Horse Racing Trainers
Bob Baffert
Bob Baffert was born in Nogales, Arizona, on 13 January 1953. He was a professional jockey before turning to training quarter horses. He trained Gold Coast Express, the champion quarter horse of 1986, before turning his attention to thoroughbreds. Within his first decade as a thoroughbred trainer he guided the victories of five national champions. He won the Eclipse Award as the leading trainer in 1997. In both 1997 and 1998, he won the first two legs of the Triple Crown with Kentucky Derby and Preakness victories with Silver Charm and Real Quiet. He has also won two Breeder’s Cup races. His earnings have already surpassed $25 million.
Jim Fitzsimmons
James E. “Sunny Jim” Fitzsimmons was born in 1874. He began exercising horses when he was ten, and he paid his dues by cleaning stables, grooming horses, and then becoming a jockey. He went on to become one of the most famous trainers of all time, not retiring until he was eighty-nine years old in 1963. In a training career spanning three-quarters of a century, his horses won 2,275 races and purses exceeding $13 million. His most notable claims to fame were his two Triple Crown winners, Gallant Fox in 1930 and Omaha in 1935. He also won the Kentucky Derby with Johnstown in 1939, and trained Eclipse Award winners Bold Ruler, Granville, High Voltage, Misty Morn, Vagrancy, and Nashua. Fitzsimmons was inducted into the Thoroughbred Racing Hall of Fame in 1958. He died at the age of ninety-two in 1966.
Ben Jones
Ben Jones was born in 1882. He spent forty-seven years as a trainer. He was the key figure in building Calumet Farms into the leading owner of winning horses eleven times in the 1940s and 1950s. He trained Triple Crown winner Whirlaway for Calumet, and he took over the general managership of the farm in 1947, just as Citation’s racing career began. He gave the reins of Citation to his son Jim, to train for his successful run at the Triple Crown in 1948. Ben Jones produced 1,519 winners as a trainer, earning purses of nearly $5 million. Counting Citation, his six wins at the Kentucky Derby are the most ever for a trainer.
Lucien Laurin
Lucien Laurin trained 1973 Triple Crown winner Secretariat and also 1972 Kentucky Derby and Belmont winner Riva Ridge for the Meadows Stable. His four consecutive victories in Triple Crown races stood as a trainer’s record until D. Wayne Lucas won five in a row. Laurin also trained horses that won thirty-two other stakes races. Laurin was born in 1912. He began his career with horses as a jockey, riding 161 winners before he turned to training in 1942. He was an active trainer for forty-five years. Lucien Laurin died in May 2000 at the age of eighty-eight.
D. Wayne Lucas
D. Wayne Lucas was born in Antiga, Wisconsin, in 1935. By the mid-1980s he emerged as the leading contemporary trainer. He has also been important as the purchasing agent selecting several champion horses. Lucas graduated from the University of Wisconsin, where he was also an assistant basketball coach. He began training horses in the late 1960s. Lucas was inducted into the racing Hall of Fame after having been the top money-earning thoroughbred trainer in fourteen different years. His wins have included the Kentucky Derby on four occasions, the Preakness five times, the Belmont, and fifteen Breeder’s Cup races. He won the Eclipse Award as the leading trainer in 1985, 1986, 1987, and 1994. In 1994, 1995, and 1996 he set a trainer’s record when he won five Triple Crown races.
William I. Mott
William I. Mott was born in Mobridge, South Dakota, in 1953. He started training horses while he was still in high school, winning many races in the unrecognized meets of South Dakota. In 1978 he joined the stable of trainer Jack Van Berg, where he worked until 1986. Then he became the trainer for owners Bert and Diana Firestone before becoming independent. At age forty-five, Mott was the youngest trainer ever to be inducted into the racing hall of fame. His major claim to fame was supported by the record of Cigar – two times the horse of the year. During the 1990s, Mott was the second leading money winner among trainers.
Woody Stevens
Woodford Cefis “Woody” Stephens was born a sharecropper’s son on 1 September 1913 in Midway, Florida. He died in 1998 just before his eighty-fifth birthday. Woody Stephens started his career with horses as a jockey in 1930. Ten years later he became a trainer, a trade he continued for fifty-seven years. Stephens’s most notable achievement was his five consecutive wins at the Belmont in the 1980s. He also had two Kentucky Derby winners and one Preakness win. He trained eleven national champions – only D. Wayne Lucas trained more. Before Stevens retired in 1997, he was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1976 and was given the Eclipse Award as the leading trainer in 1983.
Charlie Whittingham
Charlie Whittingham was born on 13 April 1913. He lived eighty-six years and came to be known to some as the greatest trainer ever. It was certain that he was the oldest trainer ever to have a Kentucky Derby winner. He was seventy-three when Ferdinand claimed the roses, and he was seventy-six when Sunday Silence was the first to cross the finish line in Louisville. Whittingham’s leading rider during his career was Willie Shoemaker. Whittingham followed horses from the age of eight, as his older brother was a jockey. He began training horses in 1934. His sixty-year career brought him three Eclipse Awards as the leading trainer and Hall of Fame induction in 1974. He trained eleven national champions and three horses named as horse of the year—Ack Ack, Ferdinand, and Sunday Silence. He was the all-time most winning trainer at both Santa Anita and Hollywood Park. His amazing career also included a tour of duty with the marines in the South Pacific during World War II. He died in California on 20 April 1999.
Nicholas Zito
Nicholas Zito was born in New York City in 1948. When he was nine years old he started attending the horse races with his father, who had done service as an exercise attendant. At the age of fifteen, Nicholas got a job as a handyman in the racetrack stables. He moved up the career ladder as an exercise boy, then a groom, and slowly worked toward being a trainer. He learned every step of the way. In the early 1970s, he won his opportunity, training his first horse in 1972. But even then success came slowly. In the 1980s, he teamed up with owner B. Giles Brophy and the keys to success were in his hands. In 1991 he won the Kentucky Derby with Strike the Gold and again in 1994 with Go for Gin. He was only the fifteenth trainer ever to have two Kentucky Derby winners.