Keeneland Magazine - Spring 2021 Issue

GODOLPHIN’S SUCCESS

ANDRE PATER

RADIO EYE’S MISSION

A CONSUMMATE HORSEWOMAN

K EENELAND SPRING 2021

celebrating bluegrass traditions

U.S. $5.00 (CAN. $7.50)

KEENELAND.COM

Top 5% in the country.

Three consecutive years Saint Joseph Hospital is the only hospital in Kentucky named to Healthgrades’ list of America’s 250 Best Hospitals for three consecutive years. This achievement places us in the top 5% of all hospitals in the nation for our superior clinical performance and excellence. At CHI Saint Joseph Health, we’re called to serve.

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The late ‘Bull’ Hancock of Claiborne Farm was one of the most successful of all stallion selectors; he laid down five criteria for selecting a stallion. Hancock insisted that a potential stallion should satisfy all criteria:

1

He must have shown good form as a 2YO.

2

He must have demonstrated his ability to stay 1¼ miles as a 3YO.

3

He must be sound.

4

He must look masculine.

5

He must have the right kind of pedigree.

Won the Champagne Stakes-Gr.1 by 4 lengths (previous winners include Coolmore America’s outstanding sires Scat Daddy & Uncle Mo).

Won the Travers Stakes-Gr.1 by 5½ lengths (fifth fastest time ever, faster than top sires Bernardini, Medaglia d’Oro etc.) and runner-up in the Kentucky Derby-Gr.1, both over 10f.

He also won the Belmont Stakes-Gr.1 (9f.) by 3¾ lengths and Florida Derby-Gr.1 (9f.) by 4¼ lengths (leading sires to win it include Scat Daddy, Quality Road, Constitution and Nyquist).

9 runs at 2 and 3 years, 6 wins, once second, once third.

6 runs in Gr.1s, 4 very impressive wins and once second.

Come and see him for yourself.

A better racehorse than his leading young sire Constitution (by Tapit).

His dam Tizfiz (by Tiznow) won the San Gorgonio H.-Gr.2 (now the Robert J. Frankel Stakes) at Santa Anita and is a full-sister to Fury Kapcori (Gr.3 winner & runner-up in the CashCall Futurity-Gr.1).

New for 2021 Fee $40,000.

Aisling Duignan, Dermot Ryan, Charlie O’Connor, Adrian Wallace, Robyn Murray or Blaise Benjamin. Tel: 859-873-7088. Fax: 859-879 5756.

R FO W NE TO O HO TO P

BOURBON COUNTY 204.7 ACRE H O R S E F A R M —Maybe the best value on

the market!! Tons of improvements: classic 2-story 4,069 square foot home, manager’s house, pool house, 3 horse barns with 28 stalls (one with 64’ x 50’) indoor arena, 15 run-in sheds, tobacco and hay barn, 2 equipment sheds plus brick-pillared entrance. Across the road from historic Stone Farm and adjoining Machmer Hall.

BORDERING NORTH ELKHORN CREEK —

Beautiful, meticulously-built 5 bedroom, 4 full/2 half bath home located on 12.55 acres (with option to buy 5 more acres) in a rural residential setting near schools in Scott County. Gorgeous Brazilian teak hardwood foors throughout the house. Large 1st foor master suite with adjacent den or ofce. Wonderful eat in kitchen with top of the line appliances, custom cabinets, and granite counters that opens to a large family room. Great outdoor kitchen and patio with pastoral setting. Room for horses. Property backs up to the Elkhorn Creek which is home to a Blue Heron Rookery.

MILLERSBURG ROAD —Located just 3.3 miles from Paris Bypass, this 25-acre farm ofers a concrete block barn with 7 stalls, tack/feed room and a 12’ asphalt center aisle. Other farm improvements include a loading chute, plank fencing, two felds, one paddock and 4 waterers. Te three bedroom, two bath residence sits back from the road and ofers 2,500 SF with a formal living and dining room, family room with beamed cathedral ceiling and wood-burning freplace, large kitchen, breakfast room, laundry, home ofce, and seasonal porch. In addition, there is a 2 car detached garage. Te gently rolling pastures, wet weather creek, and mature trees add to the ambience of this charming farm.

J U S T I C E R E A L E S TAT E

IRON WORKS PIKE - 145 ACRES—Absolutely

the fnest, most complete horse facility in all of Kentucky!! Lovely 7,300-SF classic Kentucky home, accessed via a mature tree-lined drive, features a copper roof, bluestone porches, tall ceilings, Kentucky chestnut oak fooring, and thick moldings; c.1800 log cabin; magnifcent formal gardens; 400’ x 400’ derby feld; 180’ x 250’ outdoor ring; 100’ x 200’ indoor arena; 4 horse barns - 48 stalls plus grooming/tack/ wash stalls; 2 additional employee houses.

1806 CANE RIDGE—Tis 422 acre farm features

the centerpiece of its family operation—its magnifcentlyrestored c.1838 Greek Revival home. Consisting of 4,650 SF, this fabulous home was restored in 2008-09.

Boasting a breath-taking gourmet kitchen, beautiful hardwood foors, large rooms, and 10’ ceilings. Farm improvements include 2 feeder barns—both with conveyor belts, a shop building, an equipment/hay storage building, multiple grain bins, two silos, a “heifer” barn, and an employee house.

173 ACRES —Located in the heart of the Toroughbred industry and just a half mile of prestigious Paris Pike, Waggoner Farm has a long history of producing exceptional race horses. 2011 Champion Filly ZAZU and 2017 Grade I Winner CUPID are just 2 recent graduates.

An exceptional working horse farm & comprised of 63 stalls in 5 barns. Additional horse improvements include an ofce, equipment sheds, hay barn, automatic walker, and let-down pens. 1,720 SF 1.5 story manager’s home plus a modular. 2 entrances add desirability and function.

THESE TWO FARMS ADJOIN!

WALNUT SPRINGS FARM - 268 ACRES —

Magnifcent 11,000 SF main residence in a stoneenclosed court yard with pool and pool house. 66 stalls in 7 barns, open equipment shed, shop/equip bldg, 3 employee houses. Tis farm was originally developed by Robert Sterling Clark of Singer Sewing Machines. He chose this land because of its excellent soils, abundant water, and the limestone underneath.

Te adjoining 256 acres is also available for sale by the same owner with 46 stalls in 3 concrete block barns.

2 5 6 A C R E S O N C A S T L E R O C K WAY —

Tis turn-key horse farm produced a $10 million yearling on its excellent land (nearly 80% Maury and Lowell).

46 stalls in 3 concrete block barns, manager’s plus 3 employee houses. A wonderful opportunity to acquire a well-located farm in the immediate area of Gainesway Farm. Adjoining 268 acre horse farm on Muir Station with magnifcent main residence is also available.

STRODES CREEK STUD —Beautiful 582 acre Toroughbred facility situated on Strodes Creek and accessed via a long, tree-lined drive. Tis highlydeveloped horse farm is in one of the world’s most productive Toroughbred regions while ofering one of the most aesthetically-pleasing settings anywhere.

Horse improvements include 115 stalls in 7 barns.

Guest plus employee housing and 3 shop/maintenance building. Beautiful land!

518 East Main Street, Lexington, KY 40508 u ( 859 ) 255-3657 u www.kyhorsefarms.com

GRANDEUR & HORSE SENSE —Tis manor

house is a reproduction of the Williamsburg mansion— Carter’s Grove. With 6,000+ SF of gracious living area, this 4 BR, 3 full/3 half BA home features tall ceilings, hardwood foors, & brick porches. Horse improvements on this 45 acre farm were recently constructed to include a magnifcent 6-stall Broadview Builders barn with groom’s apmt, a 125’ x 250’ Wordley-Martin outdoor ring with the same base as the KHP Rolex Stadium, open 48’ x 96’ equip/store bldg, a Horse Gym treadmill, & 2 run-in sheds.

Wonderful location in the immediate area of Split Rock, Hester Equine, and Jackpot Farm.

6490 RUSSELL CAVE—Tis 92 acre farm is 10 minutes

to KHP & is suited for any discipline with a 60’ x 190’ indoor arena, 2 barns with 49 stalls, round pens, 5-horse aqua-sizer, hyperbaric chamber, tenant house, and breeding lab. Wellmaintained paddocks & felds with auto waterers and runins. Sprawling ranch home features gorgeous entertainment complex with extensive decking, pool, BBQ, hot tub and lots of seating. Tis home has just been beautifully furnished and property is being sold with all furnishings, and extensive list of farm equipment. 2nd residence sits near creek and has stunning fnishes. Move right into these ready-to-go homes!

What an easy transition to your new very special location!

6344 PARIS ROAD —Wrought iron entrance gate and solar lighting on picturesque drive over meandering creek leads to expertly-planned 53 acre horse farm with gorgeous 2900 SF log home. Two tenant houses, 10 stall barn, 60’ round pen, numerous outbuildings, numerous paddocks and felds- all with run-ins, Varnan waterers, and diamond wire fencing. Most improvements less than two years old. Also available is 52 adjoining acres (6454 Paris Road) with a 3 BR manager’s house, large barn with 7 stalls /maintenance/4 aptmts. Paddocks, pastures, large hay feld, and new hay storage barn.

CENTRAL KENTUCKY’S HORSE FARM PROFESSIONALS 3 WORLD-CLASS HORSE FARMS A PORTION OF

HISTORIC

DIAMOND A FARM

ANNESTES FARM

ROSEMONT FARM

Highly developed 523 acre horse farm with immediate neighbors as Coolmore/ Ashford and Gainesborough farms.

Te centerpiece of the farm is its ofce/ stallion barn complex that is very adaptable to a yearling complex. Tere are 5 additional horse barns with 86 stalls, 2 metal buildings, large shop plus a very nice 4,900 SF manager’s home (suitable for an owner) and an employee house.

Frontage on 3 roads and exceptionally well-built and maintained. Absolutely the best turn-key horse farm on the market.

Located in highly-desirable Woodford County this exceptionally well-designed and constructed horse farm is as aesthetically pleasing as it is functional.

2 stone entrances greet you and lead you through over 3.5 miles of roads to its centerpiece—a 20+ acre lake.

Along the way, you’ll discover 2 worldclass 28 stall barns with 2 larger foaling stalls and a wash bay. Te stallion barn has 5 stalls, a 50’ x 50’ breeding area, ofce, observation area, and bath. Two 3-bedroom/2-bath employee houses, an 1,800 SF Tudor-style ofce, and shop/ equipment building complete this true turn-key horse farm.

Rosemont Farm has everything one needs to make their mark in the Bluegrass!

Location-world-renown Paris Pike, frontage on 2 major roads, restored circa 1830’s main residence with exquisite wood work and containing 6,670 SF of gracious living area; 365 acres of great soils; 5 barns with 74 stalls including mare, yearling, and training barns; 3 auxiliary residences; office; mature tree-lined driveways; multiple equipment/storage buildings; and proven producer of Stakes winners including a Kentucky Oaks winner on excellent soils.

Bill G. Bell (859-621-0607) u Mary Sue Walker (859-619-4770) u Marilyn Richardson (859-621-4850) Muffy Lyster (859-229-1804) u Allen Kershaw (859-333-2901) u Bill Justice (859-255-3657)

Contents Contents SPRING 2021

SPRING 2021

F EAT U R ES

34 EPITOME OF

EXCELLENCE

by Lenny Shulman Building on the Bell family legacy, Godolphin has gone from strength to strength on the track and the farm.

50 A LEG UP

88 CONSUMMATE

by Jarrett Van Meter The Godolphin Flying Start program grooms young professionals for leadership roles in the industry.

60 CAPTURING THE LIGHT

by Jacalyn Carfagno At the height of his artistic powers, Andre Pater still seeks new horizons.

70 WORKING

by Robin Roenker The UK-Keeneland partnership benefi ts Central Kentucky and the broader Thoroughbred industry.

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104 ROOM FOR ALL AT THIS CHEF’S TABLE

by Vickie Mitchell In Ouita Michel’s world, it’s “we” before “I.”

116 RED RIVER GORGE-OUS

COMBINATION

60

HORSEWOMAN

by Maryjean Wall First Lady of the Turf Josephine Clay gets overdue recognition.

104

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by Rena Baer This natural wonder brings new and returning visitors close to nature.

116

ON OUR COVER Hill ‘n’ Dale Racing Silks, 2016 Pastel on board, 36 x 24,

by Andre Pater Now a resident of Lexington, Kentucky, the Polish-born Andre Pater received his master’s degree from the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow. Arabian horses were his first subjects, and he was quickly one of the most sought-after painters of this breed. In the late 1980s he developed a love of the Thoroughbred and again has risen to the top of his fi eld with racing scenes as well as portrayals of hunting dogs, cattle, and wildlife.

Contents

SPRING 2021

128

18

138

D E PA R T M E N T S PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE 14 • CONTRIBUTORS 16 • NEWS 18 • CONNECTIONS 22

24 SPOTLIGHT ON Statistics and results speak volumes for trainer Mike Maker.

by Liane Crossley

128 MAKING

A DIFFERENCE Radio Eye observes 30 years of providing audio service to the blind and print disabled.

by William Bowden

138 KEENELAND

TEAM PROFILE Special Events Team adapts to changing times.

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C ASTLETON L YONS

offers a unique opportunity for serious breeders to board their thoroughbreds. Here you will find a state of the art facility with old world charm. Over one thousand acres of lightly grazed lush pasture supported by the best quality soil, so famous for producing great race horses, await your thoroughbred investments.

Horses make a landscape.

Individual detailed oriented attention for horse and client in a top class environment can be found conveniently located within minutes of the Bluegrass Airport, Keeneland, Fasig-Tipton, and the world’s best equine hospitals.

Completing our facility is an isolation farm annex settled on approximately one hundred acres, directly across the road on scenic Mt. Horeb Pike.

We would be delighted to hear from you | Please contact PAT HAYES

Inquiries to Pat Hayes: 2469 Iron Works Pike, Lexington, KY 40511 (859) 455-9222 Fax (859) 455-8892 www.castletonlyons.com

K EENELAND celebrating bluegrass traditions

The off cial magazine of Keeneland Association, Inc. published by Blood-Horse LLC 821 Corporate Dr., Lexington, KY 40503 (859) 278-2361/FAX (859) 276-4450 KeenelandMagazine.com BloodHorse.com

Editor: Jacqueline Duke Artists: Catherine Nichols (Art Director), David Young, Claudia Summers Copy Editors: Tom Hall (chief), Rena Baer Visuals Director: Anne M. Eberhardt

2021: A GOLDEN YEAR His highest-rated son on a stunning run of G1 success in Hong Kong. Two Derby colts among his three-year-olds.

Juveniles from his best-bred crop to date. And an even better-bred crop of foals now being born...

THOROUGHBRED Read all about Medaglia d’Oro in the ThOROughbred News on our website.

NEWS From

Derby colts lead golden crop

WITH

the 2021 Run for the Roses a little over two months away, all eyes are on the Derby preps as the nation’s three-year-olds try to stamp their ticket to Churchill Downs. In this bunch are two colts by Medaglia d’Oro, Graded winner On Sunday, Medaglia d’Oro’s son Golden Sixty confirmed his Risk Taking and newcomer Prevalence. position high among the world’s leading racehorses with a third Risk Taking, trained by Chad Brown and owned by Klaravich Stables, has won two consecutive G1 win – and his 16th from 17 starts – in the Hong Kong races at one and one-eighth miles, including Gold Cup. His Timeform rating, a mighty 129, is now just one pound the G3 Withers last time out. The Keeneland behind Medaglia d’Oro’s best ever, the 130-rated Rachel Alexandra. sales grad appears to be headed to the G2 Wood Memorial next on April 3.

The Godolphin homebred and Triple His juveniles include 15 out of G1 winners – Crown nominee Prevalence put in an early among them, Breeders’ Cup Distaff winner 2021 ‘wow’ moment in his first start at Forever Unbridled, Kentucky Oaks winner Gulfstream Park on January 23, defeating a Cathryn Sophia, and Breeders’ Cup Juvenile tough field of maidens on debut by eightFillies winner My Miss Aurelia. Thirteen and-a-half lengths. Trained by Brendan are half-siblings to G1 winners and there Walsh, the sophomore registered an 89 are full siblings to Breeders’ Cup winners Beyer Speed Figure for his strong effort.

Songbird and Bar of Gold. They were duly Medaglia d’Oro also has a nice threewell received at the yearling sales: Medaglia year-old filly in Moonlight dÕOro who took d’Oro was the nation’s leading yearling sire as it is, Medaglia d’Oro’s the one-mile G3 Las Virgenes Stakes in also by average last year. crop of three-year-olds is her first start following her maiden victory.

And he has an even better crop of foals likely to be upstaged by his 2021 crop of Trained by Richard Mandella and owned now being born. He bred his best book juveniles: with a Comparable Index (CI) of

by MyRacehorse.com & Spendthrift Farm, of mares ever by CI in 2020 – they score the filly brought $620,000 at Keeneland as a 4.90, they reckon to be his best-bred group a whopping 7.73, the best for any stallion from 15 crops of racing age. yearling in 2019. since Storm Cat in 2007.

Creative Services: Jennifer Singleton (Director), Forrest Begley Account Executive: Amanda Ramey Sales Support: Catherine Johnston CORPORATE OPERATIONS Circulation Accounting Manager: Lauren Glover General Manager: Scott Carling PUBLISHED BY Blood-Horse LLC BOARD OF DIRECTORS James L. Gagliano, Carl Hamilton, Ian D. Highet, Stuart S. Janney III, Dan Metzger, Rosendo Parra, Dr. J. David Richardson

KEENELAND ASSOCIATION, INC. 4201 Versailles Road P.O. Box 1690 Lexington, Kentucky, U.S.A. 40588-1690 Tel: (859) 254-3412 (800) 456-3412 Keeneland.com © 2021 Keeneland Association, Inc.

Unbelievably, there are better crops coming

GOOD

DARLEY’S GOLDEN BOYS

DADDY OF THEM ALL Medaglia d’Oro $150,000 S&N

Astern More

This filly is very similar to

Vequist

SEE THE FILM ONLINE

than

the sum

of his parts

...ENTICED?

Go faster...

