With an unheralded 77-year-old trainer, two neophyte owners who took the snickering derision of others and turned it into their stable name, Dumb-Ass Partners, and the most improbable low-dollar bloodlines of a top horse, California Chrome has won the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness and now stands 1 1/2 miles of sandy track from immortality.
Yet, a race horse story just as unlikely and maybe more heartwarming — albeit with far less fanfare — is taking place on a 40-acre farm along Dayton Germantown Pike that is mostly hidden from the road.
Called Greenstone Stables, it’s the home of the Friends of Ferdinand Inc., a thoroughbred rescue, retraining and adoption program. And the other afternoon you got a glimpse of that wonderful tale playing out there when Elle Welch, a Wright State sophomore with her long dark hair tucked up into a riding helmet, brought Market Genius down from the barn, through the trees to the outdoor riding arena.
“Take her through some jumps,” Lori Miller, the FFI trainer said as she stood along the fence, with Otto and Zippy, the farm’s two rescue dogs, lounging in the dirt near her feet.
After Market Genius — the 7-year-old bay mare everyone here calls Ginny — loosened up, she was guided by Welch to one end of the arena.
After a shake of the head and a couple of snorts — almost the way an in-the-zone long jumper pumps up at a track meet — Ginny came barreling in on the first wooden obstacle, cleared it with an easy jump, then circled back and launched smoothly over the next fence-like barrier.
Right then you understood why Chelsey Burris, another FFI volunteer, gushed so about Ginny the other evening:
“She’s funny and sweet, but she’s also really talented and she KNOWS she’s talented. She gets out there and sees her job and can’t wait to do it. She’s like, ‘I’m ready to go. I’m ready to rock this thing.’ She cracks me up.
“She’s a rock star. A real rock star. What a great horse!”
Before she started as a jumper, Ginny was a race horse whose career prize money never quite matched her pedigree as the granddaughter of Holy Bull, the 1994 U.S. Horse of the Year who won several stakes races, went off as the post-time favorite in the Kentucky Derby that year and ended up a Hall of Famer who won nearly $2.5 million.
Ginny — as Market Genius — raced 42 times, mostly at River Downs, Beulah Park and Thistledown, won three times, finished in the money in 15 races and won a little over $28,000. When she was retired two years ago, she was at a cross roads.
Though her racing career was over, she had a couple of decades of life remaining and that left her owner with some tough decisions. When a horse rarely makes the winner’s circle — and never the record books — it is not assured the lush pastures of retirement.
The costs of feed and hay, vet bills, amassed time and care all come into play and too often horses end up with kill buyers who may offer owners $500 or so and then take the animals straight off the track to a slaughterhouse in Canada or Mexico.
According to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), that was the fate of 150,000 American horses — some 10,000 of them thoroughbreds — last year. Some became pet food and others ended up on the dinner plates of people in places like Belgium, France and Japan.
Market Genius got lucky.
Her caring owner donated her to Friends of Ferdinand, the Indiana-based horse rescue operation whose retraining facility, Greenstone Stables, is just west of Dayton.
The organization’s motto is: “Retired from racing, not from life.”
The place, run by volunteers and funded, in part, by grants and donations from the NASCAR star Tony Stewart, retrains race horses for dressage ,hunting, jumping, performing in the show ring and, at times, just to become trail horses.
“This is something any horse person can relate to and I think you have to, especially for horses in such need,” Sarah Thelen, the FFI adoption coordinator who lives in the Oregon District and works as a consultant for Cincinnati-based B Corp, said quietly, her voice beginning to waver, her eyes suddenly tearing up. “To be able to give back this way fills up my soul. It really does.
“A race track is what a race track is, but there’s a life outside the track for these horses. That’s what’s so cool about them. They can do other things very, very well and it’s up to us to help bring that out of them. They don’t deserve less.”
Sport has problems
Ferdinand was a glorious race horse.
He won the Kentucky Derby in 1986 and was second in the Preakness. A year later he won Breeders’ Cup Classic and the Eclipse Award as the Horse of the Year. By the time he retired in 1989 and went into stud at Claiborne Farm near Paris, Ky., he had won nearly $3.4 million and was the fifth-leading money winner of all-time.
But his foals never performed on the track and he finally was sold to a breeding firm in Japan in 1994. The same thing happened there and in 2002 he was sent to a slaughterhouse.
That shocking ending, eventually uncovered by The Blood-Horse, shed a bright light on the dark plight of tens of thousands of thoroughbreds worldwide each year.
And Ferdinand certainly wasn’t the first top horse to be so brutally dispatched.
Exceller, a Kentucky-bred Hall of Fame horse who won several Grade 1 stakes races in North America and Europe, became the only horse to defeat a pair of Triple Crown winners (Affirmed and Seattle Slew) in a race when he won the 1978 Jockey Club Gold Cup and earned nearly $1.7 million in 33 career starts. He was retired in 1979 and went into stud at Gainesway Farm in Lexington.
