“We won the Derby,” Holden insisted.
“That’s nice, little man, now get ready for nap time.”
In the end, though, the preschooler had proof.
Check out the photos from the crowded Winner’s Circle at Churchill Downs and there — just to the right of the gleaming chestnut colt draped in roses — is young Holden in a straw fedora and a seersucker suit. He’s in the arms of his dad, Lee Midkiff. His 9-year-old sister Chloe, in her fancy print dress and big floppy hat, is in front of him.
Today the family is in Baltimore for the Preakness. And should Animal Kingdom — two weeks ago an unheralded Derby long shot, now the 2-1 prerace favorite — make it to the Winner’s Circle again, you’ll notice that all of them will be in the same outfits.
It’s not that the Springboro family is short on wardrobe. They’re just long on superstition.
“Dad says we have to wear the same thing as long as we’re winning,” Chloe shrugged.
The 36-year-old CEO of CIN Legal Data Services in Dayton, Lee Midkiff has been doing that a lot lately. And that makes for one of the most unlikely horse racing stories ever to come out of the Miami Valley.
He got into the thoroughbred business just 19 months ago through Team Valor International, the successful horse syndication company headed by Barry Irwin, the former turf writer who has become one of the game’s most outspoken and convention-challenging mavericks.
Since joining Team Valor, Midkiff has had part ownership in Pluck, who won the $1 million Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Turf race last November at Churchill Downs. He was in the Winner’s Circle when Animal Kingdom took the Spiral Stakes at Turfway Park in late March and then again when the colt outran the naysayers to, as Midkiff put it, “etch his name in the annals of the Kentucky Derby forever.”
Quietly reflecting on the moment as he sat in his home the other day, Midkiff just smiled:
“Who would ever expect a guy from here in Springboro to be standing in the Winner’s Circle of the Kentucky Derby?”
Spectator to owner
After graduating from high school in Iowa, Midkiff went to Indiana University. It was there that be first got acquainted with the Derby.
“After finals, we’d go there on race day and have a good time in the infield,” he said. “Then in the years after that when I went to races I began to wonder what it would be like to be on the other side of the game.”
After establishing his company — which provides data information for law firms — he met Aron Wellman, the California-based attorney who is Team Valor’s VP of Operations.
“Valor provides the opportunity to be involved in some level of sports ownership that you couldn’t do in any other circumstance — at least not in my position,” Midkiff said. “Valor’s approach is that you don’t have to know all the intricacies of the business, but you can still be involved in the upper echelon of the game.”
While he is one of 20 owners in the Animal Kingdom syndication, Midkiff also has a piece of more than 20 other Team Valor horses, including Pluck, one-time Derby hopeful Crimson China and Daveron, a 6-year-old mare of considerable note.
He and a few other partners have financed part of Team Valor’s innovative new stables at the Fair Hills Training Center, 40 miles north of Baltimore, and he’s now attending races everywhere from Gulfstream Park outside Miami to Saratoga, N.Y.
“When we won with Pluck last fall I thought it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” Midkiff said. “Little did I know ...”
‘Goose bumps’
This year at the Derby, he and Chloe accompanied Animal Kingdom on the glorious prerace walk from the Churchill Downs barn, onto the track and all the way to the paddock as a record crowd of 164,858 cheered.
“It was phenomenal,” Midkiff said. “You go from the quiet in the barn area into all that noise and it just hits you. When they saddle up in the paddock and come back onto the track and everyone sings ‘My Old Kentucky Home’ you have goose bumps.”
Most folks thought that’s all that Animal Kingdom’s connections would get from the race. Although trained by the respected Englishman Graham Motion, the lightly raced colt had just four starts, fewest by a Derby winner in 93 years. It had never raced on dirt and hadn’t run in six weeks. Needles (1956) was the last Derby winner with that long of a layoff.
And there was a new jockey. John Velazquez replaced Robby Albarado, who had broken his nose when he was dumped from a horse and kicked three days earlier.
“No one really expected we were going to win,” said Chloe. “That’s why it was so exciting.”
As Animal Kingdom started to break from the trailing pack and take on the leaders coming down the stretch, Midkiff said “everything from that point on was pretty much a blur. It’s one of those moments you wish you could slow down.”
When the colt crossed the finish line 2 ¾ lengths ahead of Nehro, Chloe went from cheers to tears. In the Winner’s Circle she and her little brother both got roses from Animal Kingdom’s blanket of blooms.
“I’m still trying to wrap my arms around everything that’s happened,” Midkiff admitted. “Of all the things in my life, this has to be at the top. Obviously the births of my kids have to be pretty far up there — one and two — but outside the family, this is the best.
“I went into racing for the experiences, but I’ve got to be truthful: This was not the experience I was expecting. This is surreal. It’s so much more than I imagined.”
That’s kind of what the teachers at Goddard finally realized the other day, too.
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