trainer

Tired of all the bad news? So were we. So, in our new series, we focus on the positive, asking people from non-horse racing families two questions: how they get hooked, and how they'll hook someone else on horse racing this year. KIARAN MCLAUGHLIN, TRAINER What was the experience that made you fall in love with horse racing? I was born and raised in Lexington, Kentucky, in the horse capital of the world. At that time, everyone knew someone who had something to do with the Thoroughbred industry. For me,...

Fausto Gutierrez is not well known in U.S. racing circles and neither is his owner, St. George Stable. That may be about to change. Mexico's dominant trainer and owner have set up a U.S. division based at the Palm Meadows training center and, after a handful of starts in 2019, are ready for what they hope will be a successful 2020 season. It starts Saturday at Fair Grounds, where the star of the barn, Kukulkan (Mex) (Point Determined) will go in the GIII Louisiana S. and the well-bred first-time starter...

Captain Tim Forster, a trainer whose love of steeplechasing ran so deep that he wasn't disparaging just of Flat racing but also of hurdling, was a renowned pessimist. His famously gloomy advice to Charlie Fenwick ahead of the American amateur rider going out to partner Ben Nevis in the 1980 Grand National was "keep remounting". And in a sense it would be good advice to aspiring trainers: to keep getting back up even when it seems the odds are against you. As it happened, Fenwick didn't have to heed the...

As one Head retired from the French training ranks in 2018 with a deserved fanfare of tributes, quietly another member of the family added his name to the list of Chantilly trainers some months later. The low-key entrance of Christopher Head was quite deliberate. The 32-year-old son of Freddy and nephew of Criquette--who retired 18 months ago--has worked alongside both his father and his aunt, as well as completing a stint with leading French jumps trainer Guillaume Macaire, but he is determined that when it comes to training, he is...