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KEENELAND.COM

To order Keeneland magazine and additional copies, call 1-800-582-5604 TO SUBSCRIBE OR TO SEND A GIFT SUBSCRIPTION to Keeneland magazine, visit BloodHorse.com/KeenelandOffer

President’s Message SPRING 2021

New Era Begins It is an honor to be addressing you for the frst

and wagering has held strong. Even

time in Keeneland magazine as president of this

with these achievements during an

great institution. I recognize the immense respon-

unprecedented time, the safety of

sibility that comes with this position, and I accept

our employees, patrons, and fans

— with tremendous honor — the opportunity to

has never been compromised, and

build upon the ideals established by my prede-

the safety of our horses and riders

cessor, Bill Thomason, and those before him.

remains paramount. Traditions are

The world has changed dramatically in the

important, particularly for an orga-

past year. Had someone told me what was to

nization that has existed since 1936

unfold in 2020, I would not have believed them.

with the same mission: to be a mod-

I am heartbroken by the sadness, illness, and

el racetrack and sales company. We

death that the COVID-19 pandemic has left in its

will take the best of our traditions

wake. Alongside that sense of loss, the optimist in

and build on them with a constant

me has been looking for silver linings. As Win-

focus on what is best for the horse.

ston Churchill said, “Never let a good crisis go

SHANNON ARVIN President and CEO

We continue our involvement in efforts to unite the

to waste.” At Keeneland we have been working

industry as a founding member of the Thoroughbred Safety

tirelessly to fnd those silver linings and help lead

Coalition, a group of like-minded racetracks and industry

our industry and community through this diff-

organizations working to make our sport as safe as possible.

cult time into the brave new world.

We have also worked closely with tracks and Thoroughbred

On the sales side, we have added online

organizations in support of the Horseracing Integrity and

bidding as a way to purchase horses at our live

Safety Act (HISA). HISA provides federal legislation that

auctions, resulting in more than $30 million in

paves a path for consistent rules across jurisdictions as well

bloodstock purchased online from places far

as consistent enforcement of those rules for trainers, race-

and wide, including Japan, United Kingdom, and

tracks, and participants leading to enhanced safety for our

France. We have pioneered digital sales, hosting

equine and human athletes. HISA is truly a game changer

three digital sales in 2020, with seven addition-

for our sport, and it will elevate the horse racing industry to

al digital sales planned for 2021. On the racing

the same level as other thriving professional sports.

side, our team successfully hosted a historic July

Perhaps the ultimate silver lining of this pandemic is the

race meet, October race meet, and Breeders’ Cup

gift of perspective. We have all been forced to slow the fre-

World Championships, all in the midst of chang-

netic pace of our lives and ponder what is most important

ing guidelines and authority regarding events in a

to us. Never have I felt so grateful for family and friendships,

global pandemic.

and to be part of this incredibly resilient industry.

Our sport has seen increased TV exposure,

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KEENELAND.COM

Cheers to blue skies ahead. KM

COMMITTED TO YOUR

SUCCESS

For more than 40 years, Lane’s End has pursued one mission: helping our partners achieve their goals in sales, breeding, and racing. That dedication to your success has guided us as we’ve stood with our fellow horsemen through the ups and downs of the industry—and will continue to guide us as we look toward our shared future.

This is what we stand for.

ACCELERATE | CANDY RIDE (ARG) | CATALINA CRUISER | CITY OF LIGHT | CONNECT | DAREDEVIL | GAME WINNER GIFT BOX | HONOR A. P. | HONOR CODE | LIAM’S MAP | MINESHAFT | MR SPEAKER | QUALITY ROAD | THE FACTOR TONALIST | TWIRLING CANDY | UNIFIED | UNION RAGS | WEST COAST

Contributors

SPRING 2021

RENA BAER (Red River Gorge-ous) is a writer and an editor whose work frequently appears in Keeneland magazine and several other Lexingtonbased and national publications.

WILLIAM BOWDEN (Bringing the Written Word Alive) most recently worked as publications editor at Transylvania University. He was formerly a writer and an editor at the Somerset (Kentucky) CommonwealthJournal, the Lexington Herald-Leader, and the National Tour Association.

JACALYN CARFAGNO (Capturing the Light) is a

professional writer and an editor based in Lexington.

She has covered the equine industry and written restaurant reviews and commentary for the Lexington Herald-Leader in addition to work for a wide range of clients.

VICKIE MITCHELL

JARRETT VAN METER

(Room for All atThis Chef’s Table) writes for regional and national publications as well as for small businesses and nonproft organizations. She lives and works in Lexington.

(A Leg Up) is a writer originally from Lexington. His work has appeared in such publications as the Boston Globe, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Nashville Tennessean, the Louisville Courier-Journal, and the Lexington Herald-Leader.

He is the author of a nonfction book about Kentucky high school basketball titled How Sweet It Is.

ROBIN ROENKER (Working Combination) is a freelance writer and frequent Keeneland magazine contributor who writes for many Kentuckybased and national publications.

MARYJEAN WALL

LIANE CROSSLEY

AMY OWENS

(Making a Statement) has spent her career in Thoroughbred racing-related jobs in barns, press boxes, and offces. A seasonal member of Keeneland’s media team, she has had her work appear in BloodHorse, Daily Racing Form,Thoroughbred Daily News, Breeders’ Cup website, Horse Illustrated, European Bloodstock News, and Young Rider.

(Keeneland News/Connections) is Keeneland Communications Associate.

LENNY SHULMAN (Epitome of Success) is a senior correspondent for BloodHorse magazine and the author of Justify: 111 Days to Triple Crown Glory (Triumph Books) and Ride of Their Lives: The Trials and Turmoil of Today’s Top Jockeys.

(Consummate Horsewoman) won multiple Eclipse Awards during 35 years as Turf writer for the Lexington Herald-Leader.

In addition to Madam Belle: Sex, Money, and Infuence in a Southern Brothel, she is the author of How Kentucky Became Southern: A Tale of Outlaws, Horse Thieves, Gamblers, and Breeders. She holds a doctorate from the University of Kentucky.

CELEBRATING A HEALTHY YOU For 100 years, Lexington Clinic has been at the forefront of keeping your family healthy. With 180+ providers in more than 30 specialties, Lexington Clinic ofers you the best in personalized care.

For more information or to schedule an appointment, call 859.258.4DOC (4362) or visit lexingtonclinic.com.

Your doctors for life.

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KEENELAND.COM

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Keeneland News

SPRING 2021

COMPILED BY AMY OWENS

RACING RETURNS TO KEENELAND FOR 2021 SPRING MEET

COADY PHOTOGRAPHY

K

eeneland will present 18 stakes, featuring the 97th running of the $800,000 Toyota Blue Grass (G2) and the 84th running of the $400,000 Central Bank Ashland (G1), worth a total of $4.1 million during its 2021 spring meet from April 2-23.

“Keeneland is excited to welcome racing back to the Bluegrass in April,” Keeneland President and CEO Shannon Arvin said. “With the cancellation of last year’s spring meet because of the pandemic, it is critical to the Toroughbred industry that we are able to ofer our full slate of April stakes on their traditional dates. Tese races are key fxtures on the international racing calendar.”

Keeneland has announced plans to allow a limited number of fans to attend the season. Ticket information is available on Keeneland.com.

Te Toyota Blue Grass and Central Bank Ashland on April 3 headline a blockbuster card of six stakes.

Te Toyota Blue Grass, for 3-year-olds at 11⁄8 miles, and the Central Bank Ashland, for 3-year-old fllies at 11⁄16 miles, are both worth 170 points on the Road to the Kentucky Derby and Road to the Kentucky Oaks, respectively. Te winner of each stakes will earn 100 qualifying points to the respective race.

Two spring meet stakes will have milestone runnings. Te Maker’s Mark Mile (G1T) on April 9 will be raced for the 25th time under the sponsorship of the world-famous bourbon distillery in Loretto, Kentucky. Te Baird Doubledogdare (G3) on April 16 will be contested for the 10th time as sponsored

by Baird (formerly Hilliard Lyons).

First post during the 15-day season is 1:05 p.m.

Keeneland is closed Easter Sunday, April 4.

Keeneland’s spring race meet will feature 18 stakes worth $4.1 million.

KEENELAND 2021 SPRING MEET STAKES SCHEDULE Date

Stakes

Friday, April 2

$150,000 Kentucky Utilities Transylvania (G3T), $150,000 Beaumont Presented by Keeneland Select (G3), $100,000 Palisades Turf Sprint

Saturday, April 3

$800,000 Toyota Blue Grass (G2), $400,000 Central Bank Ashland (G1), $300,000 Madison (G1), $200,000 Appalachian Presented by Japan Racing Association (G2T), $200,000 Shakertown (G2T), $200,000 Commonwealth (G3)

Friday, April 9

$300,000 Maker’s Mark Mile (G1T), $100,000 TVG Limestone Turf Sprint

Saturday, April 10

$300,000 Coolmore Jenny Wiley (G1T), $200,000 Stonestreet Lexington (G3), $150,000 Ben Ali (G3), $100,000 Giant’s Causeway

Friday, April 16

$100,000 Baird Doubledogdare (G3)

Saturday, April 17

$200,000 Elkhorn (G2T)

Friday, April 23

$150,000 Bewitch (G3T)

© BENOIT PHOTO

Keeneland schedules April sale

Months after selling at the 2019 April sale, Higher Power won the TVG Pacifc Classic.

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SPRING 2021

Keeneland will hold an April horses of racing age sale on Monday, April 26, at the start of Kentucky Derby Week. The sale will be an integrated event, with live auctioneers at Keeneland and horses presented for sale both physically at Keeneland as well as at off-site locations, at the option of the sellers and consignors.

Internet bidding will be available for buyers to participate remotely.

“Our goal with this innovative format is to provide fexibility for both buyers and sellers,” Keeneland

K KEENELAND.COM

President, CEO, and Interim Head of Sales Shannon Arvin said. “For their convenience, buyers may attend the sale or participate via the Internet. Sellers have the option to send their horses to Keeneland or keep them at the race track where they are training. We hope this unique marketplace facilitates vibrant trade.”

Entries for the April sale will be taken through April 5. An online catalog with walking videos, racing videos, past performances, and other information will be available April 13 at Keeneland.com.

LGB, LLC 2021

Hill ‘n’ Dale at Xalapa

NOVEMBER, JANUARY SALES PRODUCE STEADY MARKETS

HORSE OF THE YEAR AUTHENTIC AMONG SEVEN CHAMPIONS FROM SEPTEMBER SALE

ANNE M. EBERHARDT PHOTOS

T

he resiliency of the Toroughbred industry was highlighted in November and January during two Keeneland sales. Keeneland held both auctions — as well as the latest September yearling sale — with extensive COVID-19 protocols for the health and safety of participants and ofered Internet and phone bidding to allow buyers to be involved remotely.

“Te continued stability of the market is a testament to the hard work of all our sales participants, who have adjusted their operations and their expectations to meet the challenges of this unprecedented time,” Keeneland President, CEO, and Interim Head of Sales Shannon Arvin said.

Te November breeding stock sale grossed $157,822,800 for 2,287 horses. Nine horses sold for $1 million or more, led by two purchases

by Larry Best’s OXO Equine: Grade 1 winner Concrete Rose for $1.95 million and Indian Miss, dam of champion Mitole in foal to Into Mischief, for $1.9 million. Lane’s End, agent for Ashbrook Farm and BBN Racing consigned Concrete Rose; Indian Miss was consigned by Hill ‘n’ Dale Sales Agency, agent.

Te January horses of all ages sale, 998 horses sold for $46,482,600. Boosting the sale were several prominent dispersals: 21 in-foal broodmares from Canada’s acclaimed Sam-Son Farm; 39 mares, yearlings and horses of racing age from Lane’s End, agent for the Complete

Concrete Rose topped the board at the 2020 November breeding stock sale.

Dispersal of the Estate of Paul Pompa Jr.; and 41 mares, yearlings and horses of racing age from Hill ‘n’ Dale Sales Agency, agent for the Dispersal of Spry Family Farm.

Te Pompa dispersal recorded sales of $6,790,200, and the Sam-Son dispersal had sales of $6,733,000. Te two dispersals generated the auction’s 11 highest prices, including the sale-topping price of $925,000. Gainesway Farm paid that amount for Danceforthecause, in foal to Twirling Candy, from Sam-Son, and Peter Brant’s White Birch Farm went to $925,000 for Regal Glory, a multiple graded stakes winner for Pompa, via phone bidding with a Keeneland representative.

“Te pandemic has been difcult, but trade didn’t stop,” Keeneland Director of Sales Development Mark Maronde said. “Buyers who were not able to attend found ways to participate. We now look forward to welcoming everyone back to Keeneland, hopefully soon, under more normal circumstances.”

Keeneland’s September yearling sale produced seven horses — led by Horse of theYear and champion 3-year-old male Authentic — who received 2020 Eclipse Awards on Jan. 29 at the 50th Eclipse Awards Ceremony, a virtual event presented by Spendthrift Farm. Joining Authentic were September sale graduates Vequist (2-year-old flly), Swiss Skydiver (3-year-old flly), Improbable (older dirt male), Monomoy Girl (older dirt female), Gamine (female sprinter), and Channel Maker (turf male).

The Eclipse Awards are voted on by the NationalThoroughbred Racing Association (member racetrack racing offcials and Equibase feld personnel), Daily Racing Form, and the NationalTurf Writers and Broadcasters.

Racing for Spendthrift Farm, MyRacehorse Stable, Madaket Stables and Starlight Racing, Authentic won the Breeders’ Cup Classic (G1) at Keeneland in the fnal race of his career.The colt also captured the Kentucky Derby (G1) Presented by Woodford Reserve,TVG. com Haskell Invitational (G1), San Felipe (G2) and Sham (G3). His trainer, Bob Baffert, also conditioned Gamine and Improbable.

Peter E. BlumThoroughbreds bred Authentic and consigned the son of Into Mischief to the 2018 September sale with Bridie Harrison, agent. SF Bloodstock/ Starlight West purchased Authentic for $350,000.

The winners of 2020 Eclipse Awards as outstanding horsemen also participate at Keeneland: Godolphin Racing (owner), WinStar Farm (breeder), Brad Cox (trainer), and Irad Ortiz Jr. (jockey).

Rubicon Becomes Keeneland’s Sustainability Partner Keeneland has become partners with Rubicon®, a software company that provides smart waste and recycling solutions to businesses and governments worldwide, to be the track’s exclusive waste, recycling, and sustainability partner.The arrangement is designed to advance the two companies’ shared goal of ending waste, beginning with a track-wide evaluation of current operations and the design and implementation of a full-service waste management program.

The partnership will expand to incorporate a mixed recycling program, recommendations for the replacement of upstream material types such as polystyrene cups and other non-reusable items, the

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creation of a food scrap diversion program, and the development of removal and recycling solutions for e-waste, tires, and other hard-to-recycle materials.

“At Keeneland, we are constantly evaluating how we can advance the racing industry’s role in making actionable changes, and we are intrinsically aware of our footprint as a destination for worldwide owners, trainers, riders, and fans,” Keeneland Vice President and COO Vince Gabbert said. “Just as we are committed to being stewards of our sport, we must be equally committed to being stewards of our planet. Becoming a near zero-waste facility felt like a natural next step for both racing and sports tourism at large.”

Authentic, winning the Breeders’ Cup Classic, is Horse of the Year.

2021

FUNTASTIC

SKY MESA

PALACE MALICE

WILL TAKE CHARGE

SHARP AZTECA

VOLATILE

$5,000 S&N

$12,500 S&N

$20,000 S&N

$5,000 S&N

$6,500 S&N

$17,500 S&N

GUN RUNNER $50,000 S&N

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LGB, LLC 2021 / Photo: Equisport Photos

Horse of the Year and 6-time Grade 1 Winner Gun Runner ($15,988,500)

Connections

SPRING 2021

2 | BROADCAST GURU HIERONYMUS RETIRES G.D. Hieronymus, Keeneland’s Eclipse Awardwinning director of broadcast services who began working at the track in 2000, retired on Feb. 1. He will continue to work during Keeneland race meets and on special projects for the track and its industry and philanthropic partners.

Hieronymus began his career in the Thoroughbred

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4 industry in Lexington in 1981 at Hammond Communications. At Keeneland, he celebrated many groundbreaking achievements and award-winning productions, including: • Development of the frst high-defnition control room at a Thoroughbred racetrack in North America; • Seven-time recipient of the International Simulcast Award; • 2004 Eclipse Award recipient for Local Television Achievement; • Directing award-winning commercials and features for Keeneland, Thoroughbred farms, and other industry partners; •Serving as director of photography for the Kentucky Derby Museum flm “The Greatest Race,” which continues to be featured today; and • Winner of the 2012 Charles W. Engelhard Award from the board of directors of the Kentucky Thoroughbred Owners

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DAVID YOUNG

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ANNE M. EBERHARDT

Prominent Central Kentucky horseman and noted bloodstock adviser Gatewood Bell was named Keeneland’s vice president of racing on Feb. 11.

Raised on his family’s Jonabell Farm in Lexington, Bell received a fnance degree with honors from the University of Kentucky. After graduation, he worked for trainer Kiaran McLaughlin for three seasons and also represented jockey Fernando Jara as an agent on the East Coast.

Bell founded Cromwell Bloodstock, named after a company owned by his grandfather, John A. Bell.

Known for his keen eye for spotting potential, Bell, under the Cromwell Bloodstock and Hat Creek Racing banners, has purchased millions of dollars’ worth of horses at public auction — led by grade/group 1 winners Undrafted, Hootenanny, Mastery, and Con Te Partiro — for a diverse clientele that includes top stud farms, owners, and trainers.

A member of The Jockey Club, he previously served on the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission and as the U.S. representative for Goffs Sales of Ireland.

ANNE M. EBERHARDT

1 | NEW VP OF RACING

and Breeders Association for outstanding service and coverage in media for the Thoroughbred industry.

True to Keeneland’s mission, Hieronymus has devoted his time and talents to beneft the Central Kentucky community and the Thoroughbred industry Under his leadership, Keeneland Broadcast Services annually provides direction and production support for such events as the NTRA Eclipse Awards, KTA-KTOB Kentucky Derby Trainers Dinner, Grayson-Jockey Club Research Foundation’s Welfare and Safety of the Racehorse Summit at Keeneland, Thoroughbred Club of America’s Honored Guest Dinner, and the National Museum of Racing Hall of Fame induction ceremony.

3 | RACING’S FINEST The global Thoroughbred industry mourns the loss of

Prince Khalid bin Abdullah of Juddmonte Farms, who died Jan. 12.

“Though he was a major presence on the international stage, we at Keeneland treasure the long friendship we enjoyed with Prince Khalid,” Keeneland President and CEO Shannon Arvin said. “His Juddmonte Farms is a prominent consignor and buyer at Keeneland sales, where he bought Known Fact, one of his earliest classic winners, at the 1978 July selected yearling sale, and purchased his champion and Breeders’ Cup Classic (G1) winner Arrogate at the 2014 September yearling sale.”

Juddmonte also has strongly supported Keeneland’s philanthropic mission and its racing program as sponsor of the grade 1 Juddmonte Spinster since 2005. Prince Khalid’s distinctive pink, green, and white silks have been carried to numerous wins at Keeneland, earning for him a Keeneland tray as part of the track’s distinguished Milestone Trophy Program.

