Month: April 2020

Last week’s Guess Who was a doozy, but luckily Brian Zipse of Horse Racing Nation is a fountain of knowledge about our sport and got the right answer: Nijinsky II, the last English Triple Crown winner. Thank you, Brian!

This week’s is also a challenge: This Maryland bred was a contemporary of a classic winner, a historic name that is only one of three to accomplish this. This horse’s sire was also distinctive in a very unique way himself. This horse also has ties to Belair Stud, but the connection may not immediately obvious. Who is this horse, name this horse’s sire, and then name the connection to Belair.

Wow! I thought last week’s was tough, but Mirkwood guessed it within a day: the horse in question was Celt! He was Marguerite’s sire and a stablemate of the great Colin. Celt also had a far more prolific stud career than his fabled cohort. Great job, Mirkwood!

This week, I am going to try to make this one tough. This horse was bred and raced outside of the United States. His sire also was bred and raced outside of the United States and both sire and son are classic winners in multiple countries. However, this horse has a thoroughly American pedigree with connections to at least THREE American Triple Crown winners in his pedigree. Who is he and what is his connection to Belair Stud?

On April 13, 1915, William Saunders was born in Bozeman, Montana. When Willie was eight, his family moved to Calgary, Alberta. There, young Willie got his first taste of the racetrack, working as a hot walker and then an exercise rider until he was sent back to Montana to finish high school. But the lure of the track made finishing school seem mundane: Willie registered his first victory as a jockey on April 14, 1932, the day after his 17th birthday. By 1935, Saunders’ hard work and potential had captured the attention of legendary trainer “Sunny Jim” Fitzsimmons, who put the young man under contract and then tapped him to ride Omaha.

Omaha’s tendency to lash out when in company meant that he needed to run outside of horses; as the big colt’s regular exercise rider, Saunders understood what the son of Gallant Fox needed, learning how to avoid those situations. It was the young man’s fondness for and understanding of Omaha that earned him the ride on the Belair star for the 1935 Triple Crown races. At the tender age of 20, Saunders would guide Omaha through the three classic races, dazzling performances that made the son of Gallant Fox the third horse to win the three. He would remain the youngest jockey to win the Triple Crown until 1978, when an 18-year-old Steve Cauthen would ride Affirmed to his Triple Crown.

Later that same year, Saunders would be involved in the alleged murder of a woman that he and exercise rider Walter Schaeffer met at a Louisville night club, Howard’s. The club required that men have companions while they were in the club so the bouncer asked one of the club’s regulars to accompany the men. That woman, Agnes Mackinson, asked another woman, Evelyn Sliwinski, to join them. The four allegedly partied well into the night at more than one club and then climbed into Saunders’ car very drunk and took off. The story of what happened that evening has two versions, Saunders’ and Schaeffer’s vs. Mackinson’s. At some point, they stopped on the side of the road, let Sliwinski out, and then took off without her. The next morning, the young woman was found dead on the side of the road. How she died became the focus of a trial that put Saunders on the front page of newspapers. The defense pinned the blame for Sliwinski’s death on the person who found her body; without more evidence, prosecuters were unable to win convictions for either Schaeffer or Saunders. With the charges dropped, the jockey went back to his life, marrying in 1936 and continuing to ride stakes winners.

Battles with his weight and then World War II interrupted Saunders’ riding career. By the time he came back from his service in the South Pacific, Saunders was back to his racing weight and picked up where he left off. He found his pre-war success difficult to duplicate and retired from riding in 1950. He became a trainer and then worked as a racing official at a variety of racetracks in Florida, Illinois, and New Jersey. Willie Saunders died a few weeks after being diagnosed with brain and lung cancer in 1986. He was 71.

Learn more about Willie Saunders and his time with Omaha in Foxes of Belair. I can’t wait to share more about the story of this Hall of Fame jockey and his immortal mount!

This week, the subject of Guess Who? is another horse that you may not have heard of, but has a connection to the history of Belair Stud. Your job is to comment with the name of the horse and the connection to Belair.

