A Saturday at Fair Hill Training Center, featuring Kelly Rubley and Chuck Lawrence
At 8AM Saturday morning, Kelly Rubley’s barn at the Fair Hill Training Center is bustling with grooms and hot walkers caring for the couple dozen horses stabled there. She’s over at the training track with two horses breezing, I’m told by a staff member. The cold is chilling and the horses breath steams each time they exhale. Light streams in from the back of the barn where the doors are wide open to the pastures beyond. While I wait for her to get back to the barn I strike up a conversation with Daulton, a groom on her staff. I ask him what time he arrives in the morning to begin the daily routine of horse care.
“5AM. Sometimes 4:30 depending on the day’s schedule,” he tells me. He’s already been working for three hours, while most of the people I know have been asleep.
In addition to her home base at Fair Hill, Ms. Rubley oversees a string of 13 horses down at Ocala during the winter, juggling time between the two locations during the cold-weather months. “Training at Fair Hill, it’s like a country club for horses,” she tells me. “When it’s warmer and there’s grass outside, they can get turned out right here, they love it. If I was a horse, I would want to live at Fair Hill.” Her barn is incredibly organized: spreadsheets she creates are pinned to stall doors that dictate each horse’s scheduled activity. An equine scale sits at the back of the barn with a sheet recording each horse’s weight each day, an effort to find each one’s “optimum race weight.” A couple horses stand just outside the barn. Julian Pimentel is there to work Carteret, a 5 year old who won twice last year and is recording his first breeze of 2019 this morning. Ms. Rubley pulls out her phone, which contains yet another spreadsheet.
“One and a quarter today, guys. On the dirt, she tells the riders as they make their way over to the training track. I hitch a ride with her assistant, also named Kelly, over to the track where Ms. Rubley will clock the works and record the times. She radios in each furlong’s time to the riders with further instruction to ease up after a half mile.
Ms. Rubley has two horses entered this afternoon at Laurel—recently Triple Crown-nominated Always Mining in the Miracle Wood Stakes for 3 year olds and General Downs in the John B. Campbell Stakes—but you wouldn’t know it, observing the conditioner. Her attention is focused 100% on the horses breezing that morning and ensuring that each horse back at the barn remains on schedule and well cared for. I ask her specifically about the plans for Always Mining, who has won 3 in a row including the Heft Stakes last out, earning a career-best 89 Beyer. She tells me he’s nominated to the Blue Grass Stakes at Keeneland if today goes well but remains cautious about his ability to handle the mile distance.
Always Mining won that afternoon under Danny Centeno going the mile in 1:35.27 and earned an 87 Beyer.
Ms. Rubley is intense at the barn. She walks me down the shed row rattling off each horse’s results and discussing possible next steps depending on various conditions available to her. She laments not being able to ride each horse during works and gallops herself anymore, describing the need to pour over condition books and mounds of paperwork each night as her barn increases in size (she expects to have about 60 horses under her care by summertime). It’s clear that these horses are members of her family, their care plans drawn up and carried out deftly by the staff, and the results of the past year indicate the attention to detail matters on race day.
The Empire Awaits
I drove back over to the training track to meet up with Chuck Lawrence, who has owned a barn at Fair Hill since the 1990s and enters horses all over the Mid-Atlantic. After watching one of the 26 horses currently in his barn breeze, we walked back to his barn, the closest stable to the training track at Fair Hill. Mr. Lawrence, a native Virginian, told me about his family history. His grandfather was a trainer in the Mid-Atlantic himself in the 1930s. He told me about his own career as a steeplechase jockey, including winning the Grade I New York Turf Writers Cup in 1987 at Saratoga.