4 | VIRTUAL ART Andrew Wyeth’s “Over the Hill,” a watercolor he painted in 1973 and kept in his personal collection until 2006, brought $109,250, including buyer premium, to top the eighth annual Sporting Art Auction, a collaboration between Keeneland and Cross Gate Gallery of Lexington, held virtually on Nov. 22. Because of the pandemic, bidding on the auction of 188 high-quality lots representing fne sporting art and American paintings and sculpture was conducted online and via phone. Gross sales were $1,625,945.

Keeneland’s portion of the auction proceeds will beneft its non-proft initiatives.

Spotlight On MIKE MAKER

SKIP DICKSTEIN

STATISTICS AND

MAKING A

RESULTS SPEAK VOLUMES FOR TRAINER MIKE MAKER

By LIANE CROSSLEY

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NICOLE MARIE THOMAS

A quiet type, Mike Maker lets his horses do the talking.

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Spotlight On MIKE MAKER

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The charismatic Hansen, the 2-year-old champion male of 2011, helped bring Maker notice.

MATHEA KELLEY

Since turning his complete attention to training on his own in 2003, Maker has made his presence felt in major racing jurisdictions in the eastern half of the United States and Canada. His resume has six training titles at Keeneland, where he can always be counted on to rank among the leaders annually. His roster of Keeneland stakes winners began in 2010 with Stately Victor in the Toyota Blue Grass. One of his most popular Keeneland starters was the nearly white Hansen, the 2011 champion 2-year-old and runner-up in the 2012 Blue Grass.

While his stats do the talking, Maker is well aware of his reputation for being reserved and he has a simple explanation.

“I’m known for being quiet, yet I think that is more so from people who don’t really know me,” he said. “It might have afected me as far as people being intimidated to approach me. I’m not one to reach out to others.”

ADAM COGLIANESE/NYRA

T

RAINER MIKE MAKER is known as a man of few words who prefers to let his successes speak for themselves. In a prosperous career in which his numbers have expanded exponentially with only rare year-to-year declines, he had his most productive fgures in 2020.

With 270 victories from 1,428 starts, he ranked third in North America, according to Equibase, and his $14.2 million in earnings were good for ffh on the leader board. Other highlights include winning four stakes at Keeneland, topped by the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Turf Presented by Coolmore America with Fire At Will, a fnalist for an Eclipse Award as the year’s champion 2-year-old male.

Stately Victor won the 2010 Toyota Blue Grass Stakes for Maker’s frst Keeneland stakes score.

‘‘

YOU JUST TRY TO FIND OUT WHAT MAKES THEM PHOTOS BY Z

HAPPY.”

— MIKE MAKER,

Former Keeneland President and CEO Bill Thomason congratulates Maker for his spring 2013 accomplishment. Maker won two more races on the fnal day, bringing his total to a record 25.

THE MAKING OF MAKER In 1993, as winter approached, Maker was at a crossroads and planning his future when a strategic phone call became a turning point. Te racing season had ended in his native Michigan, and Maker was looking for a position that would take his career to another level. With assistance from the Michigan-based stakes coordinator, Maker had gathered a list of trainers’ phone numbers, including one for D. Wayne Lukas’ division at Churchill Downs. Dallas Stewart, a key Lukas assistant at the time, answered.

“Dallas asked me a bunch of questions, and then he asked when I could be there,” Maker said. “It was an easy decision. I was always a big fan of Wayne. I had been to Churchill Downs and had always liked Louisville. Tat was where I wanted to go, and I wanted to work with a good stable.”

Maker arrived at Churchill Downs in early December that year and migrated with the outft to Oaklawn Park a few weeks later. By spring he was at Keeneland, where he eventually would be a regular on the leader board and win 14 stakes races thus far.

OF HIS HORSES

“I remember how beautiful I thought Keeneland was and that I had made the right decision to leave home,” he said.

Home for Maker, now based in Louisville, was the suburbs of Detroit where his father, George, trained Toroughbreds at Detroit Race Course, Hazel Park, and Great Lakes Downs. As a pre-teen, he had worked at the barn on weekends, summer vacations, and whenever time allowed. He supplemented those wages with a newspaper route. At age 13 he parlayed the money into a share of Fools Exodus. When the low-level claimer won the frst time the group raced him, Maker was inspired to spend his life pursuing the winner’s circle. His horsemanship evolved into becoming an exercise rider and a right-hand man to his father, who passed away in 2002.

Fools Exodus was typical of horses in the Makers’ care — workaday racers with limited talent but competitive against their own kind. Many became stakes horses that excelled in the state-bred program. Tose runners were a stark contrast to the Toroughbreds in his future. Including his decade with Lukas, Maker has been instrumental in the makings of a growing

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KEENELAND PHOTO/PHOTOS BY Z

MIKE MAKER

ANNE M. EBERHARDT

No stranger to the Keeneland winner’s circle, Maker and the connections of Three Diamonds Farm celebrate Bigger Picture’s 2019 Dixiana Elkhorn score.

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list of Hall of Famers, Eclipse Award champions, winners of Triple Crown races, and stakes winners.

“Tere’s not a whole lot of difference in training stakes horses or claimers,” Maker said. “You just try to fnd what makes them happy.”

Maker’s list of favorites during his time with Lukas includes recognizable names such as Horse of the Year Charismatic, who used his victory in Keeneland’s Coolmore Lexington Stakes as a springboard to his Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes scores in 1999;

Orientate, who won the Commonwealth Breeders’ Cup Stakes at Keeneland as part of his 2002 championship season; and 1999 Toyota Blue Grass Stakes runner-up Cat Tief.

Among his own Keeneland starters, Maker’s favorites are a trio of Blue Grass starters — the aforementioned Stately Victor and Hansen along with Twinspired, who fnished such a close second in 2011 that Maker’s team thought he had won as a 24-1 longshot.

Maker remembers his roots when pinpointing other horses he has

SKIP DICKSTEIN

CHURCHILL DOWNS / REED PALMER PHOTOGRAPHY

Maker and Ken Ramsey have teamed up for some memorable victories, including Furthest Land’s 2009 Breeders’ Cup Dirt Mile triumph, above.

The Ramseys achieved a season-record 28 wins at Churchill Downs in 2013.

cherished most. Te list includes Will Be Dancing, a non-restricted stakes winner for George Maker, and Macheath, the younger Maker’s frst stakes winner when he dabbled in training in 1993 before making that fortunate call to the Lukas barn.

Hired as an exercise rider, Maker was promoted to barn foreman and became a Lukas assistant in 1997 when Stewart lef to launch his own training career. Lukas, who was inducted into the Racing Hall of Fame in 1999, is revered for his keen eye for untapped talent in both horses and humans. He sensed that Maker was an astute horseman with instinctive people skills despite his preference for limited oral communication. He entrusted Maker with operating his own divisions primarily at

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Spotlight On

ALEX SLITZ

NICOLE MARIE THOMAS

MIKE MAKER

Fire At Will stormed home to win the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Turf at Keeneland last October.

Wintering at Gulfstream Park, Fire At Will prepares for a 3-year-old campaign.

NICOLE MARIE THOMAS

Monmouth Park and Churchill Downs.

During that phase Maker became well acquainted with Lukas’ clients Ken and Sarah Ramsey. When Maker assembled his own stable, he asked Ken Ramsey for horses. Tey became a powerful presence at Keeneland and beyond. “We are very close afer 18 years and all the ups and downs we have had,” Ken Ramsey said.

Teir harmony reached a Keeneland crescendo at the 2013 spring meet when Maker won a record 25 races, including 20 in the Ramseys’ red-and-white silks.

Te Ramseys have about 17 horses with the Maker team plus a pair of family members — their grandson Nolan and his wife, Katie Clawson — are primary assistants in the Maker conglomerate, which has about 175 horses.

WINNERS IN ALL DIVISIONS

Despite outward appearances Maker is respected as a superior communicator.

“It is easier to communicate with him privately than it is publicly,” Ken Ramsey said. “We communicate mostly via text. Every two or so weeks, he sends me a list of my horses [to discuss] and the next few races he is pointing them to. If we have a diference of opinion, we’ll talk on the phone.”

Maker has developed a reputation for being exceptional with

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Maker attends spectatorless racing at Gulfstream Park in December.

turf runners, especially those he has acquired in claiming races.

Michael Hui is among those who have capitalized on that expertise with Zulu Alpha, whom he claimed for $80,000. Under Maker, Zulu Alpha blossomed into a multiple graded stakes winner with scores in 2020 that include the Pegasus World Cup Invitational

GORMLEY Won California’s Biggest G1 Races At 2 & 3.

Look for his FIRST 2-YEAR-OLDS at upcoming sales.

Malibu Moon – Race to Urga

Spotlight On MIKE MAKER

Stakes at Gulfstream Park and TVG Elkhorn Stakes at Keeneland.

“No one gets more from less than Mike Maker,” Hui said. “He does an extraordinary job of placing horses in the right races.”

Kirk Wycof — who campaigns Fire At Will under his family’s Tree Diamonds Farm banner — said Maker is underrated in other divisions.

“He hasn’t gotten the credit he deserves for developing young horses,” he said. “He certainly has a good reputation as a trainer of grass horses and for getting the best from each horse. I think Mike is right up there with the best in developing young horses.”

In addition to the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Turf, the Wycofs and Maker have teamed up for Keeneland stakes victories in the 2020 Kentucky Utilities Transylvania (Field Pass), 2019 Dixiana Elkhorn (Bigger Picture), and 2019 Sycamore (Marzo).

Wycof commends Maker on his candor, especially about horses that need to retire from racing. While ofen disappointed, Wycof welcomes the news so his racers can fnd an alternative to on-track competition.

“Mike is incredibly honest and incredibly straightforward,” he said.

Hui, who is relatively new as a Maker client, notes their relationship has evolved since their initial contact via phone and extends far beyond the winner’s circle.

“He is cordial, and now that I have gotten to know him, he has a dry wit,” Hui said. “Five years in, we talk about our kids.

Troughout his barn and with other owners, it is like a family relationship. When I walk through the barn, everyone is cordial.

Trough Mike I have gotten to meet a lot of very good people.” KM

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Epitome of BUILDING ON THE BELL FAMILY LEGACY, GODOLPHIN HAS GONE FROM STRENGTH TO STRENGTH ON THE TRACK AND THE FARM

By Lenny Shulman Photos by Amy Lanigan

Bernardini, a homebred Preakness winner, has pride of place among the impressive U.S. stallion roster.

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Success

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Epitome of Success

B

y any measure, the Godolphin breeding and racing operation enjoyed an outstanding 2020 — and it lasted into the year’s fnal week. On Dec. 26, and just 10 minutes apart, Fair Maiden rallied from mid-pack while four wide and persevered to win the grade 1 La Brea Stakes at Santa Anita while shortly aferward, Pixelate (already a grade 2 winner) unleashed his own run from behind while fve wide to take the Woodchopper Stakes at Fair Grounds.

Both stakes winners are Godolphin homebreds. Te matings that produced each were planned by Godolphin staf. Tey were foaled and raised on Godolphin at Jonabell Farm, close by Blue Grass Airport in Lexington. And they were dispensed to their racetrack trainers by Godolphin managers seeking to optimize their talent potential. Such comprehensive oversight has grown more unique in the industry as of late.

Te American base of the worldwide Godolphin outft today represents a throwback to the past century, when the great Bluegrass farms were owned by sportsmen who sought to conjure through

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A limestone tower has stood sentry at Godolphin for decades, a tangible link between Jonabell Farm and its current ownership.

Below, Street Sense is replicating his feats on the racetrack, which includes a victory in the 2007 Kentucky Derby, by siring outstanding runners such as the unbeaten Maxfeld.

matings the best Toroughbred blood they could produce.

Tey would then race the products of their carefully crafed pedigrees. Te onset of the commercial market brought a sea change to Central Kentucky as the area’s great pastures were given over to produce stock ofen destined for the sales ring, ultimately to be raced by owners who had neither a hand in planning the matings that produced their charges nor in raising them.

Godolphin, among its peers, stands as a beacon of the grand tradition of racing horses it produces, a most satisfying procedure for staf and managers who take great pride in guiding their pupils through every phase of life and utmost pride in recent results that have placed Godolphin at the forefront of quality breeding and racing in the U.S. For the past two seasons Godolphin has arguably produced the country’s fnest 2-year-old colt. In 2019 came Maxfeld to win the Claiborne Breeders’ Futurity at Keeneland decisively. A year later Essential Quality used a victory in the Breeders’ Futurity along with a Breeders’ Cup Juvenile victory at Keeneland as springboards to honors as 2-year-old male champion. Godolphin broodmares produced both homebreds. And both broodmares are by Godolphin-owned stallions.

Tis was undoubtedly the kind of success Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum envisioned in 2001 when he purchased Jonabell Farm and established an American branch to add to his Toroughbred holdings in Europe. Sheikh Mohammed, the vice president and prime minister of the United Arab Emirates and the ruler of the Emirate of Dubai, frst attended races while studying in England in the 1960s. A decade later he formed a racing stable, and in 1981 bought Dalham Hall Stud near Newmarket, which today serves as the epicenter of his international Toroughbred interests. Five years later he added Kildangan Stud outside Kildare, Ireland. Both studs are steeped in Toroughbred history, which made ftting Sheikh Mohammed’s interest in Jonabell.

COADY PHOTOGRAPHY

Epitome of Success

Essential Quality made Godolphin proud winning the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile at Keeneland in 2020. He is an early Kentucky Derby favorite.

The saddlecloth Essential Quality wore in the Breeders’ Cup en route to being named the champion 2-year-old male is a precious souvenir.

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John A. Bell III founded Jonabell, which produced outstanding racehorses over the decades. Those include homebred Epitome, winner of the 1987 Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Fillies.

LOUISE E. REINAGEL

Breeder John A. Bell III set up his shingle on Bowman Mill Road in 1954 following eight years at Hamburg Place. Edith Bancrof’s Damascus came of the farm to become the 1967 Horse of the Year afer wins in the Preakness Stakes, Belmont Stakes, Travers Stakes, Jockey Club Gold Cup, and Wood Memorial. Te son of Sword Dancer reached millionaire status at a time when that feat was far rarer than it is today.

In 1985 Epitome made her entrance at Jonabell. Bred

ANNE M. EBERHARDT

B E L L F A M I LY V A L U E S

MATHEA KELLEY/RACINGFOTOS

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John Bell believed in raising horses as close to nature as possible and maintaining good pastures, practices that continue today. An old spring house testifes to the long use of the property.

by the Bell family, the daughter of Summing would become champion 2-year-old flly afer winning the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Fillies. She also provided a direct link to past and present ownership of Jonabell when her Pulpit colt Essence of Dubai brought a winning $2.3 million bid from Sheikh Mohammed’s bloodstock agent John Ferguson at the 2000 Keeneland September yearling sale. Essence of Dubai went on to score multiple graded-stakes victories in the U.S. and Dubai and stands at stud in Florida.

Essence of Dubai, though, is not the only connection between the two Jonabell regimes. Jimmy Bell, the son of John A. Bell II and father of newly appointed Keene-

land Vice President of Racing Gatewood Bell, today serves as president of Godolphin’s U.S. interests, and nobody could possibly know its headquarters better.

Jimmy Bell grew up on Jonabell’s 800 acres and got a frst-rate education in the horse business early on.

“All the kids — my brother and two sisters — had a lovely upbringing because we had the whole outdoors as our backyard, and we got a taste of farm life and nature. It was a great environment to grow up in. We could ride around with and observe the men working on the farm until we eventually became part of that process. Instead of fnding fame in the outside world, I never got outside the front gate.”

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Younger sister Benny Bell Williams, who heads the Bell Group, an advertising agency specializing in horse-industry clients, recalled a thread from her father’s time that has remained important around the farm: industry service. “Dad was on the phone all the time with industry matters — pick a topic — the same ones we discuss today. He felt it was important to take care of the horse industry that had been good to him and protect the pie so that everybody could have their piece. He gave in time and efort, and that carried over to all of us.”

MATHEA KELLEY/RACINGFOTOS

Epitome of Success

Godolphin replaced all the buildings when Sheikh Mohammed bought the farm.

SEAMLESS TRANSITION Jonabell has survived the transition to new ownership, maintaining continuity. Te shif was made smoother because, according to Jimmy Bell, the philosophies of his father and Sheikh Mohammed closely align when it comes to cultivating horses.

“One of the main things Dad stressed was raising the horses as close to nature as possible,” noted Bell. “Back in the day, that meant utilizing a lot of run-in sheds and tobacco barns. Dad was focused on pasture management, always looking afer the soil and trying to build it up. He’d run cattle along with the horses because their split hooves massaged the soil diferently than the horses did, and the cattle ate some of the tougher grasses, giving the pastures more uniformity.

“When Sheikh Mohammed came in, we took down all the structures and built new ones. But while the buildings have changed, the philosophy has not. We still stick close to nature, and pasture management has carried through with the

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Stunning inside and out, the stud barn houses established stallions and up-and-coming horses.

Success beyond the fnish line

Starts with a trusted partnership.

Dean Dorton’s equine industry team works alongside equine industry participants of all types (farm owners, breeders, racing operations, sales companies, and more) throughout the world, helping them meet their fnancials goals through best-in-class business advisory services. We partner with you to provide a holistic approach to your personal and business needs, providing you with advice and expertise to help you fnancially succeed on and off the track.

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Dean Dorton proudly sponsored the horse, Tax, in the 2019 Kentucky Derby, Belmont Stakes, and Travers Stakes.

More than 40 years of equine experience

Epitome of Success Left, Jimmy Bell grew up on the farm and now serves as president of Godolphin USA. The many accomplishments of horses connected to Godolphin are recognized in plaques, photos, and trophies.

Maktoums. In my association with them since 2001, there have been no better stewards of the land, the horses, and the employees than the Maktoum family. Tey recognize the importance of each of these areas and have been supportive in every way. It’s evident to anyone driving around here that the farm refects that — the healthiness of the pastures and how things are looked afer, the condition of the horses, and the employees, as well. It’s a mantra that has carried through from the early days of Jonabell on to today.”

Signifying Godolphin at Jonabell Farm’s status as hub of the six area farms now owned by Sheikh Mohammed is the modern ofce complex that serves as the headquarters of the U.S. operation. New construction following the 2001 ownership change also includes a new, world-class stallion complex with modern breeding shed and stallion barn. A half-dozen broodmare barns dot the acreage, over which ranges a 180-strong broodmare band.

IMPRESSIVE EQUINE PORTFOLIO Facilities alone don’t defne an entity’s success in this world, however.

Te horses do. And over the 40-plus years he has actively participated as an owner of Toroughbreds, Sheikh Mohammed has accumulated the blood necessary to breed and race top performers at the highest echelon of the game. Legendary were the battles once joined by Sheikh Mohammed and the equally worldwide Coolmore syndicates at Toroughbred auctions, each driving the other ever higher so that bid boards needed to expand to include an eighth column to signal bids in excess of $10 million.

