Horse Racing

Keith Desormeaux has another cheap basement star


If he does this once, maybe twice, then the easy conclusion is that coach Keith Desormeaux is just lucky. Anyone can stumble across a good horse slipping through a crack at a sale and being bought for a track. But with Desormeaux there is clearly more to it than that. He continues to find good horses that most others overlook, the latest example being confidence game (candy ride {Arg}), a $25,000 purchase at Keeneland in September, who won a $1 million GII Rebel S. Saturday in Oaklawn, securing a spot in the starting gate for the GI Kentucky Derby .

You can add him to the Exaggerator include list (make for curly), a $110,000 purchase won by GI Preakness S. in 2016, and Texas Red (Afleet Alex), a $17,000 purchase as an aspirant at Keeneland in September, who won GI Breeders’ Cup for minors 2014. Then came My Boy Jack (creative cause), a $20,000 purchase won the GIII Southwest S. and earned $776,887, and the Class III winner Dalmore (Colonel John), who cost $47,000. Desormeaux bought Swipe (Birdstone) for $5,000. He earned $622,630.

How does he do that?

“The easiest way to explain it is that these horses have shape defects or maybe some problem on the X-rays that I can live with as a rider but the salesmen,” says Desormeaux. Commercial is not possible. “All I know is I’m buying athletes. Genealogy comes second to me. Shape issues are secondary to me. I am buying well-proportioned, muscular, well-formed horses to my standards. I look for things that innately make me think of a horse as an athlete, things that I associate with class. Those are hard to explain. I know that sounds more complicated than it needs to be, but go for it.”

The first thing Desormeaux noticed about the Confidence Game was the longing animal sold later in the sale, listed as number 1462, despite having a strong lineage. He’s not just around candy ride, but the dam is Eblouissante (Bernadini), half-sister of Zenyatta (Street Cry {Ire}). Desormeaux assumed there must be something wrong somewhere, but he didn’t want to know what it was because he didn’t want anything to get in the way of his instincts telling him this was a good buy.

“I don’t know what the problem is,” he said. “The horse was sold late. I know that, given his lineage, he doesn’t belong in the sale so late. I assume there’s something on the X-ray. I judge him for his sport. It doesn’t matter to me what the x-ray says. I know I have a beautiful horse. I didn’t even look at his X-rays. I didn’t call the vet. I didn’t call anyone. I bought him because I knew I was buying an athlete.”

It’s a different approach, but it’s working and Desormeaux admits he takes great satisfaction in winning horses that rich owners and their trainers don’t want.

“I am basically doing this with horses that others believe are not in their first chain,” he said. “I know it’s a strong word, but they’re throwaways. I take great pride in using the art of equestrianism and developing the horses. That’s not all me. We send them to April Mayberry in Florida and I have a terrible team at the track doing the grunt work. All come together to achieve this goal. I am very proud of that and that is mainly because we are buying horses out of control.”

Having had so much success in buying bargain horses, what could Desormeaux do if an owner sent him to the shop and let him buy expensive horses? After so many years no one gave him that chance, Desormeaux found an owner in Ben Gase who was willing to pay well. During the OBS spring sale last year, Gase and Desormeaux bought a Prince Cairo ponies for $90,000, one spinning candy dirty for $400,000 and a dirty Bolt d’Oro for $650,000. They’re back with it at the OBS June sale, buy one Munnings ponies for $300,000. Gase is the founder and CEO of shipping technology company R2 Logisticis.

“Are you upset? Are not. But maybe if I marketed myself a little better or be a more human being, I would have owners like that,” says Desormeaux. “But I have a new guy, Ben Gase. He is letting me spend in that higher realm. I respect him for giving me a chance. I think we’ll soon see big things happen with this guy. I had to change my mind, I wouldn’t pay that amount for a horse without seeing the X-ray. I have too much meaning for that.

As for the Confidence Game, he spent some time rewarding Desormeaux. He broke his maidenhood in his second career start, but was followed by a fifth-place finish in the GIII Iroquois S. tournament where he was never threatened. He turned a corner two starts later on winning the Churchill grant and then finished third in GIII Lecomte S. In Rebel he combined it all to win an 18- first.

The GI Arkansas Derby could be the next one for him, but Desormeaux said he’ll also be looking at the GI Toyota Blue Grass S. and the GII Louisiana Derby. If he attends the Derby, he will be Desormeaux’s fourth starter in the race. If he’s there, he’ll meet horses from the biggest stables in the sport, horses that cost as much as six figures or, in the case of possibly Derby’s favorite Arabian Knight (Uncle Mo), 2.3 million USD. But you can trust that Confidence Game will get the job done. Desormeaux’s horses, no matter how much they cost, usually are.

Will Asmussen’s record be broken?

Steve Asmussen entered Sunday’s races with 10,006 career winners, a remarkable number that will only grow for some time to come. At 57, Asmussen is far from the end of his career and could eventually win 15,000. That will keep him active as a coach until he turns 72 while averaging 333 wins per year. Considering that he has averaged 419 wins per year since 2020, he might even surpass the 15,000 figure.

Jerry Hollendorfer, who had just 47 wins last year, has the second most wins of any active workout with 7,759. He won’t catch him and there won’t be anyone else training today. Even in the age of super coaches, no one operates the way Asmussen does. He’s won at the highest levels of the sport but has kept his form at races like Sam Houston and Remington Park. 85 of Asmussen’s 382 wins last year came from claim races.

In 2022, Asmussen made 2,155 starts, 358 more than Karl Broberg, who is second in the category. By comparison, Asmussen has sent more than twice as many starts in 2022 than Todd Pletcher, who has just 10 wins for the year in claim races.

There is no one else like Asmussen and it may always be. It’s hard to imagine anyone new coming around hungry for victory and going to be active at five or six tracks at a time, with stake horses and with claimants.

But that’s not what makes Asmussen virtually insurmountable when it comes to, not just with most career wins, but year-over-year wins as well. With 650 wins in 2009, he also holds that record. For a large part of his career, Asmussen was active before herds of ponies plummeted and so many races were forced to last three and four days a week. In 2000, the first year Asmussen crossed the 200-win mark of the year, there were 55,846 races held in the US. In 2009, his record year, there were 49,368 races. In 2021, the most recent years for which counts, there were 33,567 races, a drop of nearly 40% since 2000.

Even Asmussen couldn’t keep up with his numbers since the early 2000s. In a record year of 2009, he made 2,944 starts. With 2,155 in 2022, that’s a drop of 26.8%.

They say records are meant to be broken, a lesson reinforced recently in the NBA when Lebron James overcame Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to become the top scorer in league history. But in the race there was no Lebron chasing Asmussen. When it comes to winning races, it’s only Asmussen and no one else. His place in racing history seems secure.

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