Simple twists of fate from the wild world of horse breeding.

by Trey Nosrac

We plan. Maybe things work out, maybe not. Meanwhile, mystical randomness and inexplicable connections happen. If you don’t squeeze into the crowded bus, you never meet the love of your life. A stranger you meet at table #12 at your cousin’s wedding leads to a career. You turn left instead of right. The arrow ricochets off your belt buckle. Big things, little things, all are part of the tapestry of life.

The random wheel also turns in our sport. Let me share:

Once upon a time, my pal and I had a 3-year-old filly trotter in training. We purchased the yearling filly at the Ohio Select Yearling Sale. We bought her to race, not as a broodmare prospect. We already were at our broodmare maximum – one. We sent her to a well-regarded trainer.

Our filly struggled as a racehorse, and she got sore as a 2-year-old, so we turned her out. As spring rolled around in her sophomore season, our hopes dimmed. She slid from the annual dream of becoming a Sires Stakes performer to perhaps becoming a fair horse. This tale is as old as harness racing.

The world had more significant problems than our obscure borderline trotting filly racehorse in 2020. Across the land was the fear of looming death from the mutating coronavirus. These were the days of masks and handwashing and gurneys with bodies covered in white sheets rolling out of hospitals. There were days of drive-by funerals, hoarded mountains of toilet paper, and Netflix marathons. Tantrums from people livid about too many masks and restrictions, and others livid that others did not unite to follow best practices. The world was on edge.

Racetracks were closed. One of those early pandemic mornings, I pulled into a parking spot after a worker wearing rubber gloves and a surgical mask handed me my coffee and Egg McMuffin through a drive-thru window. I began to scroll on my phone for information about when and if harness horse racing would return, wondering if our filly in training would even get the opportunity to race.

On my phone screen, I saw that the HRU site had some breeding advertising. I recall that this simple advertisement was a note from a farm thanking their customers for supporting their stallions again this season. Maybe this was the stimulus, I don’t know, but suddenly, a random thought popped into my head, “Would it be possible to breed our unraced filly instead of waiting for the harness racing and real worlds to get back on their feet?”

As my coffee cooled, I phoned my pal with my lunacy. He was skeptical. The filly was in training, and we barely remembered her pedigree. We decided to see if this was even a remote possibility. I called Midland Acres, the operator of the closest breeding farm to the training facility where our filly was in limbo. They picked up the phone on the first ring, humored me, and told me they had a Long Tom breeding available for sale and that we could try it.

I again called my pal. He called the trainer, who agreed to immediately ship the filly just down the road to the breeding farm. There was zero planning or research. From a weird random idea to action took less than 10 minutes. My coffee was still warm.

To our astonishment, we received the call about a week later that our filly was in foal. Eleven months later, we welcomed a new foal. Another calendar year flew past as the baby grew big and strong. We consigned her to the Ohio Select Sale. She sold to a group of Ohio guys, and our pandemic filly was off (hopefully) to the races.

This filly (now age 3) was fourth in the Moni Maker Stakes race, trotting her mile in :52:3. She has a 1:54 race mark. She is a top trotter with a bright future. That is a long way from a random spark of an idea and two phone calls in a parking lot in the middle of a pandemic.

Often, we sit back and examine the many twists of fate along our roads. In this isolated case, if there was no pandemic, two people did not pick up their phones, or a different breeding farm was down the road – many things needed to happen to result in this excellent trotter. We can all conjure up hundreds of what-if moments that remind us of the cosmos and the mysterious forces beyond our comprehension.

The story of this accidental broodmare and the fine trotter she birthed began in a parking lot during a pandemic. More twists of fate awaited this family.

Next week, Red Flags will fly.