Tose high-fying battles have subsided at least in part because of the success of the graduates of those sales and their subsequent generations.

Although Sheikh Mohammed still enthusiastically participates at auction, his in-person appearances at U.S. sales are more sporadic than in the past.

“Afer 20 or so years of building the bloodlines, we do have a good

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CHAMPIONS KNOW

YOU KI CK DI RT I N I TS FACE AS YO U BLOW BY IT

ONE WAY

Never shy away from a challenge. Dig deeper when the pressure mounts. Be at your best when the moment arrives.

THERE’S ONLY

TO RESPOND TO ADVERSITY

Tis is what we’ve learned from over fourteen decades of treating the best thoroughbreds in the world.

So when the well-being and performance of your horse is on the line, you can be certain we will respond.

H A G Y A R D . C O M

/

8 5 9 . 2 5 5 . 8 7 4 1

Epitome of Success Left, at age 22 Medaglia d’Oro is the dean of Darley, the Godolphin stallion division.

Left, Nyquist, with handler Steve Clark, has champion Vequist in his frst crop.

Bottom left, Hard Spun consistently produces stakes winners. Below, Street Sense, with handler Fausto Esparza, is a son of Street Cry.

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MATHEA KELLEY/RACINGFOTOS

Below, the operation has high hopes for the young Tapit stallion Frosted.

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Epitome of Success

Mike Banahan, the director of farm operations, looks forward to the addition of horses such as Maxfeld and Essential Quality to the Darley stallion roster.

basis to draw upon,” Bell noted. “We’ve reached a position with our broodmares where we don’t have to go out and try to fnd yearling prospects that are better than what we think we have at home. We draw substantially from within today, which is why we put forward a fairly large racing stable, hoping we can get enough of those who distinguish themselves on the racetrack to enter the broodmare band and form a self-perpetuating cycle.”

To that end, Music Note, an A.P. Indy flly bred by Gainsborough Farm (a Godolphin satellite), earned $1.6 million and won fve grade 1 events before coming home to produce grade 2 winner Mystic Guide. Homebred Wedding Toast, by resident sire Street Sense, took a pair of grade 1 tests and is now back at the farm beginning her broodmare career. Dickinson, a grade 1 winner at Keeneland by the farm’s superstar stallion Medaglia d’Oro, is likewise just getting started in her producing career. Seventh Street, a $1 million purchase as a 2-year-old and by the late resident stallion Street Cry, won a pair of grade 1 races and is the dam of grade 2 winner Lake Avenue.

A similar story is written on the stallion

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side. Te stud horses owned by Sheikh Mohammed are known as the Darley Stallions, and a boutique collection of 10 call Godolphin at Jonabell Farm home. Tey constitute a mix of purchases that stand alongside homegrown talent. Te dean of the bunch is Medaglia d’Oro, who, at age 22, still commands a stud fee of $150,000. Purchased as an established stallion by Sheikh Mohammed afer a racetrack career that saw nearly $6 million in earnings, Medaglia d’Oro has sired a handful of champions, including Rachel Alexandra and Songbird.

It is Bernardini who has come to defne Godolphin’s success. Te son of A.P. Indy was named champion 3-year-old male of 2006 when he won the Preakness Stakes, Travers Stakes, and Jockey Club Gold Cup (all grade 1). Installed in the Godolphin stallion barn, he has sired 14 grade 1 winners to date and sits in the 24th spot on the international broodmare sires list, meaning his daughters are producing top-quality runners. He is the youngest stallion among the top 60 broodmare sires on that chart.

Also in the stallion paddocks is Frosted, a three-time grade 1-winning Godolphin homebred of nearly $4 million whose frst

crop are 3-year-olds of 2021. An operation that can create its own stallion prospects benefts from not having to gamble in an ever-more competitive market where commitments to potential stud horses must be made earlier and earlier. Godolphin struck a lode of good fortune when it made just such a deal to buy the breeding rights to Nyquist back when that colt was a 2-year-old in 2015. Not only did Nyquist go on to win the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile at Keeneland, but he also ran to victory in the following season’s Kentucky Derby and has subsequently become one of the hottest young sires in the hemisphere.

From his frst crop have come Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Fillies winner and champion Vequist and grade 1 winner Gretzky the Great.

“It is very tough to bring in outside stallions,” said Michael Banahan, Godolphin’s director of farm operations who began working at Dalham Hall Stud in 1993 and has been with Godolphin ever since. “It’s a hard game to play, the competition is severe, and it has accelerated to where you have to buy horses earlier and earlier. We haven’t brought one in from outside since Nyquist. And because we generally stay at around 150 with our book size, it’s difcult to make the arithmetic work

Epitome of Success against operations that breed considerably more mares to their stallions.

“We’re aware that Medaglia is getting up in years, although he’s still in great shape and still consistently gets multi-million-dollar yearlings. Getting our young horses to develop is important, and we’re fortunate we’ve got two nice young stallions in Frosted and Nyquist.

We’re very excited about what Nyquist has done from his frst crop.

Quality become grade 1 winners at 2, who look to have massive potential going forward.”

Maxfeld, a son of Darley stallion Street Sense and who is out of the Bernardini mare Velvety, is undefeated in fve career starts.

Unfortunately, an injury prevented him from competing in the 2020 Triple Crown series, but he was able to win two stakes races during the season, and he has fashed enormous talent in his races. He could make plenty of noise

Godolphin has several Central Kentucky divisions, including Gainsborough Farm.

“You need one of those type horses that can drive the farm for a long time. Te great stallion farms have had the one signature stallion that drove their entire operation for years, and that brings in new horses as well. It’s great pulling power to have that kind of stallion on your roster. We have such solid horses like Street Sense and Hard Spun. Bernardini is a favorite for all of us because he was our frst homebred in America to hit the highlights on the racetrack and in the breeding shed as well.

“It’s a difcult game to play — get them to the top level at the racetrack with pedigree and the conformation — to have everything going for them. We’re grateful to have exciting young horses like Maxfeld and Essential

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as an older horse in 2021.

Essential Quality, the 2020 juvenile champion, is certainly on the short list of top Kentucky Derby contenders early in 2021. He is perfect in four starts and has already earned in excess of $1.7 million. His dam, Delightful Quality, is by Elusive Quality, who was a Darley stallion before his death in 2018.

Te Kentucky Derby has proved an elusive target for Sheikh Mohammed, who vocalized his desire to win the biggest race in America early in this century. “Sheikh Mohammed is very philosophical,” Bell said. “He believes that if it’s meant to be, then it’s going to happen. For anyone in this business, winning the Derby is what makes this game go; having the

dream of a horse good enough to compete in it or win it. But he’s not trying to force anything. He has tremendous respect for what the Derby means to American racing and breeding. It’s a lofy goal, and he’s happy with the pursuit of it.”

TEAM APPROACH Te racetrack successes being enjoyed

by Godolphin have their roots back at the farm. Godolphin at Jonabell is run in a collaborative process headed by a senior management team that solicits input from workers throughout the farm before making decisions. In the racing arena, for instance, a decision was made several years ago to add more trainers to the roster to take advantage of racetracks in the Midwest.

“We wanted to do a better job of geographical distribution of the horses,” Bell said. “Not every horse is a Saratoga-caliber horse, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be competitive and make a great contribution elsewhere. We’ve added Mike Stidham [trainer of Pixelate], Brendan Walsh [Maxfeld], and Brad Cox [Essential Quality]. We have horses at Fair Grounds and Oaklawn Park now, so we’re able to be more strategic in placing our horses where they can be successful. Bill Mott has joined the team in New York. We can now put our horses where they can showcase their best efort.”

With 180 mares and approximately 120 yearlings coming aboard each season, many decisions must be made in planning matings and plotting racing careers. Sheikh Mohammed’s schedule prevents him from making regular visits to his American operation, leaving it to the management team to make recommendations that are sent to England for fnal approval.

Dan Pride serves as chief operating ofcer of Godolphin in America, and his job entails meeting with the hands-on managers of each division at the farm: the people who, for instance, know the personalities and intangibles of the horses, as well as what type of foal each broodmare tends to produce.

acknowledge and support and “We have a system in place that highlight the people who are the allows managers’ participation and backbone of everything that goes recommendations, which Dan will on,” said Bell. “People are nomisend along to Newmarket,” said nated, go through a judging panBell. “Certainly, Newmarket can el, and are acknowledged by their make changes, but the process alpeers for exemplary work. It’s lows for our suggestions. We meet gratifying to see them get their and discuss any and everything. It’s moment in the sun.” great to get diferent perspectives, In addition, Godolphin has input, and feedback. One of the partnered with Keeneland as highlights of Godolphin is the peosponsor of the Darley Alcibiades ple you get to work with, who are and the accompanying race-day dedicated to what they do. We ofen Best Turned Out recognition prosay that we try to take the job serigram since 2003. Last fall Darley ously, but not ourselves.” also supported Nourish the BackAdded Banahan, “Everyone gets stretch, which provided meals to bring their piece to the table. It’s a to the hardworking community great, collaborative approach where in Keeneland’s barn area every people in their area of expertise Wednesday and Sunday during can do their jobs in comfort and the race meet. have enough autonomy to make Top, Delightful Quality is the dam of Essential Quality while Twenty years later the results suggestions because they know the Velvety, above, produced the undefeated Maxfeld. make it obvious that Godolphin horses here better than anyone else.

We’re fortunate to be involved in the mating also started the Toroughbred Industry at Jonabell has found its stride in its stafng, process, how the horses are raised, and which Employee Awards to recognize the people processes, and, most importantly, its horses. who work every day behind the scenes to Given the cyclical nature of the Toroughtrainers they should go to.” bred business, by all accounts it is poised to In addition to participating in the day-to- ensure the well-being of the horses.

“Sheikh Mohammed’s philosophy is to reap the rewards in 2021, and beyond. KM day breeding and racing of Toroughbreds, Godolphin under Sheikh Mohammed has given back to the industry in a variety of philanthropic avenues. Te Godolphin Flying Start (formerly Darley Flying Start) program provides an international education in every facet of the Toroughbred world for bright young students who travel the globe for two years learning from top outfts. Flying Start graduates today populate dozens of organizations including Keeneland and have become industry leaders.

Bell has just begun a second term as head of the Toroughbred Afercare Alliance, which seeks sustainable funding for the care, boarding, and retraining of Toroughbreds, and certifes some 80 operations that have helped more than 11,000 Toroughbreds to date. Supporting afercare is a philosophy that comes from the top of Godolphin, which has Godolphin salutes its top horses.

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The Godolphin Flying Start program grooms young professionals for future leadership roles in Thoroughbred racing and breeding

By JARRETT VAN METER

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“I remember her asking questions: How school was going?

How were fnals shaping up? All this small talk, and it was killing me because I was waiting with bated breath to fnd out if this was a good phone call or a bad phone call,” remembered Bandorof. “As she fnally gets around to telling me — you can’t make this up — the call started breaking up. I thought the call was going to get dropped. She came back in and I kind of pieced together that I had gotten in and I believe my words were, ‘Oh, thank God.’ ” In 2003 Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum of Dubai founded the Godolphin Flying Start program as an incubator for emerging Toroughbred professionals with the goal of contributing to the long-term success of the racing industry.

In the 18 years since, the two-year program has produced sector leaders in nearly every medium, from breeding farms (Henry Field of Newgate Farm in Australia) to sales (Dean Roethemeier and Kyle Wilson of Keeneland; Matthew Prior of Tattersalls) to media (Gary King and Kelsey Riley of Toroughbred Daily News) to training (Francis-Henri Grafard of France and Dan Blacker and Tom Morley of the U.S.).

Flying Start typically receives 80 international applicants, interviews 30, and accepts 12 for the fully funded course; and applicants ofen spend years trying to accumulate enough experiences to gain admittance. Kavanagh’s call to Bandorof, now

ANNE M. EBERHARDT PHOTOS

onrad Bandorof was studying for his last fnals as an undergrad at Sewanee, Te University of the South in Tennessee, when the call came through. It was an Irish number, and although it wasn’t saved in his contacts, he knew who was on the other end. He answered the call and was greeted by Clodagh Kavanagh, executive director of the Godolphin Flying Start program. Sewanee is known for having spotty cell phone reception, so Bandorof moved to a spot where he thought he could maintain a clear signal.

Sheikh Mohammed Al Maktoum of Dubai founded the Flying Start program.

The program helped prepare Conrad Bandoroff for a leadership role at Denali Stud.

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jump head

KEENELAND PHOTOS

the vice president of his family’s Denali Stud, was the culmination of the program’s rigorous application process that requires everything from a handwritten cover letter to a video proving basic riding profciency, not to mention years of summer jobs and internships as close to home as Keeneland and as far away as Arrowfeld Stud in Australia.

“I called my dad, and it was pretty emotional,” Bandorof said of the moments following his acceptance. “I was obviously overcome with joy and excitement. It’s something that I worked toward for a long time, and getting to call him to give him that good news was a special moment for us.”

A cohort of a dozen can include recent college grads and young professionals who have already been in the industry for a few years. Bandorof’s class boasted the largest contingent ever admitted from a single country with six Americans, along with enrollees from China, Spain, Ireland, and Australia. Te enrollees assemble in Kildare, Ireland, at Kildangan Stud for a three-month phase that Bandorof referred to as “boot camp” that

Dean Roethemeier (above) and Kyle Wilson (below) are part of Keeneland’s sales team.

“

THEY’VE GOT THIS RAW PIECE OF CLAY AND THEY START MOLDING… —Conrad Bandoroff

acclimates trainees to the academic pace, hands-on approach to practical application, and Godolphin Flying Start standards they will be held to for the next two years.

“Tey bring you in here, you’re all excited, you’re starry-eyed, you’re on top of the world,” he remembered. “Te program gets its claws into you; Clodagh gets to know what makes you tick. Tey’ve got this raw piece of clay and they start molding.”

From Ireland the class moves to Newmarket, England, for the shortest phase of the program. Students attend the British Racing School to bolster their riding skills, and the phase culminates with trainees shadowing agents for the Tattersalls foal and mare sales. Next, the group moves to the United States — Lexington more specifcally — for six months. From a technical teaching standpoint, Kavanagh noted, the Bluegrass region is vital to the curriculum.

“As the centre of horseracing and breeding in the USA, it’s a vital cog in the international scope of the Flying Start programme,” Kavanagh wrote of Lexington in an email. “Te network, bloodstock, breeding, and racing that the trainees experience in Lexington have value for the rest of their lives. Te Godolphin USA management team are fantastic supporters and mentors of the programme.”

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Te USA syllabus includes a course in equine nutrition at the University of Kentucky and a two-week workshop at the Kentucky Horseshoeing School while feldwork is focused toward the Northern Hemisphere breeding season. Trainees attend racing meets at Keeneland, Churchill Downs, and Turfway Park, and breeding stock sales in Central Kentucky.

Lexington is hardly a global metropolis, but its population and geographic size dwarf those of both Kildare and Newmarket. Kate Galvin, who serves as assistant sales manager for the Godolphin USA stallion department and was a member of Flying Start’s 2004-06 class, said the relative size of the city and the six-month stay also lend to an extensive

cultural education.

“Lexington was big compared to where we were in Ireland, England, and Australia,” Galvin said. “Tere were so many things to do outside of the course, like going to a [University of Kentucky] game. Tere are so many people here from all over the world compared to some of the other places we were in. You are here for six, almost seven, months, so a lot of people I feel like really put down roots here and picked up other friends. We weren’t necessarily just in our little bubble of 12 as much when we were in Kentucky.”

Te conclusion of the U.S. phase also marks the transition to year two of the program: Participants spend six months in Australia, a month in Dubai, then return to Kildare, Ire-

land, to complete the circle around the globe.

Graduate Gerry Dufy, who is farm manager at Godolphin’s Raceland and Stonerside farms near Lexington, recalls his time in Dubai where he met Sheikh Mohammed as making a big impression.

“Tere was so much anticipation and nervousness, but when we fnally were introduced to him, he made a joke and we immediately felt at ease in his company,” Dufy said. “We toured Dubai and saw many of the amazing projects that were under construction, including the Burj Khalifa and we had lunch with him and his family. His vision and passion for the game were like nothing I had ever seen or will probably ever see again.

“What was very interesting about that day

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is the same morning I sat with Alhadad, a groom from Pakistan who was working in Dubai to try and provide a better life for his family who lived in an impoverished village in Pakistan. Alhadad and I were working at Nad Al Sheba together. To me it represented very well what the Toroughbred industry is about and how it brings people from every walk of life, background, and socio-economic profle together through their shared passion for this majestic animal.”

Te program’s conclusion yields 12 seasoned and versatile Toroughbred professionals with a web of contacts and connections, as Bandorof put it, “the world over.”

“Te access that you are given to high-level fgures in our industry is unparalleled,” he noted. “It would Clodagh Kavanagh is the program’s have taken me much lonexecutive director. ger, had I not gone through the program, to establish a relationship with these people, and there are some that I never would have been able to because of our geographic location compared to theirs.”

Bandorof’s class watched Winx win her second Cox Plate in Australia and a few months later saw Arrogate claim the 2017 Dubai World Cup. Galvin’s group was on hand to Kate Galvin is assistant see Makybe Diva win her manager for Godolphin third straight Melbourne USA’s stallion division.

Cup. Tere are late nights and early mornings, and amid the ever-changing surroundings the group of trainees moves through, a bond is formed. Both Galvin and Bandorof still keep in touch with the other members of their cohort.

“We had so much fun,” remembered Galvin. “You had such a

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strict schedule, but you are young, in your 20s, and there was always she ofen fnds herself interviewing other graduates for her onfun to be had in whatever local town we were in. Tat’s the neat camera work for Sky Sports Racing, BBC5 Live, and AtTeRaces, thing about Flying Start; you kind of arrive at the new place and get including trainers such as Grafard and Jerome Reynier and bloodsettled in your new accommodations and then you go out and meet stock agents such as Matt Coleman, Ed Sackville, and Barry Lynch.

“I did harbor a pipe dream at the time to be a friends for dinner, drinks, or with the other stuhorse racing broadcaster but knew I didn’t have dents on the course, and you get to know a new any contacts or a way into the industry,” said town.”

Bryce of her decision to enroll in Flying Start.

Kate Hardy, Flying Start’s USA coordinator, “I saw the course as a fast-track way to both imsaid it is no coincidence program graduates can prove my knowledge of the global Toroughbred be found in infuential posts throughout the inbusiness and meet the people I would need to dustry, not only because of what they gain during kick-start a career in it.” their two years but also the support past graduTe program has not been immune to the ates lend to the program and younger generarestrictions of the global pandemic. Most intions of Flying Starters. person lectures have been moved to a virtual for“Between the leaders they meet, the network mat, and the current frst-year class just began they build, and the horsemanship skills they learn its U.S. phase while still in Ireland, taking online from all over the world, trainees graduate with a courses and completing a foaling rotation on foundation that sets them up for success,” said Kildangan. Erin McLaughlin is a frst-year trainHardy. “It is a real credit to the program to see Gerry Duffy manages ee originally from Pennsylvania who previously the number of graduates in leadership positions two Kentucky farms for Godolphin USA. worked at Lane End’s Farm’s Oak Tree division. around the world, many of them now mentoring On a phone call from Kildangan, she said that the next generation of Flying Start trainees.” despite the challenges of the pandemic, getting Francis-Henri Grafard was a member of the to learn and work with people from around the program’s frst class. A native of the Charolais world has already broadened her understanding region of France, Grafard not only met his wife, of the industry as a whole.

