . he’s still in front.’ I couldn’t believe they caught him.”

Clifton Park settled for third at 35-1, beaten a half-length and a nose, but bounced back to win the Oliver’s Twist Stakes in September and the Maryland Million Nursery in October. Nowadays, Jackson gets his hands on Saratoga winners – champion Just F Y I recently checked in, as did the recently retired Casa Creed – sent by trainers Chad Brown, Bill Mott and others for the various therapies at Fair Hill. They aren’t Over Indulged or Storm Cat, or Clifton Park for that matter, but they’re part of the power of Saratoga.

“It’s satisfying whenever they go on and do well and perform at the top level like some of them have,” Jackson said. “Saratoga brings that extra little bit to it and makes it even more special.”

There’s more to it than horses, of course.

There was a time when most racetracks in the country hosted Saratoga-like crowds. People bought tickets, arrived by train and car, got dressed up, ate in the dining room, bet their money. Save for a few special events, that’s changed. Except Saratoga.

“The fans, the racing fans,” Jackson said, “they’re the biggest part of it. They’re why Saratoga is Saratoga year after year.”

Trainer Mike Trombetta won five races at last year’s meet and will have plenty of chances this summer, too, with Future Is Now and Arzak looming large in stakes company, but he won’t forget his first trip to the Spa.

“My dad took me up there a year or two out of high school . . . I had never seen the place before and we were coming up that hill toward the track, I’m a teenager, and I look up and here comes a horse running down the road headed to the Northway,” said Trombetta, who grew up in Maryland. “He had gotten loose, and the outrider was trotting down the asphalt after him and there were two guys in golf carts behind him. There goes the horse, heading toward 87. That was my first Saratoga experience.

“I remember thinking, ‘These horses cross the street, they’re part of the town.’ To this day, I’m horrified when my horses go across that road.”

The horses do indeed cross Union Avenue, and Fifth and Nelson (any others?) and are definitely part of the town.

“It’s the best place in the world to race a horse, it’s that simple,” Trombetta said. “I don’t know of anything better. I haven’t experienced Royal Ascot in my life yet, but in this country, I don’t know of any place better. It’s one little meet a year, and everybody takes their best horses up there to showcase them and it’s just a fun place to race. The atmosphere is just unbelievable. That’s why.”

Owner Larry Johnson’s Irish Laddie gave Trombetta his first Saratoga win in 2004, a $65,000 claimer. Two years later, Trombetta won the P.G. Johnson Stakes with Changeisgonnacome. Don’t look for him in the win photo.

“Larry made me run a filly up there that I didn’t think could win and I watched the race from Delaware Park and she won,” Trombetta said. “I missed my first stakes winner at Saratoga. She crossed the wire and I was like, ‘Oh, I should probably be there.’ ”

Todd Pletcher knows the Saratoga winner’s circle better than anyone. He’s topped the trainer standings a record 14 times including a five-year run from 2002 to 2006 and a six-year stretch from 2010 to 2015.

Pletcher started working at Saratoga during his days with fellow Hall of Famer and six-time leading trainer D. Wayne Lukas in 1989, but his first trip goes back further.

“I came one time with my dad, who was training for Dan Lasater, one of the leading owners at the time and they came here to buy a horse,” Pletcher said. “I went to the races one day with them. I don’t remember what year it was but one thing I do remember, wherever we were sitting, Jimmy The Greek was right there. At that point I was young enough to know the ‘NFL Today’ and Jimmy The Greek was a legend. I remember that. I remember being on the backside, going by Frank Martin’s barn and watching his grooms work, how meticulous they were and seeing some top horses at the time train.”

Pletcher has trained some of the top horses of the modern era out of his barn on the Oklahoma Training Track and he’s won every major prize in upstate New York from the Alabama to the Whitney, the Hopeful to the Travers and the Fourstardave to the Spinaway. The horses, trainers and jockeys make the headlines, but there’s much that makes the meet go.