This horse shared a sire with his dynamic stablemate and raced in his shadow throughout his career. Both were bred and owned by the same man, but this horse found a new home late in his stud career. Both inherited a tendency toward infirmity from their sire, this tendency affecting our horse in question more than his dynamic stablemate during their racing careers. At stud, though, our Guess Who? far outpaced his stablemate, even leading the sire list. He was so highly sought after that his sale made headlines.

Though our Guess Who? never wore the red polka dots, but his name is part of the history of Belair. Can you guess who this horse is?

On this day in April 1876, William Woodward (WW) was born to William Woodward and the former Sarah Rodman in New York City. His grandfather was a partner in a successful cotton house and, eventually, WW’s father would head up that house while WW’s uncle James became president of Hanover Bank. His family’s success allowed WW to grow up going to the races at Jerome Park and riding in his father’s fine carriages. From an early age, WW was surrounded by and enamored of horses.

After his father’s death in 1889, WW attended the Groton School and then went on to Harvard, graduating in 1898 and then completing a law degree in 1901. He spent two years in England as the secretary to the American ambassador to Britain, Joseph Chaote. His time there stoked his love for horses even more; WW had had his heart set on winning the Epsom Derby since his childhood and his two years in England only strengthened his resolve. He would breed and own thoroughbreds to run those classic distances. In time, WW would have stables in both the United States and England.

After returning to the United States, WW became vice president of Hanover National Bank, working with his uncle James. That same year, WW met socialite Elsie Ogden Cryder, one of a famous set of triplets, at Saratoga. They married in 1904. In 1910, James Woodward died, leaving WW his Maryland estate, Belair. WW would also become Hanover’s president and set about building Belair into a dominant thoroughbred breeding and racing operation. In 1923, WW asked “Sunny Jim” Fitzsimmons to become Belair’s trainer. Theirs would be a partnership that would change horse racing.

In addition to his work with Hanover National Bank, WW became a member of the Jockey Club in 1917 and then would be elected its chairman in 1930. That same year, Gallant Fox became the second Triple Crown winner, capitalizing on the interest that Sir Barton’s 1919 trip around the classics had created in winning the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness Stakes, and the Belmont Stakes. WW would win the Triple Crown a second time in 1935 with Omaha, from Gallant Fox’s first crop of foals. WW and Belair would dominate the 1930s, winning three Kentucky Derbies, two Preakness Stakes, and five Belmont Stakes in that decade. And that is a very short list of Belair’s accomplishments.

WW and Elsie would have four daughters before son Billy came along in 1920. When WW died in 1953, Billy inherited Belair Stud, including a colt named Nashua, the last champion that WW bred. Upon Billy’s death only two years later, Nashua would be sold for a then-record $1,251,200. Elise and daughter Edith would go on to race a few horses of their own in the Belair silks.

WW’s death in 1953 ended a life that had been almost entirely devoted to the Thoroughbred. As a breeder, he had overseen the creation of Belair Stud as one of the country’s premiere breeders while also building a championship stable. As chairman of the Jockey Club, he had overseen the expansion of and technological revolution within the sport of kings. During his tenure, starting gates, radio broadcasts, and more became fixtures of American horse racing. One of his final accomplishments as chairman was the repeal of the Jersey Act, which prevented most American-bred Thoroughbreds from being registered as pure-bred in the UK.

In 2016, over 50 years after his death, WW was elected to the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame as a Pillar of the Turf. Indeed his many contributions to the sport merit his status as a Pillar, his tireless work on behalf of horse racing contributing to its expansion in the 1930s and 1940s. Additionally, Saratoga holds the Woodward Stakes for three-year-olds and up each August, a 1 1/8-mile race named for WW. The Woodward counts champions like Kelso, Cigar, Easy Goer, and more as winners, a fitting tribute to the man who championed horse racing in so many ways.

Happy Birthday to you, William Woodward, and thank you for all that you gave to our sport in your lifetime!