Lisa-Jane, on the course, but he developed skills “I think everyone gains an open-mindedness and contacts that aided him in opening of his because we see so many diferent industries and own stable in 2011. we see so many diferent sides that there is just “I have clients from all over the world, and the this innovative, open-minded attitude toward international aspect of the Flying Start has been the industry,” said McLaughlin. “You see the pasa hugely contributing factor, as well as ensuring sion that each individual has for it everywhere that I came out with better English than I started,” we go. Tat transfers to you as motivation. You said Grafard. “Te scope and ambition of Sheikh want to be a good leader.”

Mohammed’s vision with the Godolphin Flying Kavanagh said watching this growth from a Start really inspired us then and continues to inmentoring perspective is among the most fulfllspire me now.”

Erin McLaughlin ing elements of her position.

Grafard is just one of the program’s imis in her frst year of the program.

“Tose who work hard, listen, and remain pressive roster of international alums. Henry open to learning, as well as have confdence to Field is the general manager of Newgate Farm in Australia. Eden Harrington is vice president of China Horse make mistakes and have their own opinion, are the ones who progClub, Asia’s premier Toroughbred ownership group that has ress the most,” she said. “Te classes who commit to working as a campaigned the likes of Triple Crown winner Justify. Gina Bryce team by trusting, supporting, and challenging each other have a truhas established herself as one of the industry’s preeminent free- ly exceptional two years. It is amazing to listen and watch them have lance broadcasters. Like Grafard, Bryce met her future partner, professional discussions with industry leaders as they move toward bloodstock agent Alex Elliott, during her Flying Start course, and the end of the two years.” KM

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Andre Pater nears completion of “Where River Weds Mountain” in his Lexington studio. The 60 x 40 painting is an homage to Native American culture.

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CAPTURING the

LIGHT At the height of his artistic powers, ANDRE PATER still seeks new horizons

By JACALYN CARFAGNO Photos by KIRK SCHLEA

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A

Andre Pater is a man of deep knowledge and keen insight, natural talent, and rigorous work ethic. He is a garrulous, engaging storyteller whose craf demands long hours alone with canvas and brushes.

He has by any measure achieved success as a sporting artist but his restless curiosity has driven a constant evolution in style and subjects.

He explained that evolution by recounting a story from years ago. A wealthy businessman asked Pater about his dreams. In those days, he said, “it was going from this payment to this payment,” but he felt the question demanded a better answer. Looking at the view from his client’s roofop, Pater pointed to the horizon and said, “Tis is how I dream; I go there, but when I get there I see another horizon.”

Pater has painted many of the greatest Toroughbreds of his era but, looking for that next challenge, he became entranced with Native American subjects while taking his family on trips in the West. Native Americans in traditional attire and astride horses became all-consuming subjects. Art collectors followed him, and by 2016 his “Red Arrow,” a portrait of a Lakota warrior, topped the Sporting Art Auction, a collaboration between Keeneland and Cross Gate Gallery, at $276,000. His fascination with the subject continues, and he spent much of 2020 working on a large commission of an 1870s Crow wedding party, “Where River Weds Mountain.”

Scrupulous research precedes any Pater painting. Dis-

From top, Pater collected Native American artifacts, clothing, tack, and even a Cheyenne ceremonial tomahawk, left, for reference for his paintings. He deeply researches all of his subject matter.

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cussing the Crow wedding party painting on his easel, Pater diverged into explanations about the matrilineal structure of the tribes, the diference between pre- and post-reservation design, the beads from Italy that became part of Native American ornamentation, the meaning of symbols and colors among diferent Native American groups. Pater found a book on Crow design and created patterns for clothing and ornaments, and almost daily consulted Bad Hand, a Crow elder he has come to know well, to verify details. And he worked. First, he created a sketch, defning the composition, then went to Montana where he photographed Crow models astride horses. Returning to Lexington, he spent long hours in the studio using his craf to transform his knowledge and vision into a work of art.

With the painting fnally fnished and glowing on the easel in his studio, he talked about “the beautiful American dream come true” that took him from a childhood in Krakow, Poland, to his studio in Lexington, Kentucky.

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Pursuing his passion Pater had long wanted to be an artist, but his parents insisted on a more practical degree so he studied, and excelled in, interior architecture. Nevertheless, he pursued his passion for art — and horses.

On summer vacations in the country, while other kids played outside, the young Andrzej (the English version is Andrew but Pater changed it to “Andre” so he wouldn’t be called “Andy”) went to the stables to be with the horses. “It was my world,” he recalled. Soon he began drawing and painting them, mostly Arabians, which had been central to Poland’s history and culture since the 16th century.

Pater developed a knack for selling as a student, setting up near the train station with sketchbook and pencils. “I learned a lot, the whole craf of selling, responding to clients’ expectations, needs,” he said, remembering how tourists looked over his shoulder and talked with him about the works they were about to buy.

Although his personal ventures in the market economy were successful, during Pater’s youth Poland remained in the orbit of the U.S.S.R. and Communist orthodoxy. Pater recalled supermarkets with acres of empty shelves, rationing coupons, a moribund economy, and rigid ideology. When it came time for his architectural thesis project, Pater designed an equestrian center that a sponsor was interested in building, but the committee reviewing it wasn’t excited. “Tey rejected me twice, because it was politically incorrect … too bourgeois,” he said.

Afer obtaining his architecture degree, Pater went to New York in 1981 on a tourist visa to “fool around” for a while. But political upheaval in Poland lef him stranded in the United

Pater mixes paint as he works to complete “Where River Weds Mountain,” which depicts an 1870s Crow wedding party.

Left, Pater has marked many pages in a book he uses for research. His studio contains an extensive library.

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Above, Pater first produced a rough sketch for the painting. Left, Pater’s children, Bogdan and Ola (on left), joined him with his Crow consultant, Bad Hand (fourth from left) and two Crow models. Right, Pater, 27, the year before he came to the U.S.

COURTESY OF ANDRE PATER

COURTESY OF ANDRE PATER

States. He struggled in New York working in restaurants until he heard about a job in interior architecture in Dallas. Tere he roomed with a friend, and for a while they spent weekends enjoying the freedoms of youth and America.

But he grew dissatisfed. Pater still wanted to be an artist, and his lifestyle wasn’t helping him realize that dream. Plus, he acknowledged, “I don’t like to have bosses.” So he got his own place and started a new weekend routine. At the end of the workweek, he’d buy groceries, head to his apartment, lock himself in “and Friday evening, Saturday, Sunday, I paint.” On Mondays it was back to work, but his mind lingered in the studio: “I couldn’t stop thinking about” painting.

Pater’s subject of choice in those days was ofen horses, as it had been most of his life.

Commercial success eluded him in a couple of early shows in Dallas, so in 1984 Pater quit his job, loaded up his “dinky” car with work he’d completed on those solitary weekends, and drove to Reno, Nevada, for the annual Arabian Horse Art Auction.

His work caused a sensation and sold out quickly.

Pater says some people doubted that he, barely 30

and looking even younger, was the real thing so they devised a drawing contest for the next evening. He put all doubters to rest, sketching live horses with a skill and speed unmatched by his competitors and, again, selling out.

Creating a demand Pater’s talent came to the notice of Greg Ladd, founder and owner of Cross Gate Gallery in Lexington who is known for cultivating young artists. Te two have been working partners and friends since not long afer Pater moved to Lexington in 1988, afer having married his wife, Kasia.

According to Ladd: “Andre can draw like nobody’s business. People want to skip that process, and they can sometimes fool you a little bit with some paintings, but on the whole that drawing shows through, and Andre is a master at that. His drawings are wonderful.”

Te fundamentals matter, Pater agreed. “Art is a craf; talent is important but it’s a craf you have to learn … then if you have enough imagination or guts you become an

A crucifx blessed by the late Pope John Paul II has a place of honor in Pater’s studio. Pater and his wife, Kasia, were confrmed by the Polish native when John Paul was bishop of Krakow.

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CAPTURING the LIGHT

Many prominent Thoroughbred owners and breeders have commissioned Pater to paint their racing silks, some of which the artist keeps in his studio. The studio also yields jockeys’ helmets and goggles, a rooster, and a painting bib.

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artist, but you have to know what you are doing.”

In Lexington Pater turned his attention to Toroughbreds and other subjects of the sporting life now beloved of his collectors.

Before long, Cross Gate hosted Pater’s frst one-man show, in 1992, and then another in 1998. Trough a complex set of connections — involving works of the late revered sporting artist Sir Alfred Munnings, a British lord who is a sporting art expert, the chairman of Sotheby’s, and an American ambassador — Ladd arranged for Pater’s one-man show in London in 2002. People lined up hours before the opening, and all 36 pieces sold that night. Te average price in London was $24,000, which, as chance would have it, was the total collected for the 26 pieces in the 1992 show. Andre Pater had realized his dreams of being his own boss and earning his livelihood as an artist.

“Getting here has been a long road,” Ladd said.

Ladd said he and Pater spent more than a decade traveling to expose his work to “those few people who cannot only appreciate the quality of the work [but who also] have the money to buy it.” Tey were both “young and hungry,” Pater said, so they loaded up a van with paintings and drove to Saratoga and Del Mar; to Toronto, Atlanta, and Miami; to Middleburg, Virginia; and Aiken, South Carolina. It was in Aiken, both Pater and Ladd recall, that they shared a bed because they’d been booked into a B&B with only one double bed lef.

“We laugh about it all the time,” Ladd said.

“We listened to Eric Clapton ‘Unplugged’ all the way down there and all the way back.”

Although he has now spent more of his life in the United States than in his native country, Pater remains proud of Poland’s heritage and culture. His two adult children, Bogdan and Ola, both speak Polish fuently (“much better than I speak English”), and he’s proud that he and his wife were both confrmed by the late Pope John Paul II when he was still bishop of

Krakow. Afer he became pope, John Paul II returned to Poland and invited students to bring their crucifxes to be blessed. Pater said he happened to come face to face with the Pontif and their eyes met; then he was thoroughly doused as holy water rained down to bless crucifxes and humans alike.

Tat crucifx, one of the few objects Pater brought from Poland, retains a place of honor in his studio among his vivid collection of Native American artifacts, equine books, sketches, and photos.

Seeking new horizons Tese days Pater’s work is ofen sold before he takes up his brushes. Pater’s scenic paintings and portraits of horses, jockeys, hounds, roosters, cattle, and even people are striking for his mastery of composition, light, line, and movement. “Regardless of the subject matter that Pater undertakes, he is a force on the artistic stage,” sporting art expert Lorian Peralta-Ramos wrote in A Matter of Light, the Art of Andre Pater, an award-winning book of the artist’s work that was published in 2019.

In addition to his other commissions, Pater’s art will grace a Maker’s Mark bottle that will commemorate the 25th anniversary of Keeneland’s Maker’s Mark Mile. He is one of three artists chosen to decorate the highly collectible bottles. Proceeds will beneft LexArts and support enhancements and programming in the Isaac Murphy Memorial Art Garden.

Pater turns 68 this spring and thinks he’s poised on the horizon of his prime as an artist. With no more “schools, colleges, mortgages,” to worry about, he has “more freedom” to be selective in his work. And he remains curious: “Tere’s still a lot of unknown for me.” Despite rich commissions and high auction prices he is certain to fnd a new horizon. “I paint what fres me up. I’m still growing.” KM

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Close at hand is an extensive collection of brushes, mixing tools, and paint, all essential to the unique qualities of Pater’s work.

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KEENELAND PHOTO

The UK-Keeneland partnership benefts Central Kentucky — and the broader Thoroughbred Industry

By Robin Roenker

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UK cheerleaders add to the festivities at Big Blue Day at the Races, a fall event at Keeneland that welcomes students, alumni, faculty, and staff.

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But many UK alumni — and Kentuckians, in general — might be surprised to learn just how deep the Keeneland-UK partnership goes.

Records show that as early as 1941, just fve years afer Keeneland’s inaugural race season, the Keeneland Association board of directors earmarked contributions to help fund salaries for top University of The Keeneland Foundation purchased and donated an electron microscope to UK in 1947.

Kentucky employees.

In 1947 the Keeneland Foundation paid for and donated an electron microscope Nick Nicholson and Bill Tomason to current president Shannon to UK — the frst of its kind in Kentucky. In 1953 the Keeneland Arvin — have held seats on its board of directors.

Foundation donated $200,000 toward the building of a dormitory, In recent years the UK-Keeneland partnership has only grown Keeneland Hall, on UK’s North Campus. stronger. Today the collaboration is shaping Lexington into a world In 1984 Keeneland became one of the original funders of UK’s leader in equine and track safety research. It’s helping fund faciliGluck Equine Research Center, pledging $1 million to help build ties improvements on the UK campus that beneft both staf and the facility. Former Keeneland president and chairman James E. students. And it’s building new, meaningful collaborations between “Ted” Bassett was part of an advisory committee of Toroughbred the UK HealthCare Kentucky Children’s Hospital and Keeneland industry leaders who helped raise an additional $4.2 million toKids Club, just to name a few. ward Gluck’s establishment. Troughout Gluck’s history, members “Te depth of our mutual sponsorship and partnership is of Keeneland leadership — from Bassett and former presidents

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KEENELAND

Ask almost any University of Kentucky student or alum, and he or she will tell you that a fall or spring race day at Keeneland with friends ranks among their top undergraduate memories.

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perhaps best described as a friendship,” said Bill Tomason, former Keeneland president and CEO. “Keeneland works with every element of the University of Kentucky — the students, the administration, professors, and employees — to make sure that we are working in coordination for the betterment of our community.”

Michael Richey, UK’s vice president for philanthropy and alumni engagement, agrees, noting the UK-Keeneland partnership works as well as it does because the two organizations share the same goals.

“Keeneland and the university have a shared vision,” Richey said. “And that is to serve the Commonwealth of Kentucky and to serve its citizens.”

Supporting the community Across their more than 80 years of partnership, Keeneland and UK have joined forces in ways both large and small.

Keeneland has long supported UK

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Keeneland and UK top brass participated in the dorm’s 1955 dedication.

scholarship programs and is a major contributor to DanceBlue, UK’s annual student dance marathon to raise money for pediatric cancer research and treatment at Kentucky Children’s Hospital.

Sales of the annual commemorative Keeneland Maker’s Mark bourbon bottles have helped raise more than $1.5 million for UK Athletics’ on-campus Center for Academic and Tutorial Services (CATS) and $500,000 for the UK Gill Heart & Vascular Institute, among other entities within the university.

Keeneland’s annual Big Blue Day at the Races — with guest appearances

by UK cheerleaders, mascots, marching band members, and more — welcomes UK students, alumni, faculty, and staf for free general admission.

Keeneland also ofen sponsors fun pre-game and halfime activities for fans at UK football and men’s basketball games.

In 2014 the Keeneland Association

KEENELAND

In 1953 Keeneland contributed $200,000 to help build a dormitory, Keeneland Hall, on UK’s North Campus.

J. B. Faulconer’s The Keeneland Story, published in 1960, outlines donations to UK.

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donated $50,000 to upgrade a meeting room in UK’s William T. Young Library with stateof-the-art monitors and furnishings — transforming it into a modern, collaborative meeting space for students and faculty.

In 2019 Keeneland announced UK HealthCare’s multiyear agreement to sponsor the Keeneland Kids Club, Keeneland’s run/walk program — which opens the grounds to local charity walks and runs — and the First Lady stakes during the fall meet.

“Being able to connect with Keeneland’s Kids Club and run/walk program reinforces our existing community engagement program and allows us to extend our mission of health education to a wider audience,” said Dr. Mark Newman, UK executive vice president for health afairs, in a statement announcing the collaboration.

Even before the partnership was formalized, the ties between Keeneland’s Kids Club and the UK HealthCare Kentucky Children’s Hospital had long been strong. In pre-COVID years, guests to the Kids Club’s popular Former president Bill Thomason participates in a Maker’s Mark bottle signing.

Proceeds have benefted several UK programs.

“Breakfast with Buckles” December holiday event ofen brought unwrapped toys to be donated to pediatric hospital patients, and ticket proceeds helped raise more than $3,000 for the Kentucky Children’s Hospital.

Buckles, the Keeneland Kids Club mascot, has frequently delivered Keeneland care packages, including track coloring books and stick-horse-making kits — fashioned from pool noodles and felt — to help brighten the day of Kentucky Children’s Hospital patients.

Also in 2019, Keeneland announced the Keeneland Library’s creation of the Life’s Work Oral History Project, an initiative designed to capture treasured stories from the Toroughbred industry and preserve and promote them for future generations. Life’s Work represents a unique collaboration of the Keeneland Library along with the University College Scholarship Day recipients gather in the Keeneland winner’s circle with of Kentucky Libraries’ Louie B. Nunn Center their honorary checks. for Oral History and the Toroughbred Daily Trustee Emeritus James E. “Ted” Bassett III, and Shadwell Farm News (TDN).

Life’s Work features video and oral interviews from prom- Vice President and General Manager Rick Nichols, among othinent fgures in the equine industry, such as Seth Hancock of ers, whose passion and livelihood have been devoted to the Claiborne Farm, John Phillips of Darby Dan Farm, Keeneland Toroughbred.

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Supporting the industry Recently Keeneland and the University of Kentucky have merged their focus on a common goal: making Lexington and Central Kentucky the country’s epicenter for equine-related research.

For more than 30 years UK’s Gluck Equine Research Center has been a respect-

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ed leader, internationally, in research on equine health and disease.

“One of the most successful examples of the UK-Keeneland partnership was the establishment of the University of Kentucky Equine Research Foundation,” said former Keeneland president Bassett, who was instrumental in Gluck’s founding.

“Te Gluck Equine Research Center has been at the forefront of a wide range of research regarding equine infectious diseases and is recognized internationally for establishing safety protocols for the recovery and transportation of horses,” Bassett added.

Building on Gluck’s strong foundation, Nancy Cox, Ph.D., dean of UK’s College of Agriculture, Food and Environment and vice president for Land-Grant Engagement, has made it a mission to grow and expand UK’s status as a leader in equine safety and track safety research since her appointment as dean in 2014.

Keeneland has been an active, willing partner in helping achieve that vision.