“From a trainer’s perspective, the owners are so much more into it, involved, present and in attendance for the races,” Pletcher said. “When Saratoga ends, life gets back to normal for a lot of them. A lot of times you go to the rail in the summer for turf works and it’ll be like a who’s who cast of owners lining the rail watching horses train, which you just don’t get everywhere.

“On top of that, when you go to the races it’s generally a full house. Maybe not a packed house every day but there’s a lot of fans in attendance. In today’s world of simulcast where everyone is watching on their tablet or their phone, or whatever, this is one of the few places besides Keeneland that on a daily basis you get good attendances. That’s a significant part of it. Then there’s obviously all the history, tradition, and all of that which goes along with it.”

Al Stall Jr., a Saratoga regular since 1996 and trainer of 2010 Whitney winner Blame, also knows how important it is to win at Saratoga. Stall made his first trips to Saratoga in the 1970s alongside his father, the late innovative regulator and owner Al Stall Sr.

“I grew up in the game and Saratoga has always been the holy grail,” Stall said. “My first time here was in the ’70s. I came up here with my father. I remember the races, the Woody Stephenses and all that kind of stuff. I came up on my own in ’96 and I’ve been here every summer since then.

“I’m a traditional, old-school type person. I don’t change things too much, but I want to be here also, and my family loves it, too. That helps. It’s fun, it’s different. In this day and age with cell phones, you win a race on a Wednesday at Saratoga and by the time you get your picture taken, walk back into the grandstand, look at your phone and you’ll see 37 text messages. That doesn’t happen anywhere else. Everybody’s watching.”

Graham Motion typically summons his trip to Saratoga with Wooing for the 1989 Diana when prompted for an early Saratoga memory. Trained by Sheppard, Wooing started at 30-1 and led from the start for jockey Antonio Nunez only to get disqualified for interfering with Glowing Honor and Jerry Bailey.

“I galloped that filly and Jonathan sent me because she was kind of difficult, kind of silly, and I got on her at home,” said Motion. “She won, or we thought she won, and then she didn’t.”

Welcome to Saratoga. As a trainer, Motion horses have finished second in six Dianas – five by a neck or a less. Saturday, he runs Mission Of Joy in this year’s Grade 1 turf stakes. A win would mean the world, and slot in nicely with Motion’s 32 Grade 1 wins including Saratoga’s Whitney and Sword Dancer (twice).

“There’s nothing like winning those old races at Saratoga that have such prestige and such reputations,” he said. “They’re not easy to win. It’s never easy at Saratoga. I’m in a two-other-than on Thursday (second race with No Show Sammy Jo) that might as well be a Grade 2, so why do we do it?

“From a business point of view, if you’re winning a race at Saratoga in August everybody sees it. One win at Saratoga can feel like eight or nine at some other tracks.”

Long before he was a trainer, Motion came to Saratoga with his father Michael, an international bloodstock agent with England’s Tattersalls company and eventually spent time on the Fasig-Tipton muck crew on the sales grounds at Saratoga – a job Mike Rowe would love.

Tasks included toting grimy burlap muck sacks, shuttling trash to the dump (losing the occasional can over the side of the pick-up truck) and pretty much anything someone higher up the ladder told him to do.

“My boss was Lee Watson, he was in charge of the crew,” Motion said. “He used to page us over the speaker when we weren’t where we were supposed to be. We’d be out all night and go straight to work. You’d have a hangover, and you’d have to pick up those muck sacks. If it was raining, the muck would be running down your back. It was terrible, but we had such a good time.”

Watson sent Motion and his mates across the street to make bets, with confidence, but also with a warning. He’d say, “I got a good tip here. You boys go over there. Don’t bet your money, but put some on for me.”

Watson couldn’t have known it, but he was introducing Motion and the others to Saratoga. Forty-something years later, Motion has trained the winners of 2,744 races and is a regular at the nation’s oldest racetrack.

Jeremiah Englehart grew up in New York and in a racing family, the son of leading Finger Lakes conditioner Chris Englehart. He remembers coming with his father to run Frattare, winner of the 1989 Finger Lakes Budweiser Breeders’ Cup Handicap, in a mid-August allowance and the filly Iron Tizzy in the final race on the second-to-last card at the 1992 meeting.