Last year, however, was the biggest year of his career, when owner Matt Schera transferred a 7-year-old $62,500 claim named Glorious Empire to his barn in February. We walked over to Glorious Empire’s stall where a staff member was examining him, a dark blanket thrown over his back for warmth. When he first arrived at the Lawrence barn, “Glorious” breezed a few times and the trainer thought he needed more distance. He won an Optional Claiming event at Delaware Park going 9 furlongs in June and followed that up with a dead-heat victory in the Grade II Bowling Green Stakes at Saratoga, going 11 furlongs. It was at that point that Mr. Lawrence and Mr. Schera realized they had something special. They tried the Grade I $1,000,000 Sword Dancer Stakes, going 12 furlongs on Travers day at Saratoga, and with Julien Leparoux aboard they got out to a lead and never looked back. After going the second quarter in 25.70, each successive quarter-mile fraction was faster than the previous: 24.94, 23.04, finishing the mile and a half in a blistering 22.55 seconds. It was Mr. Lawrence’s first career Grade I win. He won at 15-1 odds.
We walked into Mr. Lawrence’s heated office in the center of his barn to talk more. He said that after that race they knew they would take him to the Breeders Cup that fall at Churchill Downs to compete for the biggest prize of his life. He described the thrilling week leading up to the race, saying how special it was to be there with his wife, 10-year old son and eight-year old daughter. I asked him if he minded Chad Brown, Bill Mott, and European heavyweights Aidan O’Brien and John Gosden getting all the attention and spotlight, even though his horse had the highest Beyer figure in North America going long on turf and didn’t seem to get the respect he deserved. He said no. He enjoyed the underdog status that has followed him ever since he was a jockey.
At the race, Glorious Empire battled Channel Maker for the lead out of the gate but didn’t maintain the same speed he showed in the Sword Dancer. He ended up finishing last over the soggy turf. Mr. Lawrence described the result as a “big, big disappointment” numerous times to me. There was some disagreement regarding the strategy Mr. Leparoux used, emulating the on-the-lead performance of the Sword Dancer, while Mr. Lawrence would have preferred to stay off the pace. “But hindsight is always 20/20,” Mr. Lawrence said to me, again, numerous times. They took “Glorious” down to Gulfstream Park in December to compete in the Grade II Fort Lauderdale Stakes, an effort to secure the Eclipse Award for 2018 Turf Champion. He went off at 7-1, again not getting the respect he deserved, and he won that, too. That made two Grade II wins and one Grade I win for Glorious Empire’s 2018 campaign.
Stormy Liberal won the Eclipse award after a Grade III win and a victory in the Breeder’s Cup Turf Sprint, a 5 & ½ furlong race.
Unfortunately, “Glorious” came out of the Fort Lauderdale with a strained ligament, although the vets say it is not a career-threatening injury. Mr. Lawrence is poised for another Saratoga campaign with the gelding if all goes according to plan in the horse’s rehabilitation. We left the office and walked back over to his stall where the Grade I millionaire posed for a picture for us. The horse that earned $198,397 in the 5 years previous earned $767,830 in 2018 under the tutelage of Mr. Lawrence at Fair Hill.
Mr. Lawrence took me on a tour of the rest of his barn. He was excited about a new horse, a maiden named Cyclical who got his first Fair Hill breeze that morning going an easy 50 and 2 half mile. As we walked the shed row past one horse, Mr. Lawrence stopped in the middle of a sentence and called up the racing office at Parx to enter it in a race next week. He got off the phone and resumed the conversation like nothing happened.
We got into Mr. Lawrence’s truck and drove back through Fair Hill, getting a look at a couple hills he’s used to train his horses on at times, one of the many benefits of training at a site that is nearing 10,000 acres after a new land acquisition. He drove me back to my car, past the new Janney/Phipps barn that Shug McGaughey will move into, back to the training track, where we parted after two hours together.
On my way out of the small training track parking lot, past the barns, across the horse paths that intersect with the dirt road I’m driving on, I looked in the rearview mirror to get one final glimpse of horses galloping around the dirt oval. Passing Kelly Rubley’s barn I recalled my conversation with Daulton, the groom on her staff. It struck me while leaving Fair Hill that these people accomplish more by noon on a Saturday morning than most people accomplish in a week. And then they turn around do it all again the next day.