He was sold to a Swedish firm in 1997 and after an infection supposedly hindered his breeding capabilities, he was slaughtered and sold for meat.
As beautiful as horse racing is, it is plagued by problems — drugs, over-taxed young horses and especially what happens to thoroughbreds once their racing has ended and their breeding career is no longer profitable or, in the case of geldings, impossible from the start.
“I think most fans just think, ‘Oh, when the horses retire, they go to a farm somewhere,’ ” said Burris. “A lot of people don’t realize the problems they can face.”
And this isn’t just the plight of thoroughbreds, but everything from carriage horses like those you see at Central Park to work horses. It’s been documented that the Amish, including the enclaves in northeast Ohio and just across the state line in Indiana, are especially prone to sell their horses to kill buyers.
The last U.S. slaughterhouses were closed in 2007, but that hasn’t stopped the practice, Horses are shipped to Mexico and especially Canada, which rivals only China in the amount of equine meat it produces and then sends to Europe and Japan.
As the Humane Society has reported, the trips to these slaughterhouses often are brutal for the animals, who may well go 24 hours or more in hot, crowded transports with no food, water or rest. Horses are then killed by bolt-firing stun guns or are stabbed in the neck — often repeatedly — with puntilla knives to sever the spinal cord and hinder breathing. The horses, often still conscious, are then hung up by a leg and butchered.
The people at Friends of Ferdinand don’t want to publicly focus on that heart-wrenching situation. They don’t want the emotional politics of the issue to overshadow and hinder the good deeds they are doing.
But, regardless, I think you need to know that flip side to fully understand just what guardian angels they are and how important their work is.
“We’re supposed to be a stopgap to prevent that from happening to some horses,” said Miller. “But the vast majority of trainers out there are reputable and really care about their animals. That’s why they contact us.”
Friends of Ferdinand offers a two-tier program. Because it has a popular Facebook page (
) and website (www.friendsofferdinand.com), it’s able to offer a free equine sales listing service for owners that reaches lots of followers.
FFI also accepts donated horses, gets them the necessary veterinary care, retrains them for life after the track and then helps find suitable adoptive homes.
“I’m a racing fan and a horse lover,” said Burris. “I figure if I stood at the rail of the race track and cheered these horses when they were racing, then I should still be there cheering them on beyond the track.”
True love of horses
Miller, the FFI trainer, also runs Greenstone Stables, an area boarding and training facility. Interestingly, after going through the equine business management program at Findlay University, she graduated University of Dayton law school and passed the Ohio State Bar Exam in 2005, although she has never worked as a lawyer.,
Amanda Sharritt, the executive director of FFI, is a Fairmont High School graduate and the mother of three young children. Her husband, Jay, is in the U.S. Army and they have lived all across the U.S, and in Japan. He was deployed to Iraq, is now getting his master’s degree here and then they will move to West Point where he will teach.
Welch, the 19-year-old WSU student, is serving an internship, thanks to financial support from Tony Stewart. And Burris, the FFI marketing director, lives in Odon, Ind., and works as a program analyst on the U.S. Navy base in Crane, Ind.
All of them have one thing in common: a true love of horses.
That love, said Miller, “got me into race horses” and now she has “the opportunity to help them end up in a good place.” She adopted a race horse of her own — Too Many Whyz — and she especially was taken by a FFI alum, Sir Edward, that she helped retrain, saw adopted by a friend and has accompanied this weekend to a horse show in Kentucky.
“To be a part of all this, it’s kind of an addictive feeling,” she said.
Friends of Ferdinand has several volunteers who live in Indiana and visit tracks to spread the word to trainers and owners. Most of the horses that fit the program are brought to Greenstone, where they are examined by vets, evaluated by Miller and eventually retrained in a discipline that best suits them.
FFI currently has seven horses ready for adoption. One new horse in the program, Miller said, won over $100,000 on the race track.
Then there’s FFI veteran Logan Township, a 12-year-old bay with a white star that looks like a heart on his forehead. He raced 78 times during a seven-year career, placed in the money 23 times and won just over $87,000, before being retired injury-free in 2011.
“He kind of reminds me of the stereotypical dumb jock,” Burris said with a laugh. “He’s really handsome and athletic. It just seems to take him a little longer maybe to figure things out. But when he does, he does it perfectly.’”
Sarah Thelen helps match the horses with prospective adopters who pay a reduced adoptive fee ($1,000 for Logan Township, $2,000 for Market Genius) for the retrained horses.
Miller estimated some 20 of their horses have been adopted so far. To help raise funds for feed and care, FFI sells t-shirts off its website that sums up its work.
The back of each shirt, referring to off-track thoroughbreds, reads: “OTTB – Engineered for an Encore, a second career is in the genes.”
“To see these horses get second careers is probably the greatest reward ever,” Welch said. “Seeing these horses you’ve gotten to know go on to do good things — great things — and have fun doing it, that’s the best thing ever. That is a great transformation.”
And that’s just as good as anything that will happen at Belmont Park in the next 13 days.
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