“Iron Tizzy won the last race with Eddie Maple aboard and it literally took my dad and I close to three hours to get her on the trailer to head home,” Englehart said. “We laugh about it now . . . It was just him and I. We were using brooms, whatever we could to get her on the trailer and I think she just finally gave up. She went on. It’s a funny story now. Literally three hours to get on the trailer from the receiving barn. But we smiled the whole way home because she won. You have a lot more patience when they win, especially at Saratoga.”

Englehart took a while to do that on his own, losing with his first 58 starters before his first victory with Winter Games in the first race on Opening Day in 2014. He’s won plenty since, including four at the 2023 meet.

“I have a hard time getting over the fact that if I walk outside the gates, somebody might stop me at Stewart’s and ask ‘Do you have anything going this week?’ and I don’t even know who it is,” Englehart said. “The town loves the racing. The history here is unbelievable.

“When I first had horses and I’d walk over to watch training, I’d look up at the trees and think, ‘Man, what have those trees seen over the last couple hundred years?’ It’s amazing. I think NYRA and everybody has done a great job making Saratoga special, and to me, it will always be special. Honestly, everybody that comes to the meet, the fans, the horses, the trainers, the clients, together they make it special. Everyone has the same feeling. I don’t know anyone that walks in on the first day at Saratoga and says, ‘I can’t believe I have to be here.’ It’s like being 47 years old and wanting to go to Disney World. This is my Disney World. That’s how I feel about it and why it’s special to me.”

You have to dig a little deeper to find Jimmy Toner’s Saratoga origin story, but it’s back there.

“I was the assistant,” he said of his job with trainer Bill Mitchell. “I was staying with Jim Dailey the outrider and Bart Sweeney who worked on the gate. I had four horses in what is Shug McGaughey’s barn now. Eddie Neloy was there then.”

The four horses included Little Tumbler, targeting the Schuylerville after winning the Astoria at Aqueduct, and Lucky George, “a nasty sucker.” Little Tumbler finished second in the stakes, but Lucky George came through with a win.

“From there I proceeded to go to Suffolk Downs and Lincoln Downs for years,” Toner said. “They kicked me out and said come back later. That was 1960.”

Sixty?

Yes, sixty.

Toner came back, and became a fixture. In 1983, he won the Adirondack and the Spinaway with Buzz My Bell for owner Caesar Kimmel. Two years later, the team landed the Schuylerville with I’m Splendid. “That’s when I was a claiming trainer winning stakes with 2-year-olds and before they started calling me a turf trainer.” Toner won Saratoga’s Grade 1 Diana with Memories Of Silver in 1998 and Wonder Again in 2004, the latter in a rainstorm that might have made Noah flinch.

“She was a wreck in the paddock,” Toner said. “It starts to drizzle and everybody goes inside to saddle. We bring her in, and I could see her starting to shiver so I wanted to take her back outside.”

Toner’s assistant Manu Davy, in a new suit for the occasion, wasn’t so sure.

“He looked at me like, ‘What?’ ” Toner said. “Then the valet came out and he walked right by us to the stalls. It was raining by now, but she was quieting down and we saddled her outside in the rain.”

Out on the track, in the mist and gloom, Wonder Again followed Sand Springs and Ocean Drive early, stayed on the inside hedge turning for home and drew off late for Edgar Prado. Toner wasn’t sure where his mare was until the stretch despite the fluffy white shadow roll across her nose.

“You could see them break and you couldn’t see much until they turned into the lane,” he said. “I spotted her and she got up and she won. You couldn’t see, it was raining so hard. That was a fun race, and we had a lot of them. We had some good luck there.”

Toner, based at Fair Hill Training Center with 25 horses, won’t keep a string at Saratoga this summer but will be a regular shipper.

“It’s the premier place to be in the summertime, that’s for sure,” said Toner, who runs Battlefield Park in the 11th race on Opening Day. “The atmosphere, the town, it’s a great place. I miss it. There wasn’t much there in 1960, I’ll tell you. It’s changed a lot.”

But it’s always mattered.