By Jessica Martini
Leonardo and Jhonardo Sanchez lived out the pinhooking dream last spring when selling a filly by Tiz the Law–purchased for $70,000 the previous fall–for $1.05 million at the Ocala Breeders' Sales Company's April 2-Year-Olds in Training Sale. The dream only got sweeter when the filly, Dandona, won the GIII Florida Oaks in the colors of Tagermeen Racing early last month. The father-son team behind Laureles Racing will hope to repeat the success at this year's OBS April sale when they offer a daughter of Tapit (hip 384) through the Kings Equine consignment next week.
“It's a dream come true at the end when you go to the auction, with all the work that goes into assembling the team and trusting the process and letting them develop their natural talent,” Jhonardo Sanchez recalled of their April success from a year ago. “At the end, they are animals, right? So you can do everything perfectly and think you are doing everything the way it should be done, but it is always going to depend on them. And it's definitely something that we can say that everything went well and went right at the right moment at the right place. We are very, very happy to see her win. Because a lot of people, they buy a million-dollar horse, but they end up never getting an opportunity to win something like this.”
For Leonardo and Jhonardo, their love of horses has roots in their native Venezuela.
“My grandfather has always been involved in horse racing here in Venezuela,” Jhonardo said. “He had the passion that then went to the other generations, my dad and me. The pinhooking, that's something that we started doing in Florida.”
The family, which owns a group of car dealerships in Venezuela, originally ventured to Florida seven years ago with the intention to race.
“We have always had a passion for horses and the intention at the beginning was racing,” Jhonardo said. “We raced at Gulfstream for a couple of years and we started getting involved in the business in that world in Florida. And then after racing, we started getting connected with people in Ocala. We started going to Ocala and we started liking the town a lot. We got involved in that with people that we met that we also knew from the horse world in Venezuela. We started to assemble a team that could go to the auction and select the horses. At the beginning, it was thinking about racing, but then we saw we had enough talent in our team to pick horses and get involved in the pinhooking business and actually get some good-looking horses, that look well and race well after we sell them.”
Dandona provided the team with its first graded-stakes winning graduate.
“We are very, very glad to see that she is winning,” Jhonardo said. “She is doing very well. She took a long time to race, we were a little nervous about it. But she's proven what we saw in her and what the owner saw in her as well.”
Leonardo and Jhonardo Sanchez with Dandona at OBS last April | Stefanie Grimm
But Dandona isn't Laureles Racing's only success story from last year's OBS April sale. Mr Mo's Magic (Uncle Chuck), purchased for $12,000 at the 2024 OBS January sale and resold for $50,000 last spring, won the Mar. 29 Lambholm South Sophomore Turf Stakes at Tampa Bay Downs. And Shes Essential (Essential Quality), purchased for $57,000 at Fasig October and resold for $130,000 last April, won the Al Nayifat Stakes in February at Jebel Ali Racecourse.
Following last year's success, the Laureles team headed into a competitive yearling market with an added emphasis on quality.
“We are trying to focus a little bit more on quality,” Jhonardo said. “It was a little bit tough last year.”
The team will offer five 2-year-olds at the upcoming sales, with the Tapit filly leading the group off at April, followed by a Win Win Win colt at the Fasig-Tipton Midlantic sale in May and juveniles by Epicenter and City of Light at the OBS June sale.
The Tapit filly is out of graded-placed Wholelottashakin (Scat Daddy) and is a half-sister to graded winner Wholebodemeister (Bodemeister), as well as to Shes Essential. She was purchased by Laureles Racing for $170,000 at the Fasig-Tipton October sale last fall.
“She is kind of the profile that we are trying to buy now, a little bit more expensive horses,” Jhonardo said. “From everything that we saw and everything that we could buy–to be really honest, some horses went for crazy money at that sale–we think that she met all of our specifications in terms of pedigree, and physique. We are trying to trust our team in what they see in the animal and having a training process that is going to end up building the animal that we want.”
Leonardo added of the filly, “The mother's line is very strong, but we always end up making the decision when we look at the physical. The filly has a really nice physique and we are trusting our team when they saw her.”
The Laureles Racing juveniles are being prepped at Oak Ridge Training Center, with Richard Bracho handling the day-to-day operations.
“Richard Bracho is a great addition to the team,” Jhonardo said. “He is the one that is every day there in charge of the operations. And we are always discussing the strategies and what to do.”
With one seven-figure result already, the Sanchezes are entering this year's April sale with a mixture of optimism and realism.
“We are hoping to do it again, or towards that path,” Jhonardo said. “You can't expect to do that every year. It's not that easy. We already know it's not easy.”
The under-tack show for the OBS April sale begins Monday and continues through Saturday with sessions starting each day at 8 a.m. The April sale will be held Apr. 14-17 with bidding beginning each day at 10:30 a.m.
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