“Keeneland has had a wonderful, collaborative relationship with Dean Nancy Cox,” said former Keeneland president Tomason. “Nancy has got a vision for what she’s

KEENELAND/PHOTOS BY Z

The track also has a presence at Kroger Field, home of UK’s football team.

Keeneland helped upgrade a meeting room at UK’s William T. Young Library.

KEENELAND

In keeping with the Keeneland Library’s mission to preserve and promote the rich history of Toroughbred racing, the Library engaged the prestigious University of Kentucky Libraries’ Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History to support the project. Te Nunn Center’s state-of-the-art archives will index and preserve each Life’s Work video interview.

“We know that when the University of Kentucky and Keeneland join forces, it’s going to be impactful,” said Christa Marrillia, Keeneland vice president and chief marketing ofcer. “We don’t do it just to create buzz and do something that’s fun — even though we have had fun along the way. We do it as a continuation of our mission and to enhance the community. Tat’s what makes it so exciting.”

KEENELAND

CHET WHITE

Keeneland has promoted racing at UK men’s basketball games at Rupp Arena.

Keeneland Kids Club mascot Buckles visits a patient at UK HealthCare Kentucky Children’s Hospital.

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Keeneland contributed $1 million to the Gluck Equine Research Center, one of the world’s foremost such institutions.

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doing at the University of Kentucky. It’s about creating a center of excellence for so many issues that are critical around the country to the health and safety of horses.”

Cox agreed that the partnership has been a rich one. “Te University of Kentucky and Keeneland have the same philosophy — not only about making things as safe as they can be for racing but also about using the best approaches based on sound science and evidence,” she said.

In the past fve years, Keeneland has played a key role in helping attract top equine research faculty to the University of Kentucky, including Scott Stanley, Ph.D., a former UK College of Agriculture graduate who enjoyed a highly respected 20-year

Gluck researchers are at the forefront of studying and improving equine health and safety.

KEENELAND AND THE UNIVERSITY HAVE A SHARED VISION. — Michael Richey, UK’s vice

president for philanthropy and alumni engagement

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career at the University of California-Davis’ Equine Animal Chemistry Laboratory before joining the UK faculty in 2018.

Stanley specializes in equine drug testing. His testing procedures allow tracks and equine sales companies to screen horses for any non-regulatory drug use, including steroids, phosphonates, and non-steroidal antiinfammatory drugs.

“Our testing capabilities have grown and expanded to accommodate the needs of the industry,” Stanley explained.

In 2019 Keeneland made a $1.3 million gif to UK to create the Keeneland Endowed Chair in Equine Veterinary Science — the faculty seat that Stanley now holds. Te funds were pivotal in UK’s goal to create a world-class equine drug research and testing program in Lexington, under Stanley’s leadership.

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“Since I’ve arrived, the endowment has grown to more than $3 million. Tose funds will support my salary as well as research,” explained Stanley, who works as both a professor and a researcher at Gluck and as a director of UK’s new Equine Analytical Chemistry Lab, a service laboratory for the industry based at UK’s Coldstream Research Campus.

Keeneland was also instrumental in attracting Michael “Mick” Peterson, Ph.D. — a national expert in track surfaces safety research and testing — to the UK faculty in 2017.

“Keeneland is really central to the fact that I’m even here or that UK’s racetrack safety program even exists,” said Peterson, a former researcher at the University of Maine who now directs racetrack safety research at UK. “Keeneland not only provided the support to help move my lab here, but they have also been a key facilitator for our work. Tey have allowed us to use the Keeneland track and Te Toroughbred Center as living laboratories for our track surfaces testing equipment and the research that we’re doing,” Peterson said. “It’s like these two people, Dean Cox

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and Keeneland’s Bill Tomason, were able to say, ‘We want to be the center of the world for the equine industry’ — and they made it happen.”

In late 2020 Keeneland, Churchill Downs, Del Mar Toroughbred Club, the New York Racing Association, and Te Stronach Group jointly pledged additional fnancial resources to further UK’s research on track surface safety, under Peterson’s directorship.

As the racing industry works to keep its horses and riders safe through new guidelines — including anti-doping and track surfaces safety standards mandated by the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Act of 2020 — UK’s work at the forefront of drug testing and track safety research will be all the more critical.

“As racetracks need to be certifed and need scientifc expertise in order to ensure they’re meeting these uniform standards around the country, the University of Kentucky is poised to be that center of excellence and expertise,” Tomason said. “UK is equipped to provide services all across the country that are going to be critical for the success of the Toroughbred industry into the future.” KM

DANIELLE DONHAM

UK’s racetrack safety initiative allows on-site research. UK’s Michael “Mick” Peterson describes the Keeneland racing surfaces as “living laboratories.”

UK researchers use special equipment to test the Keeneland dirt surface.

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UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

COURTESY OF ASHLAND, THE HENRY CLAY ESTATE

Left, Josephine Clay managed all aspects of Ashland Stud Farm. She moved to the Ashland estate, above, after the Civil War left her a widow. Below, Star Davis was born at Ashland-on-Tates Creek and sired 1878 Kentucky Derby winner Day Star.

CONSUMMATE First Lady of the Turf JOSEPHINE CLAY gets overdue recognition

HORSEWOMAN PHOTO CREDIT

STORIES SWIRLED AROUND JOSEPHINE CLAY, like the shocking rumor she played a mean hand of poker at the Phoenix Hotel. Te very idea of a woman sitting down with men for cards set the proper ladies of Lexington clucking furiously. Josephine didn’t care. She had young Toroughbreds to sell and she knew where to fnd the men in the horse business who controlled the money. She gathered her skirts, parted the curtain of cigar smoke, and dealt herself in.

COURTESY OF ASHLAND, THE HENRY CLAY ESTATE

By MARYJEAN WALL

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UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

CONSUMMATE HORSEWOMAN

Father-in-law Henry Clay founded Ashland and was one of Kentucky’s most renowned politicians. The original house was razed by son James B. Clay, with rebuilding completed in 1857.

She was also unique in that she is believed to be the only woman to have owned and operated a stud in the generation following the Civil War. As proprietor of Ashland Stud Farm, also known as Ashland-onTates Creek, Josephine chose matings for her mares, raised their foals, and tended to every detail right down to mixing the daily horse rations. She loved her horses, set up trust funds for their care, and allowed them to nibble on her straw hats. She even served as a spokesperson for the Kentucky horse industry.

Considering she stood out in her time, it is a mystery why Josephine slipped from historic memory following her death in 1920.

But she did. Te horse business forgot about her. So did Kentucky history. For example, the Kentucky Encyclopedia, published in 1992, did not include Josephine among its entries. Josephine was not “rediscovered” until early in the decade of 2000, when a

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descendant began looking at her scrapbook from a fresh perspective.

Holding her own Josephine Clay stepped outside the norm during a time when women rarely lef the domestic sphere. In defying social conventions, she had powerful inspiration from within her own family, as the women of the extended Clay family had never been shrinking violets.

Josephine’s cousin through marriage, Laura Clay, was a leader in the national sufragist movement. Laura’s mother, Mary Jane Warfeld Clay, ran her husband’s livestock farm while her husband, Cassius Marcellus Clay, was of to Russia during the Civil War as ambassador for the United States.

Mary Jane ably assumed her husband’s role at their farm, as she knew horses well.

Her father, Dr. Elisha Warfeld, bred and raised the champion racehorse Lexington at

their family farm, Te Meadows.

Tough they both worked with horses, Josephine and Mary Jane difered in their reasons why. Mary Jane traded in horses and mules to save the farm and feed her family during wartime. Josephine, a product of the next generation, ventured into the man’s world of bloodstock because she wanted to.

Josephine did not know Toroughbreds when she moved to Lexington from Missouri and in 1866 married John Morrison Clay, Henry Clay’s youngest son. She knew horses and had grown up riding on the frontier. But a Toroughbred was a diferent animal entirely, she quickly learned.

John began to instruct her in the ways of these blooded animals. For more than two decades before John died in 1887, she ran Ashland largely on her own, as John was often away on the racing circuit. She learned how to deal with buyers, sellers, breeders, and feed merchants. She trained the young

UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

CONSUMMATE HORSEWOMAN

stock. Occasionally she also dealt with journalists writing stories about Ashland. Josephine emerged as spokesperson for the farm at a time when the horse business was evolving into an economic driver for Kentucky. Ashland’s success brought attention to the nascent horse business, which in turn helped all of Lexington while it struggled for economic stability following the war.

A narrative began to emerge.

John taught Josephine about Toroughbreds, and she supplied their partnership with the entrepreneurial skills he lacked. She possibly helped save the stud when an immense note was coming due at the bank.

John was constantly in debt. He had little skill with money. Before Josephine came into his life, John had kept Ashland afoat only because he owned some of the best bloodstock in North America, willed to him by his father.

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John learned to rely on Josephine’s business skills. He sought her advice on the prices they should ask for horses they ofered for sale. Tey made a formidable team, he with his instinct for breeding and racing a good horse; she with her affinity for numbers and attention to detail.

From Ashland’s charmed pastures came two Kentucky Derby winners and the dam of the frst American horse to win England’s Epsom Derby. John was believed the breeder of the two Kentucky Derby winners, but Josephine might have infuenced his mating decisions heavily. When she wrote about these three horses following John’s death, she wrote she was the seller, perhaps her way of saying she and John had held equal roles at Ashland.

True leader Josephine continued her practice of calling herself “Mrs. John Clay”

UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

Josephine Clay, right, and Josephine Clay Simpson stand on either side of Henry Clay Simpson. Above, an undated photo of Josephine Clay. Below, Josephine married John M. Clay in 1866.

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following her husband’s death. Tis was the custom at the time but a misrepresentation of Josephine. She hid behind no man’s name. She made her own decisions; she negotiated the terrain of the bloodstock world as nimbly as a man; and she was to be reckoned with in business. Men were in awe of her skills, remarking that she could rattle of equine pedigrees with lightning speed.

Eventually she became a spokesperson for the Kentucky horse business. Her opinions on the health of the industry were respected, particularly afer social reformers temporarily ended racing in New York. Josephine speculated the Kentucky business would be fne despite the bumps in the road she foresaw in the near future. No one was laughing because a woman spoke her mind.

Progressive women seeking better social and working conditions for their gender, not to mention the right to vote, saw Josephine as a role model. In 1903 she received an invitation to speak at a women’s leadership conference in Toronto. She did not attend but sent a copy of her speech to be read. She insisted a woman’s limitations in the professions lay only within herself.

Her obituary described her as a horse breeder and a writer of published novels. She was also a poet, a musician, and the mother

UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

Above, Josephine Clay’s business skills enabled Ashland to prosper. Left, she recorded detailed notes about her horses in these catalogs.

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of four daughters, three of whom lived into adulthood. One of her greatest accomplishments was helping hard-drinking John turn his life around.

It was indeed strange that despite Josephine’s renown during her lifetime, all memory of her disappeared afer she was gone. It was like she had never existed. She was nowhere to be found in stories of the fabled Bluegrass horse farms, or in recollections of early Lexington racing. Gone, too, was the belief during her lifetime that she once rode and won a race with a horse John trained at the Kentucky Association track. Josephine was said to have disguised herself as a boy to ride that horse, a century prior to women’s winning the right to ride races. Stories like this disappeared afer Josephine’s death, but her life was a story waiting to be retold.

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UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

CONSUMMATE HORSEWOMAN

Henry Clay’s son, James, introduced Standardbreds to Ashland in the 1850s. The stallion Dictator, pictured here, was owned by Major Henry Clay McDowell

Shared love of racing Josephine Russell Erwin Clay was born in Missouri, in 1835, when Missouri clung fercely to its status as a slave state. Tis was made possible with a compromise brokered

by Josephine’s eventual father-in-law, U.S. Speaker of the House Henry Clay. People called Clay the Great Compromiser, for good reason. His negotiations among slave-holding and free states held of the

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Civil War by some 40 years. Josephine met him several times as a young girl; she would come to know him better through stories she heard afer marrying into his family.

Henry Clay had kept a small amount of prime bloodstock at Ashland, the name he gave his estate less than two miles east of downtown Lexington. He was among the founders of Lexington’s original public racecourse, the Kentucky Association track.

In a curious twist, Josephine Russell married twice into his family: frst to Henry’s grandson, Eugene Erwin; later to Henry’s youngest son, John. Like Henry Clay, who died in 1852, Josephine enthusiastically embraced the Toroughbred and the farm work that made racing possible.

Josephine’s frst husband, Eugene Erwin of Independence, Missouri, rose to the rank of colonel in the Confederate army. He died while attempting to turn back U.S. General Ulysses Grant’s army during the siege of Vicksburg, Mississippi. Tis lef Josephine a Confederate widow, uncertain how she would support her daughters. Te solution, to her mind, was to move to Lexington and take up residence with the Clay family.

In Lexington, she took on the job of managing John Clay’s household. In fact, she moved into his house, a questionable slip in the proscribed world of social standards. She did not get a bargain in her new role. John was a heavy drinker. He got into fghts. He’d spent a brief time in the local lunatic asylum. “To many, Mr. Clay appeared eccentric,” his obituary stated most generously in 1887.

Josephine married him in 1866, a year afer moving into his house at the Ashland estate. John became a loving stepfather to Josephine’s three daughters, and he was greatly in love with Josephine. Nonetheless, he lef his family frequently to follow the racing circuit. Josephine appeared to view his travels as a needless expense, as we can discern from John’s letters home.

“Your unkind letter … was received, and surprises me,” John wrote from Eatontown, New Jersey, while racing at Monmouth Park. “I am sleeping and eating in a stable 900 miles from my own dear wife, living so rough that I am sorely tried to persevere in it.” John added, “ …have patience and give me fair play ... don’t mistrust your husband.”

Occasionally, John swore he was giving up horse training because his life on the road overwhelmed him. His letters reveal

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COURTESY OF ASHLAND, THE HENRY CLAY ESTATE

UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

John Clay spent time on the racing circuit with the couple’s horses and communicated with Josephine regularly. Here he telegraphed the day’s results.

Below, a Thomas Scott painting depicts Skedaddle and her foal Slashes.

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his loneliness while living in the stables or boarding houses. He was plagued with neuralgia, as he wrote to Josephine in nearly every letter. Looming large in his life was the prospect of falling back into his drinking habits. He wrote that he had learned to rely for strength on religion, as he had converted to Catholicism and attended Mass in his travels.

When times were good, John enjoyed the high notes.

Following the war, he and Josephine had loved winning races in Lexington with their fast flly Skedaddle and won more with her ofspring, including Sauce Box and Squeeze ’Em. John took a promising son of Uncle Vic to the races in the East, hoping to get a good price for him. Tis was Victory, who came from Magnolia, a mare in Henry Clay’s foundation stock. John had been taking top-notch horses east to race since 1863, when he sold a son of Lexington to New York interests. Its name was Kentucky. Arguably Kentucky was the best of his generation. With the sale of Kentucky, John’s reputation outside the Bluegrass was secured.

Josephine came into John’s life afer John had rescued Skedaddle from Confederate raider John Hunt Morgan.

Morgan’s men had raided Ashland and other farms toward the end of the war. John was determined Skedaddle not get away. He followed Morgan to Georgetown, paid him a ransom for the return of the flly, and brought her home.

Skedaddle’s ofspring carried forth her talent into future generations. Even in recent times, racing would not have had Cara Rafaela and her son Bernardini, for example.

Cara Rafaela was named Broodmare of the Year in 2006 afer her son, Bernardini, won grade 1 races, including the Preakness, Travers, and Jockey Club Gold Cup, along the way to an Eclipse Award as 3-year-old champion. Both traced back to Skedaddle. She was one of the lucky ones to have survived the war without disappearing into army units or outlaw bands. From the horses that disappeared, we will never know what their future descendants might have brought to the sport.

John sometimes mentioned Skedaddle in his letters home from the tracks. More frequently, he wrote defending his vagabond life and the fnancial strain to Ashland’s budget, which Josephine carefully managed from home.

She worried about expenses; him, not so much. He tried to convince her that life on the road did not cost as much as she feared.

From the track at Cincinnati he wrote in 1867, “Slept on straw in the stable lof.” He continued, “If Banshee can win here, she will sell I think easily for $5,000. We must

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CONSUMMATE HORSEWOMAN

borrow money from a Woodford County horseman, John Harper. Expenses “will not be less than seven hundred dollars a month,” wrote John, “including my forfeits and entrance money in stakes here Saratoga Jerome Park and Baltimore.”

Josephine must have asked herself, “What was he thinking?” Here was John, adding to their expenses with his travels, while she was struggling to save the farm.

Ashland needed a lucky break to keep

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he could sell him for a huge price. Victory was the horse Custer rode in 1876 into battle against the Sioux at the Little Bighorn River. No one knows whether Victory died with Custer on the battlefeld or whether Sitting Bull ran of with him to Canada.

Either way, John never got the $10,000 he once thought Victory was worth.

Back at Ashland, Josephine continued her hard work. She trained the young stock for John on the farm’s one-mile track. John was always trying to micromanage her work from afar, and sometimes lef detailed instructions in his letters.

“Have the track harrowed afer you gallop Gilroy and Sal,” John wrote to Josephine.

“Gilroy can gallop slow as he can gallop, Black Sal behind him if the track is hard. I would bandage Gilroy’s and Sal’s legs with cold water bandages afer galloping every morning. Keep them wet until they are fed at noon… put a little glycerin in heels.”

COURTESY OF THE KENTUCKY HISTORICAL SOCIETY

going. Apparently the farm found the luck it needed, for John never again mentioned the possibility of losing the farm.

Josephine got her own good glimpse of the happy times two years following her marriage to John, when Victory began his racing career. If any horse could bring a fnancial windfall to Ashland, it looked like it would be Victory. John sought Josephine’s advice on a price.

“I await your reply about pricing Victory and will sell at your fgures,” he wrote to Josephine in 1868. Four days later he wrote

Regaining her place

Following John’s death, Josephine had every reason to close the stud and retire Left, these purses contained prize money that to ladies’ circles of her social John M. Clay collected when his horses won.

Above, unlike those for her famous father-inclass. Tis would have been law, Lexington has no tangible tribute expected, for she self-idento Josephine Clay. tifed as a sufragist during the time that Lexington was to her again, this time saying he would take a hotbed for sufragist circles. Laura Clay’s no less than $10,000 for Victory, a price Jo- work was so widely recognized that the Democratic National Convention of 1920 sephine undoubtedly had set.

Something must have happened to Vic- put her name and that of two other womtory, for when he’s next heard from he was en on the ballot for U.S. president. Tis no longer racing and had joined the Seventh occurred during the frst year that women Cavalry as one of General George Arm- were permitted to vote in a presidential strong Custer’s personal mounts. Custer election. Josephine died some months earwould not have paid $10,000 to buy the lier and thus did not live to cast a ballot. army a horse, so Victory’s value must have She would have wanted to vote, afer urging plummeted sometime afer John thought women to fnd their way into professions.

