Cambrey Setting a Healthy Trend for the Industry

“As a baby, he was mean,” recalls Vickie Hewitt. “When we were prepping him for sale, as a short yearling, he would charge the door, ears back, rearing up.”

How they handled him on Cambrey Farm, back then, may have a lot to do with the fact that Trendsetter (Modernist) heads to the GIII Peter Pan Stakes on Saturday as a breakout winner of the GIII Lexington Stakes.

“We didn't step in there and start yelling at him, or raise our hands,” Hewitt recalls. “We'd be very patient. You don't kill the fire in them.”

Hewitt believes passionately, and infectiously, that this game can give more oxygen to its underdogs; to the people who can only breed or buy at the lowest level, and to their horses.

And she knows that one of the ways any youngster can end up punching above weight is to be given the best start in life. After all, the things that make a difference can't be improved by a bigger farm simply spending more. Patience, diligence, horsemanship cost nothing but time and effort: in other words, the going rate is the same for David as Goliath.

Before coming to Paris, Kentucky, over 20 years ago, Hewitt was a middle school teacher and principal in California. Asked whether those experiences have proved helpful in her second vocation, she turns the idea round.

Trendsetter | Coady Media

“I think my experience with horses helped me as a teacher,” she says. “I was training horses when I was 11, worked for an Arabian horse farm when I was 16. I think you need an innate patience, or at least to learn patience, working with horses–and I think that helped me be a teacher and principal. They liken a horse's intelligence to that of a third-grade child. And with horses, babies especially, there's always going to be both heartbreak and elation.”

Actually two of Hewitt's clients are teachers, and that's instructive of the way she views our so-called Sport of Kings. For she is adamant that we can turn around a declining foal crop by sharing the magic of the horse with people whose principal resource is ardor, not dollars and cents. It's just that those people, very often, feel shut out.

“They really don't have a lot of money, but what they do have is a huge dream,” Hewitt reasons. “They just want to see that horse in the winner's circle. Whether it be at the claiming level, or allowance, doesn't matter. It's about the dream. They're passionate. They go to the races and feel the excitement. When I was a kid, it was just so exciting to see how beautiful those animals were, to see them run. There are so many horses like Trendsetter, that come from modest backgrounds, and people need to hear about those.”

Trendsetter is out of an Astrology mare, Supaya, who had ended her career down the field at Presque Isle Downs under a $7,500 tag. Hewitt bought her for a client for $4,000, virtually in the category of the rescue mares she will tend to bring to the farm from the track every year. She recommended trying Supaya with Modernist, who is out of a Bernardini mare-a nick that promptly came to life with Arabian Knight, who is by Modernist's sire Uncle Mo out of an Astrology mare.

Unfortunately Hewitt's client lost heart, other investments having not worked out, and discarded Supaya for just $1,000 in a Fasig-Tipton digital sale in December 2024, even though her Modernist colt had made a solid $22,000 as a short yearling at Keeneland the previous January. But he was not alone. The colt we now know as Trendsetter was in turn sold for $25,000 to Grassroots Training & Sales at Timonium that fall, and proved a good pinhook when bought by Davant Latham for $125,000 at OBS the following April. Latham retained the horse at $725,000 at Keeneland in April and now has just five rivals for a free tilt at the GI Belmont Stakes in the Peter Pan.

Hewitt did urge her client not to sell Supaya. “I do try to tell my people that are getting into the business that they need to be patient,” she remarks. “I tell them that if you're in it to make a quick buck, that is not how you make it in this business. You need to have a plan, and be prepared to take a risk.”

Sometimes Hewitt will lease a mare to clients to help get them going. In 2021, she picked up a young Uncle Mo mare named Thank You Note, who had managed a single anonymous start, for just $6,000. Yet she was out of a stakes-winning daughter of Giant's Causeway, and the genes came through when Thank You Note, leased to a client, produced a Midshipman colt to make $100,000 as a yearling (and then $270,000 as a 2-year-old).