COURTESY OF ASHLAND, THE HENRY CLAY ESTATE

hope for the best.” In 1872 he pleaded with Josephine and her daughters to join him at Monmouth Park for a month. “Tere are plenty of small houses I could rent in reach of Long Branch,” he wrote to her. Josephine refused to leave Ashland. Te farm was in fnancial trouble, and she was determined to keep it from going under.

Te horse operation at Ashland owed $7,000, and the note was coming due in August, two months away. Six days before writing about this looming note in a letter, John had written that he had needed to

So, the mystery of why Josephine was forgotten to the sport of horse racing and Kentucky history remains unsolved.

“It’s an interesting question,” remarked Eric Brooks, curator, site manager, and historian of all things Henry Clay at Ashland, the Clay family’s estate. “If she hadn’t stepped in, John might not have been able to continue,” Brooks said. “He was drinking and sleeping in barns. He was not on a path that was going to lead to long-term success.”

Brooks wonders if John’s name recorded as sole breeder of their horses worked against the memory of Josephine enduring through history. “If she had bred a Derby winner afer John died, it might have made her name known better,” he said.

Brooks also believes Josephine was not

interested in making her place in history. She did things to please herself or her friends and family. She was not looking for a place in the record books.

Perhaps other factors played into losing historical memory of Josephine. For example, men originally wrote the history of horse racing and could have overlooked a woman’s role in building the sport.

Te epilogue for Josephine’s story began taking shape during the infamous ice storm of 2003. Her great-grandson, Henry Clay Simpson Jr. of New Jersey and Vermont, was marooned in his mother’s house in Lexington in the afermath of the storm.

Simpson spent the down time rereading his great-grandmother Josephine’s scrapbook and began to see her in a richer perspective.

Like most of Josephine’s other descendants, Simpson had been unaware of the extent of her accomplishments.

He began further research into her life, writing a book titled Josephine Clay Pioneer Horsewoman of the Bluegrass, published in 2005. Te Kentucky Horse Park simultaneously opened an exhibit about Josephine. Research by Cathy Schenck, now retired as librarian at the Keeneland Library, turned up 20 winners of the Triple Crown races descended from Magnolia and Margaret Wood, the foundation mares at Ashland.

Overnight, Josephine Clay had turned into a rediscovered sensation. She regained her proper place in historical memory. Even if it was a bit late. KM

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Ouita Michel, in one of the dining rooms at Holly Hill Inn, is mentoring a new generation of chefs and restaurant professionals.

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Michel collaborated with Genie Graf on Michel’s frst cookbook. Right, Michel and her husband, Chris, opened the fne-dining establishment Holly Hill Inn in 2001. It remains her fagship restaurant.

debate sprang up as chef and restaurateur Ouita Michel and her coeditors Sara Gibbs and Genie Graf worked on Michel’s frst cookbook last year. It concerned the approach to writing about the recipes.

“Ouita wanted the stories written in third person,” said Gibbs. “But it became problematic because so many of them were her stories.” Eventually, frst person won out.

In all things, Michel prefers “we” to “I.” Try to talk about the infuence she has had on Kentucky food, dining, and buying local, and she will shif the focus to those around her — to youthful chef Ethan Bowling, who has worked for her since he was 15; to farmer Patrick Kennedy, who has long made sure her restaurants are supplied with pork and other meats he produces on his Stonecross Farm; to Gibbs and Graf, who’ve been a part of her team for years

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and were integral to getting her cookbook to print. She’d much rather talk about others’ successes and contributions than her own.

Gibbs and Michel frst connected about a decade ago through their mutual interest in the local foods movement. Gibbs later managed the café that Michel’s company operated for Woodford Reserve (the café is closed because of the pandemic) before she moved to Florida a couple of years ago.

“She is so good at seeing people’s strengths and moving them into positions where they can shine,” said Gibbs.

Tat ability extends, Gibbs said, to new farmers and how their products will ft into her restaurants’ menus.

A James Beard Award nominee several times over, the 56-year-old Michel has become the Bluegrass region’s best-known chef and restaurant owner since she and her husband, Chris, opened their frst restaurant, Holly Hill Inn, in Midway in 2001.

Tey closed on the inn in late 2000, giving Michel the chance to celebrate the new venture by cooking a New Year’s Eve dinner for family and friends. Her mother’s best friend walked into the drafy old house and watched water drip from the ceiling. “She said, ‘What are you doing?’ and

I said, ‘I don’t know!’ ” Michel had no grand plan; at that point, handling Holly Hill Inn seemed more than enough.

“I had no conception of building a group,” she said. “I never thought I’d have more than one restaurant.”

Tat changed in a few years as Michel began to feel restless. “I realized this can’t be the rest of my professional life, just being in the kitchen of Holly Hill Inn.” So in 2003 the Michels opened Wallace Station. Ten, from 2010 to 2018, they opened fve more restaurants — Windy Corner, Smithtown Seafood, Midway Bakery, Zim’s Café/Tirsty Fox, and Honeywood.

Business expansion did not come without struggles, both professional and personal.

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Michel never expected to open more than one restaurant, but Wallace Station, above and below, followed Holly Hill Inn in 2003.

had been sick for about a year and we were opening Smithtown Seafood, and we almost went bankrupt because I was trying to do everything,” Michel said. Her stepfather had died a few years before. Afer losing two of the most important people in her life, she said, “I realized this cannot all be about me.”

A business consultant helped the Michels create back-end systems that would allow them to more easily manage multiple restaurants. He also leveled with Michel about her role. “He told me, ‘You can run your business or you can run your kitchen, but you can’t do both.’ ” She chose to step aside and let new, young chefs have their day.

“So, now, I’m not in the kitchen,” she said. “I know people don’t understand, and I don’t try to hide that. But I’m about exploration. I love the prospect of learning, the collaboration and teamwork. I love working with young people and seeing what they are doing and learning from them but also sharing and teaching them what I know.”

Having Michel step back is essential for the careers of the up-and-coming chefs she hires, Gibbs said. “She has to let them be the star; she has to let them shine.”

Having her at the helm of a signifcant feet

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ROOM for ALL at THIS CHEF’S TABLE of restaurants has been essential during the pandemic. Te restaurant industry has been particularly hard hit, and Michel’s restaurants have not gone unscathed.

Several closed for a time as others shifed to carryout Michel promotes Kentucky products, such as honey, at Wallace Station. and curbside. Smithtown Seafood’s second location at Te Summit at Fritz Farm, along business. “She made smart decisions about how to proceed,” said with all others in Te Barn there, closed for good. She lost staf, Gibbs. Te trust she’d built in the community paid dividends. going from about 220 employees to 140, some through attrition In a time of uncertainty, “the community knew she was being as parents quit to stay home with school-age children or older forthright and honest about what was going on to keep people employees decided frontline work carried too much risk. employed and still put some food out there. And, as the panFrom the outset of the pandemic, Michel operated with hon- demic has gone on, I think she has gotten better and better, even esty and transparency. She had built trust among customers and knowing that at any point they could have to shut down.”

Michel said she leaned on her intuition, her sense of what is right. suppliers, and she realized the pandemic was no time to weaken Her goals became “to make decisions that I would not later that strength.

From Florida, Gibbs kept close tabs on her friend and the regret and try to always put my people and my customers frst. As

Michel has stepped away from day-to-day cooking to let new young chefs have the spotlight.

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Midway Bakery’s bread, cookies, and other items supply Michel’s various dining spots.

I’ve gotten older, the most important thing to me is to be a great employer. I know that if I am, everything else will follow.”

Even as her team dealt with the uncertainty the pandemic wrought, they moved forward and innovated. “Tis is a work in progress,” she said with a laugh, “and it will be until the day I stop doing it. But I’ve been proud of what we’ve gotten done in 2020.”

Online ordering systems got up and running. “We had always

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wanted to have it, but it had fallen by the wayside because there is always so much other stuf to take care of,” Michel said.

At Wallace Station, orders taken online or at a window could be eaten at well-spaced picnic tables. Holly Hill ofered curbside pickup. At Zim’s, in the restored Fayette County Courthouse, a window next to the patio was fung open so patrons could line up outside to order and pick up food. At Zim’s sister restaurant

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Michel shares a recipe for the popular lemon bars in her cookbook.

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SHARING FAVORITE RECIPES f

Favorite cookbooks are easy to spot on the kitchen shelf. They’re the ones with worn covers, dog-eared pages often splattered with batter.

That’s how Ouita Michel hopes her f rst cookbook, Just a Few Miles South: Timeless Recipes From Our Favorite Places, will look in a few years.

“I didn’t want to produce a coffee table book,” the Bluegrass chef and restaurateur said.

“I wanted this to be the book that you had in your kitchen all the time, using it. When your kid wants to make

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scones, you are going to whip it out.

Hopefully, this will be the go-to cookbook for your kitchen.”

That seems likely, considering that in late January, preorders for the cookbook at ouitamichel.com were at 1,400. That doesn’t even include orders through Amazon.com and publisher University Press of Kentucky.

Many of the cookbook’s 150 recipes are staples at Michel’s casual restaurants, like Wallace Station, Windy Corner, and Zim’s. Some, of course, are Michel’s, but current and former employees, family, and friends created many of them, and they get credit,

and bar, Te Tirsty Fox, “We opened a window and sold booze out of it,” Michel said. “Te governor made it legal for us to do that, I might add. We had bottles of bourbon and margaritas fying out the window.”

Te impact of online sales was huge at the holidays, when Tanksgiving and Christmas meals to-go sold out. Cookie boxes from the Michel’s Midway Bakery were marketed online nationwide.

Zim’s Café and Honeywood signed on to try out a new delivery system, Delivery Co-op, which is owned by its restaurant members. Honeywood’s large kitchen wasn’t operating at full capacity because of seating limits in the dining room, so a “ghost kitchen” was embedded in it. Te “ghost kitchen” is a carryout-only Japanese sandwich concept called CurryCurry Katsu, run by the Honeywood staf. “It’s going gangbusters,” Michel said, “It’s totally crazy, right?”

As she looks forward, Michel said her focus will be on further developing her existing restaurants, not creating new ones.

“We aren’t going to grow any bigger than we are right now,” she said. “I have opened my last restaurant.

“We have these amazing locations, and what I want to do now is really develop them. How can we improve the guest experience, take our hospitality to the next level, and produce more of our own food?

How can we increase the locally raised products we use? Tat is what I’m interested in — that and I’d like to write more books. I want to write a book that is more the tale of the Holly Hill Inn. Maybe that will be the next.”

In what she calls “a year of great anxiety,” Michel found comfort in the familiar — her family, including her sister, who lives across the street in Midway; gardening; the Midway Christian Church, where in normal times she sings

much like contributors in ladies’ club and church auxiliary cookbooks.

Michel has 1,000 Kentucky club and auxiliary cookbooks in her personal collection, which inspired her to develop a cookbook that’s a little old-fashioned. Just a Few Miles South draws from those ringbound community cookbooks in both its collaborative approach and its graphic design.

“The cookbook content is a little old-fashioned because all of the restaurants are a little bit old-fashioned. I’m a little bit old-fashioned in the way I think about food compared to young chefs today, I guess.

“So this book isn’t charred carrot with miso glaze and a drizzle of orange oil, even though I might like that. It’s our cookies, breads, chili, brown beans, cornbread, fried chicken, pimento cheese. The silver bullets that have been on our menus for decades.”

(By the way, among the “silver bullets” are the beloved lemon bars, a recipe shared with Michel many years ago and “one of our top sellers,” she said.)

Even with its old-fashioned leanings, the hardcover cookbook has a contemporary twist. Tattoo artist Brenna Flannery drew the book’s 100 illustrations, simple line drawings of a big turkey, a pot of burgoo over a f re, a country ham, for example.

The art gives the book “a nostalgic style with modern execution,” said Michel.

“Brenna is fantastic, especially with food and plant drawings.”

In typical Michel fashion, she has made sure this cookbook is not just about her. Coeditors Sara Gibbs and Genie Graf

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get star billing, their names just a tad smaller than Michel’s on the cover. Recipes editor Gibbs pared down restaurant-size versions, made and tested the dishes, and then refned the recipes as needed. Graf handled editing and marketing. Both have worked with Michel for years.

The cookbook comes at a time when the pandemic has kept people at home more, in their kitchens, and while Michel hopes it will inspire them, she also hopes it will encourage people to explore Kentucky’s food culture and discover there’s more to the state than hot browns and fried chicken.

Flannery’s drawings Ñ for example, an opening illustration of Old Frankfort Pike and its stone fences Ñ will give readers a glimpse of the Bluegrass. “I did want a book that expressed place,” she said.

And it will hopefully encourage them to explore more, to learn about inventive chefs like her friends Toa Green, of Crank and Boom ice cream, and Sam Fore and her Sri Lankan snack bites.

“It is about expressing what ingredients we are growing, the diversity of our community, and what people are eating,” she said.

Just a Few Miles South ($24.95) is available at ouitamichel.com for preorder. Orders made by April 20 will get a signed cookbook, invitations to a book launch, and newsletters from Michel that include recipes not in the book.

in the choir and rings bells.

For Michel’s birthday, she got a tattoo, a gif from tattoo artist Brenna Flannery, who drew the illustrations for Michel’s cookbook.

“It’s my frst — and only,” she said of the dandelion on the inside of her forearm. “But it was cool, and this is a triumph for the year we have just been in.”

A dandelion seems an odd choice until you hear Michel’s explanation and realize she and the fower have much in common.

“One of my favorite pictures of my daughter, Willa, is her as a little girl, face all scrunched up blowing the seeds away from a dandelion.

“Te dandelion to me is the most cheerful and pragmatic of fowers — its bright yellow bloom is so pretty, the leaves make a delicious salad, the plant has incredible perseverance, and sturdiness. It can grow anywhere.” KM

Michel says she has no new restaurants in her future.

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By RENA BAER Photos by DAVID COYLE

THIS NATURAL WONDER BRINGS NEW AND RETURNING VISITORS CLOSE TO NATURE

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The cliffside opening in Cloud Splitter rock leads to a small perch high above the valley foor.

Left, mountain laurel blooms as the morning fog SPRING 2021 117 recedes.

A rainbow adds an extra burst of color to Castle Arch.

estled in Kentucky’s rolling landscape, the Red River Gorge is an unusual gem being discovered by a growing number of visitors who ofen plan to return before they even leave.

About 70 miles southeast of Lexington, the RRG encompasses a canyon system of nearly 45 square miles along the Red River. It is part of the Daniel Boone National Forest and contains hundreds of miles of hiking trails that lead to breathtaking vistas, meandering streams, the occasional waterfall, and more than 100 sandstone arches, ridges, and clifs all carved by rivers and time (400 million years to be more exact).

Te RRG has been recognized as a National Natural Landmark and a National Archeological District, as well as included on the National Register of Historic Places. Its namesake, the Red River, was declared a National Wild and Scenic River

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in 1993 under President Bill Clinton, an action that turned the area into protected land.

Given its abundance of natural riches, the RRG ofers myriad other opportunities to commune with Mother Nature, above- and below-ground: kayaking, canoeing, photography, zip lining, and fshing, to name a few. And with its endless clifs, the RRG is also a mecca for rock climbing and rappelling, which before Facebook and Instagram were its foremost claims to fame.

Now, for better or for worse, depending upon whom you ask, the RRG is a photogenic social media darling. Its topography is just the background, with each season wielding a fresh look and creating new visuals.

Spring invites more than 25 species of colorful wildfowers

The lovely Auxier Branch runs between Auxier and Tunnel ridges.

such as dwarf iris and Jacob’s ladder; summer delivers verdant green canopies of beech, sugar maple, and oak trees mixed with white pines; fall astounds as the leaves turn brilliant shades of red, orange, and yellow; and winter opens up views that go on forever.

With a keen eye, visitors might catch sight of some of the wildlife native to the area, which includes hawks, owls, woodpeckers, fox, deer, black bears, and the copperhead and the timber rattlesnake, both venomous.

And while the RRG doesn’t require an entrance fee, it does require the responsibility to be aware and respectful of the surroundings. Te RRG, it is frequently said, is at risk of being loved to death. Some visitors ignore rules, parking wherever they wish and leav-

ing trash in their wake. Tey also wander of trails, spray-paint grafti, carve into rocks, and climb over clearly marked boundaries.

Keep in mind that dozens of people have died over the years, with carelessness, alcohol consumption, and disregard being the unofcial causes of death.

“People don’t get seriously injured walking on the trails,” said lifelong area resident John May, chief of Wolfe County Search and Rescue, an avid hiker, and a member of the Wolfe County Tourism Board. “It’s when they do things like go to the ledge and try to hang on to a branch so they can see what the drop

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A climber pauses on the edge of Tower Rock as the setting sun shines through a passage in the formation.

Hopewell Arch soars in the ridgeline above Copperas Creek.

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looks like or to take a picture, that’s when they get into trouble.”

Tough there are safety considerations (see sidebar), the rewards of hiking in the RRG are many. Te sheer size of the arches and sandstone clifs is difcult to capture in photographs but awe inspiring in person. Looking up from the bottom of the gorge, one can’t help but be flled with wonder about the passage of time and our tiny dot on the continuum.

Te ridges, like the well-known Auxier Ridge, provide many scenic vistas — some almost 360 degrees — overlooking the surrounding valleys, foothills, rock formations, and arches. Tese vistas and arches can be located on topographical and other more detailed maps and are the perfect spots to observe the sun coming up or setting. If you are an early riser, you might catch the mystical sight of the morning fog shrouding the valleys below or have the good fortune of a breeze moving misty air across the ridge and right around you.

Tough shadier and cooler, the trails through the canyons are muddy as water runs down the terrain into the streams at the bottom. And if you love chasing waterfalls, there are a few, such as the of-visited Creation Falls, but don’t get your hopes up too high if there hasn’t been much rain recently.

Te busiest seasons traditionally have been spring and fall, with the latter being particularly popular for viewing the changing leaves. But in recent years the seasonal variations in visitor numbers aren’t as stark, particularly with the pandemic. Local hospitality- and adventure-oriented businesses that used to shutter in the winter are remaining open.

“It’s become more of a four-season area,” said May. “We are seeing more visitors in the winter. I think that’s a little bit because people have gotten tired of the crowds during other times of the year.”

With the infux, parking has also become an issue, he said, with people pulling over roadside or creating parking where there purposely is none. Consequently, providing more regular shuttle services into the trail areas is being considered. Currently, a couple of outftters ofer shuttle services, but they are by appointment only rather than at timed intervals.

Trees punctuate a foggy morning in the gorge shortly before sunrise.

Where to stay, eat

The Perseid meteor shower puts on a show, as seen from Tunnel Ridge Road.

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Te RRG ofers a wide range of accommodations, from well-appointed cabins to tiny efciencies and from glamping to primitive camping.