“My goal has always been to help the lower end people make it in this business,” Hewitt explains. “Because some of the most passionate people I know, the ones who care most about horses, aren't the billionaires. They have a regular nine-to-five job and can only afford one or two mares. Yes, some of my clients can breed to the $75,000-$100,000 stallions. But for the most part, they can't afford $30,000 for a stud fee because they only make $60,000 a year to live. So I think in order to boost the business, and increase foal numbers, farms need to do incentives–like Taylor Made will, like Ashford and Darley and Gainesway often do. Foal share, mare share. A lot of farms have come away from that, but they're pushing out the smaller guy with a dream.”

Hewitt knows where those people are coming from, because she was once one herself. Horses might not have been in her blood, but they were always in her soul. She was told that the first word she ever said, as a toddler, was “horse.” And she was already buying Thoroughbreds at Barretts while still a teacher. But then, when she got into breeding, she “got tired of my horses coming back from Kentucky barren and thin.” So she retired early from education and moved with her baby son to the Bluegrass. Jason is now 25 and manages the farm.

Modernist | Sarah Andrew

Hewitt is grateful to locals who helped her to bed down in a new environment: Steve Johnson at Margaux, for instance; and Joe Taylor, who mentored Jason in the Catholic Boy Scouts. Nowadays she has about 100 acres spread between a small farm in Paris and an annex in Cynthiana.

“I don't take more than 30 mares a year, almost all year-rounders,” Hewitt explains. “We prep the babies, sell the babies. Most clients, I now do all the nicking for, too. That's where success starts, but then it's how that mare is fed, how she's treated, how her foal is managed, what people are doing on a farm to progress a foal to where they're going, whether a sale or the racetrack. All those factors impact the horse. And I think we see that, in the upper end, where so many of the best horses are homebred. At a 2-year-old sale, I don't know what someone had to do to make a horse walk the way it does. I don't know what kind of illnesses that horse had, what kind of personality it has. I can look at our babies and say whether or not they're going to run, whether or not they have the personality. As horse people, I think we all have that sort of inner sense.”

Which takes us back to what she was saying about Trendsetter. Don't take the fire out of them.

“You don't overtrain them,” Hewitt argues. “There's a fine line between training them like they're a riding horse or a racehorse. You need to recognize when you're doing too much or not enough. Every horse is an individual. We have a colt here from the family of Bella Ballerina, and he's a handful. Even with a butt rope he would be up in the air, not because he's trying to hurt you, just because he feels good. So you have to stand with him and wait till he calms down and his nostrils stop flaring, and then you move him along.

“We've had people that we've kept less than 24 hours because of what they've learned from other farms. They do things like take the tail of the baby and yank it over the back, just when the baby's feeling good. You use that move if someone's in danger. But you have to know, as a horseman, when you're just depressing the foal, or actually training the foal. It all takes time. The farrier that does my babies knows patience. If it takes us 45 minutes to do a baby, it will take us 45 minutes to do a baby.”

Hewitt has seen foals on other farms that are terrified, their spirit already broken; seen mares come off the track that will flatten their ears and give you both barrels when you go into their stall.

“But that's not a mean horse,” she insists. “That's a horse that's been made mean. And it takes us 30 to 60 days to get the horse again to where they go, 'Wow, why am I trying to kick this person? This person's okay.' Horses want to please you, and they have that heart, that passion of running. But raising babies, a horse can be ruined for the racetrack long before it reaches a sales ring.”

And treating a horse right starts with the matings you select. Hewitt starts and finishes with female family, and what she calls “utility” sires, proven guns like Midshipman and Hard Spun: less commercial, maybe, but less expensive and more likely to put a runner on the page for clients with a limited budget.

“Thirty years ago, first-year stallions were scrambling to get mares,” she recalls. “Those older, utility sires were the ones you could never get to. But now the stallion business is driving the Thoroughbred business.”

And the same agents who drive so much demand for unproven sires will also distort impressions of the market.

“They try to sell people a bill of goods, tell them that they have to spend a $1 million to have a racehorse,” Hewitt says. “And that's just not true. It just discourages people who really are passionate. They're not all Wall Street people, but they're the ones who donate to aftercare, who rescue horses. And those are the people who can increase our foal numbers. Because even if they can only afford one or two mares, there will always be light at the end of the tunnel. They will always have the chance of coming up with a Trendsetter.”