Tere are a couple of hotels in the immediate area, including the staterun lodge at Natural Bridge State Park. Accommodations are pretty basic and not comparable with a Hilton, so if you are looking for something nicer, it might be best to check out the private and growing number of cabins available in the area, most of which require a stay of two or more nights. Some are quite lovely with all the amenities.

Jef Sells bought 5-Star Cabin Rental in Slade last year. Opened 20 years ago, it was the frst cabin rental company in the RRG. Now there are several companies, along with hundreds more cabins. When COVID-19 hit, Sells worried about cancellations, but the pandemic turned out to be a catalyst, not a deterrent. Business, he said, has not only picked up but has doubled.

Dwarf crested irises push through “People want to get away the leaf debris of the forest floor. from the city and be safe,” he said. “It used to be they just wanted to get out into the woods, but now they also want their creature comforts like cable, Internet, a big TV, and for everything to be spotlessly clean.”

Before COVID the cabins were frequently reserved during the summers and on weekends in the spring and fall. Tese days they are being rented throughout the week and during the winter. He said with all the attention the RRG has drawn through social media as a great place to

From camping to well-appointed cabins, the gorge offers a variety of accommodations. What the Fudge Shoppe, a confectionary, opened recently in Campton.

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PREPARE FOR YOUR VISIT Where a lot of people get in trouble hiking in the Red River Gorge is lack of preparation, said lifelong area resident John May, chief of Wolfe County Search and Rescue, an avid hiker, and a member of the Wolfe County Tourism Board.

“It’s as simple as taking 30 minutes or an hour before you come here to do a little research about where you are going. Figure out which trail you’re going to be on, where it is, how diffcult and long it is, and whether you are physically ft enough to handle it,” he said.

Unlike many other national parks, there is no offcial entrance or gate into the area. Rather than driving around for hours, it’s much easier to have a specifc destination in mind that you are sure is accessible. Due to excessive rain, winter, or repairs, some roads are seasonally or intermittently closed.

The Internet offers a plethora of information about all of the trails, from directions on how to get there to their level of diffculty. Though there are a few smoother trails in the RRG, many are rocky with uneven footing, exposed roots, and frequent obstacles to navigate. With the RRG’s being a canyon system, the trails descend from ridges into valleys, up onto arches and below them as well. You won’t be the frst person searching for a specifc arch who later discovers you couldn’t fnd it because you were standing atop it.

To cut down on the likelihood of this happening, be sure and carry a map, preferably one that shows the topography, along with a compass. Phone apps can help you navigate and fnd coordinates, but cell service disappears in the low areas and batteries run down quickly, so be sure and download the map you are using and have a portable charger, said May. While the main trails are well marked and trodden, many are less discernable, particularly in late fall and winter when leaves cover the trails, in denser forest, and in rocky areas. It’s also easy to get distracted and take a wrong turn.

“I always tell people to have some kind of navigational tool and know how to use it,” he said, adding that visitors should be sure and carry a fashlight and even a blanket just in case they have to spend the night. “You never know if you’ll get lost or twist an ankle, and it’ll take you longer to get out.”

Wildlife and many types of wildfowers add to the gorge’s appeal.

Sky Bridge is a popular and aptly named point of interest.

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Backpackers cross the Red River on a swinging bridge that is part of the Sheltowee Trace Trail.

escape, he anticipates the trend will continue afer the pandemic abates, particularly if people continue working remotely.

“It’s going crazy, and I don’t see it stopping any time soon,” said Sells, who manages 50 cabins in the area, including four he owns. “I’d have more cabins because the demand and land are there, but the builders aren’t.”

Demand for more dining options is also exceeding supply. Selections are slim and basic but not without their charm. Miguel’s Pizza is a mainstay, operating since 1984, and has expanded to include expansive outdoor dining options and a large basement to accommodate overfow from its upstairs dining area. Once mostly a hangout for climbers, Miguel’s draws nonstop business these days from hikers looking to replace those carbs with a few piping hot slices of pizza.

Sky Bridge Station is more of a newcomer and is popular for its hefy hamburgers, hot dogs, and nachos. It’s also a great place to grab a beer or a root beer or an Ale-8 and enjoy the décor, which includes old musical instruments and a skeleton on a bicycle. But call ahead before you go because its hours can be somewhat unpredictable. Te same goes for the Red River Rockhouse, another popular staple in the area.

A Mexican restaurant and a barbecue joint, just down the road from Miguel’s, have also joined the lineup. And if you are looking for sweet memories of your trip to the RRG, a new fudge shop, What the Fudge Shoppe, opened this past winter in nearby downtown Campton.

And while more small businesses are popping up, a large resort might be in the RRG’s future. Property developer Ian Teal is working with the Chamber of Commerce and business leaders on plans for 1,000 pristine acres he owns of the Slade exit of the Mountain Parkway.

Tough nothing is defnitive yet, and things have been quiet during COVID, potential plans have included a high-end development that could generate 500 jobs and a payroll of $14 million in an economically depressed region that needs the jobs. Te project is not without its controversy. Many fans of the RRG fear the development is at odds with the environment and would lead to degradation of fragile ecosystems and the loss of the area’s distinct feel as a peaceful escape from the strains of everyday life.

More development is coming, said May. “Hopefully, there will be common sense and sustainability mixed in with it,” he said. KM

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Making a Difference RADIO EYE

Mike Barnard of Mt. Sterling has been a faithful Radio Eye listener for 30 years.

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BRINGING THE WRITTEN WORD ALIVE Radio Eye celebrates 30 years of providing audio services to the visually impaired and print disabled

By William Bowden | Photos by Mahan Multimedia

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Making a Difference RADIO EYE

ike Barnard is one of the reasons Radio Eye exists. Blind from birth, he can tune in every day to a broadcast designed with people like him in mind. Te latest news, an inviting book series, and American history vignettes are among the many customized programs from which he can choose.

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“I like hearing the news and sports being read from the Lexington Herald-Leader,” said Barnard, a Mt. Sterling, Kentucky, resident and a Radio Eye listener since 1991. “Gary and Alice Dehner do a bang-up job with that,” he added, referring to a popular husband-and-wife volunteer reader team. “Alice has a personality that won’t quit.”

Amanda Presley, who lives in Lexington, has partial visual impairment, and multiple sclerosis makes holding reading material difcult. She loves to hear books being read and also relies on Radio Eye to keep in touch with the news. “I like to be aware of things going on,” she said. “Radio Eye has a way of bringing the world into my living room.”

Tat kind of feedback from listeners lets Radio Eye know it’s on the right wavelength. Te comments underline the value of a personal connection with Radio Eye audiences throughout Kentucky.

“Many of our listeners are alone and, therefore, feel isolated,” said program director Lucy Stone. “Tey may not have anyone.

We have been told on more than one occasion that our readers are their friends.”

Executive director Amy Hatter put the nonproft organization’s mission in perspective: “We began in 1990 with the goal of ensuring that everyone has access to the same information regardless of a print disability. Starting with just a handful of listeners, we now reach more than 10,000 Kentuckians.”

Te staf and volunteers for the Lexington-based organization produce 3,000 hours of original readings every year. Tat translates into 10,500 hours of on-air programming through repeat broadcasts aired around the clock. Te content is tailored to help their listening audience lead more enriched, productive, independent, and enjoyable lives.

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Amy Hatter, the executive director, is proud that Radio Eye serves more than 10,000 Kentuckians.

Going on the air Radio Eye was founded by the late Al Crabb, a former University of Kentucky English professor and poet. He thought there was a need to serve a community of listeners the organization refers to as “print-disabled.” Teir disabilities may include visual problems such as blindness, glaucoma, and macular degeneration, or other barriers to accessing printed material such as dyslexia or illiteracy.

“Most of our listeners do have some level of visual impairment, but most are not completely blind,” Hatter said. “Te majority of Americans who lose their vision do so as part of the aging process. You may still have some vision for many years.”

Te service began by simply reading from the Herald-Leader every day. Now, the complexity and range of the daily program guide are truly impressive. Listeners determine that content through surveys that allow them to vote on their programming preferences.

On any given day listeners might hear readings from the Louisville Courier-Journal, Smithsonian magazine, Cook’s Corner, the New York Times, People magazine, America’s Past, a Harry Caudill short story, National Geographic, or a host of other sources and subjects.

Gary and Alice Dehner are a popular husband-and-wife reading duo.

They describe themselves as “The Bickersons” for their lighthearted banter.

Tere are four distinct broadcast streams — Lexington, Louisville, Morehead, and Eastern Kentucky. Much of the programming overlaps all streams while other segments are unique to that listening area. Listeners may also tune in to original and commercially prepared podcasts on demand.

Still, in a media-saturated culture it’s a fair question to ask why Radio Eye is even needed. Can’t listeners just use their radios, TVs, and the Internet to hear a cacophony of audio content on any imaginable topic? It’s a question the staf has heard before.

Te primary answer goes back to that core Radio Eye value — the personal nature of the service. It’s not just the news; it’s the news being read by someone a listener may have come to know and relate to in a unique way. Te same is true for other content areas.

A perfect example is the tag team of Gary and Alice Dehner, who laughingly think of themselves as “Te Bickersons.” Tey channel the couple (played by Don Ameche and Frances Langford) from that late-1940s radio comedy sketch show as they sprinkle in lighthearted bickering during their co-reading of the Herald-Leader

The couple read the Lexington Herald-Leader several times a week. Alice also serves as Radio Eye’s board secretary.

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David Hafley, Radio Eye’s board chair, gets as much satisfaction from reading to listeners as the recipients do from the service.

on Tursdays and Saturdays.

“Gary and I alternate stories and throw in some banter just for fun,” said Alice, who is Radio Eye’s board secretary. “Listeners have told me they would appreciate more humor in our programming. Tat suits my personality. I can’t just read everything in a cut-and-dried way.”

A recently added attraction is the Signal Teater Players, a radio acting company that Radio Eye board chair David Hafey helped create. “We perform short stories from the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s. We’ve done ‘Te Magic Christmas Tree’ and the classic comedy sketch ‘Who’s on First?’ It’s a hoot!”

As with types of content, the forms of technology used to access Radio Eye have also become more numerous. In the beginning, listeners only had to turn on a simple, purpose-built SCA (Subsidiary Communications Authorization) radio tuned to the organization’s channel. Tat over-the-air experience still exists, though Internet-delivered content now dominates.

Today, Amazon Echo is one of the most popular devices being used, along with smartphones and a toll-free telephone number. On-demand podcasts are available through iTunes and Spreaker. Tere are also computer-assist apps that read a computer screen and convert it to audio or magnify it to help with navigating the Radio Eye website.

Running on volunteer power Philip Rose, shown with an Amazon Echo, has listened to Radio Eye since the program’s first day in 1990. He also serves on the board.

This ComPol radio (inset) is one of Radio Eye’s older models.

Headphones and microphone, with control box, are used by readers in the studio (now temporarily closed).

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Radio Eye relies heavily on its volunteers to make the system work. Tis group of dedicated readers normally numbers more than 200, but the pandemic has cut that to about 60. Each volunteer is now responsible for reading three to four programs a week.

Te pandemic also forced Radio Eye in March 2020 to shutter its physical studio in the Northside Branch of the Lexington Public Library temporarily. Readers now work from home and upload their recordings to Dropbox for inclusion in the programming server, all of which is handled remotely. (See sidebar) Taking the switch to a virtual radio station in stride, volunteers continue to realize a high degree of satisfaction from their work. Tey cherish their direct connection with listeners and the value they add to those lives.

“We really make a diference in peoples’ lives by helping them stay connected to the world,” said Hafey, who

Making a Difference RADIO EYE

LOOKING TO LEXINGTON

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Hatter, the staff, and volunteers produce more than 3,000 hours of original readings a year.

reads Herald-Leader Letters to the Editor on Sundays. “I was looking for an organization I could put my heart and soul into, and I found it in Radio Eye. And we volunteers get as much out of it as our listeners do.”

Alice Dehner ofers a similar testimonial. “I love it when Mike Barnard will call and give Gary and me a review of our latest reading,” she said.

“When you give something to your community, it’s very fulflling.”

Antidote for isolation When listeners responded to a survey to gauge how benefcial Radio Eye is to them, 95% (of the 54% who said their disability made them feel isolated) said it made them feel more connected to the world at large. Next was improving their overall health and well-being (87%), making them feel happier (82%), and becoming more informed about political candidates (63%).

No one has benefted from Radio Eye for longer than Philip Rose, a Lexington resident who has partial sight in one eye. “I’ve had a receiver since November 12, 1990, the day they frst came on the air,” said Rose, a Radio Eye board member and an avid newspaper listener. “You can get the headlines on TV or regular radio news, but Radio Eye gives you the whole story, all of the details.”

Marilyn Niemczewski, blind since birth and a

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hen the pandemic forced the temporary closure of many reading service studios across the country, organizations in Texas, Georgia, Indiana, Illinois, and Ohio were among those who turned to Lexington Radio Eye program director Lucy Stone for tips on how to transition to remote Lucy Stone helped services in operations. other states go remote.

“All of the executive directors and program directors for these services are in a Facebook group,” Stone said. “They knew we had been using remote readers in Lexington in a limited way before the pandemic. When faced with this challenge, they said, ‘Wait a minute, Kentucky, what are you doing?’ ” Stone spent time on the phone with the services and provided them with written material on training remote readers and the technicalities of running a virtual studio.

“We had started a few years ago building up our remote program for the convenience of students, working professionals, and retired people who might fnd it hard to get to our studio,” Stone said. “So when the time came to transition totally, we had a running start. It was a little nerve-wracking the frst few weeks, but now it runs very smoothly.”

Thanks in no small part to Stone’s and Radio Eye’s foresight and willingness to share information, the same can be said for a number of sister organizations around the country.

Radio Eye has run smoothly during the pandemic.

John Hall Lexington Philanthropist and Former Director, Keeneland Association

Donna Hall Lexington Philanthropist

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Thanks to the generous endowment established by John and Donna Hall to inspire the next generation of philanthropists, and the pooled donations of BGCF365 members, BGCF365 has awarded grants totaling $100,000 to innovative Lexington nonprofits.

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Making a Difference RADIO EYE

audience’s needs. “We keep listeners in touch with their region by reading from local newspapers like the Hazard Herald or Te Mountain Eagle out of Whitesburg.”

Wait for me!

This MetroSonix radio is a recent model used by some listeners.

Springfeld resident, is a fan of Veterans Voice, which tells stories about the military and those who served. “One of my uncles took part in D-Day, and another was with Patton going across Europe,” she said, adding that her father is a veteran of three wars. Te sports news as read by Bill Sallee, Radio Eye’s ofce manager, is another of her favorites. “He makes it sound like you actually went to the game.”

Te sense of isolation many listeners feel can be particularly acute in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky, said Sharon Cornett, program manager for that region.

“Radio Eye provides a special kind of companionship,” she said.

“People like to be read to, especially by someone they may have come to know through our programs. Tey fnd it comforting as well as enlightening.”

Cornett lives in the Perry County community of Viper near Hazard. She makes sure Radio Eye’s programming meets her

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Radio Eye has much to celebrate as it looks back on 30 years of service to the print-disabled community. It has grown from serving a small audience with limited programming and a single way to connect, into having a statewide audience using sophisticated listening technology. It has added Spanish and children’s programming, and opened a Louisville studio in 2016.

Te staf has grown in number and professionalism. Its annual budget has climbed to approximately $300,000 as funding for the 501(c)(3) nonproft organization increased. It comes through contributions from individuals, corporations, businesses, foundations, revenue from events and reserve fund investments, in-kind donations, and an endowment from the Blue Grass Community Foundation.

“Technology has given us so many ways to broadcast and be heard today that our founder, Al Crabb, could never have imagined,” said Hatter. “We have continued to stay relevant in the face of all the changes over the past three decades.”

Trough it all, Radio Eye has remained true to its core value of engaging its audience in an informative and distinctly personal way to help them live better lives. When you talk with listeners, this always comes out.

Niemczewski revealed that unique connection in this anecdote of her “speaking” to that remote yet very real reader in her life. Her simple plea may be the best and most touching testament to the value of Radio Eye in people’s lives: “When the newspapers come on, my husband will say, ‘Marilyn, hurry, they’re going to read the Courier-Journal.’ And I say, ‘Wait a minute! Don’t start without me!’ ” KM

ON BEHALF OF KEENELAND, THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS For your ongoing support of Keeneland’s mission and the wonderful traditions of Thoroughbred racing.

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Keeneland Team Profle SPRING 2021

KEENELAND SPECIAL EVENTS Creatively Reimagines Experiences to Provide a Pandemic-Safe Environment

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Te new normal of COVID-19 protocols, however, has presented a challenge to the Keeneland Special Events Team and event planners everywhere who prioritize creating a fun but safe event environment for their guests.

With the help of technology, special events for the foreseeable future have been reimagined to ofer virtual and hybrid formats, the latter with both in-person and virtual components. While there are a certain ease and convenience to attending an event online, “Zoom fatigue” and the ability to involve guests and keep their attention are real problems facing every planner.

Te Keeneland Special Events Team strives to navigate these issues by providing clients with a sense of shared experience — creatively incorporating an activity or element that infuses fun for all attendees whether they are participating virtually or in person as part of a COVID-19-safe environment.

Shared experiences can range from playing the Bet to Win racing game, to conducting a virtual class on mixing mocktails, to using race-day expression props to liven up a party, to even walking guests through baking sweet treats from home.

In an efort to showcase these oferings in a Guests participating real-life setting, the Special Events Team recentin the Keeneland Event Experience ly hosted Te Keeneland Event Experience for moved from venue planners in the Bluegrass region. Held in a proto venue via a gressive style, guests moved from venue to venue socially distanced throughout the Keeneland grounds. Each stop rehayride provided by the Keeneland Mainvealed another distinctive activity for attendees. tenance Team.

Among the highlights: a cooking demonstration by acclaimed Keeneland Hospitality Executive Chef and Managing Director Marc Terrien; a class in mixing a blackberry citrus

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PHOTOS BY THE MALICOTES

eeneland is renowned for ofering unique venues for a variety of special events — weddings, business meetings, cocktail parties, and more — that promise unparalleled hospitality and worldclass culinary experiences that surpass expectations.

Top, Keeneland Hospitality Executive Chef Marc Therrien discusses high-end culinary options available to clients.

At the Keeneland Event Experience, participants learned how to mix blackberry citrus Old-Fashioned cocktails.

Old-Fashioned cocktail; a hot cocoa bar; a tour of the Keeneland Print Shop to learn about customization capabilities; and elevated samples of safely packaged snacks. Guests traveled via a cozy but socially distanced hayride.

“Shared experiences are truly what help bring us together as a community,” Keeneland Business Development Manager Morgan Whitney said. “We look forward to collaborating with our clients to create the most engaging and unique events possible.”

Keeneland, which is currently accepting event bookings through 2022, has 14 diferent venues to help meet any need. KM