Races for top sophomore colt pacers have been elusive at The Meadowlands.

by Debbie Little

With the Pepsi North America Cup on June 14 and the Meadowlands Pace a month later, trainers of top 3-year-old male pacers want to get a few tighteners into their horses before the rubber meets the road, but that’s been hard to do at The Meadowlands, although not for a lack of trying.

Interim race secretary Karen Fagliarone was busier than a one-armed paper hanger as she manned the phones trying to fill the field last Saturday night (May 24) to accommodate those colts looking for a race.

“I tell my interns, when I start working with them, when you open up that box in the morning, you look at every single horse in every single class, and it’s like a big puzzle, and then you have to fit the pieces together,” said the veteran race secretary, adding with a laugh, “That’s how I’ve trained them all, and they all seem to have gone on and gotten better jobs than I have, so I guess I did something right.”

Unfortunately, no matter how hard Fagliarone tried, she could not get all the puzzle pieces to fit.

“I tried to fill the winners of two, but no more than six, because a lot of them fit in there,” she said. “You can ask Chris Ryder and Tony [Alagna], I must have called them five different times… ‘We’re going to go with it, we’re going to go with it, and we’re not going to go with it,’ because I’d call and nobody else wanted to move in there. I spent like all morning trying to fill that race to get these horses to go, and I couldn’t.

“You can ask them, I called Eric Mollor four times, I called Tony [Alagna] four times, Chris Ryder and I spoke about six times, back and forth, Sammy DePinto, same thing. I put his horse in to qualify. Then I took him out, because I said, ‘Oh, I think I can get it to go.’ And then I put him back in to qualify, because I said, ‘No, I can’t get it to go.’

According to Fagliarone, there were some pieces on the board that could have fit, but there were some obstacles.

“I’ve always found that you can’t really lie to these horsemen because they all want to know, how fast it’s going to go or what am I in against?” Fagliarone said. “And I feel like if you’re not truthful, you’ll never get that respect back. And you’ll call for a horse the next week, and they’ll be like, ‘Yeah, you told me last week that it was a cheap race, and you buried me,’ and you’ll never get another horse from them. So, I feel that you really need to be upfront and honest with everybody, but it’s difficult because, like I said, everything up there goes in [1]:49 and a piece.”

In an effort to try and fill the race, Ryder said he entered more than one.

“I threw a horse in just to make the race go, T H Tyson,” Ryder said. “He missed getting in, so he was available, and, you know, he would have been competitive. He goes [1]:50, [1]:51, but they still couldn’t use it.

“I guess it’s just a reflection of the state of the business. It’s a bit of a sad thing to admit to. The powers that be, it really doesn’t seem to be an issue for them.

“It’s not really the answer here, but over the years we’ve had late closers [at The Meadowlands] in the spring and a lot of horses got a jumpstart or a little bit of racing.”

When trainer DePinto was campaigning North America Cup runner-up We Will See back in 2010, he doesn’t remember facing the issues he is now with his 3-year-old colt pacer Papis Pistol.

“You know what, the classes did fill back then, yeah, it was easier,” DePinto said. “I raced [We Will See] at The Meadowlands in a couple of overnights before I even went to Canada with him.

“So, yeah, in the last 15 years, a lot has changed. I think we’ve got fewer horses, too. I don’t think the breeding farms are putting out as many horses as they used to. I think the numbers are down at the sales.”

As Fagliarone said, DePinto also received multiple calls last week from her.

“I called my partners at least three different times that day and told them ‘We’re racing, no, we’re qualifying, no, we’re back racing, no, now we’re qualifying again, no, now we’re racing,’” DePinto said. “And then she called me and said, ‘It’s not going to go; do you want to qualify?’ And I said, yeah, put me in the qualifier.”

DePinto did suggest that maybe if they added a little more money to the purse of the race there might have been a little more interest, but maybe not.

Another issue was that last Saturday was not a typical card at The Meadowlands.

“The problem with going with five or six in there is we had nine races of stakes that day,” Fagliarone said. “So, how do you go with a five-horse field when you’re leaving 50 horses out of the box?”

Given how important handle is at The Meadowlands, would management have been okay with a six-horse field of Meadowlands Pace probables over a full field of overnight horses?

“I wouldn’t see why not, but I would like to have full fields,” said chief operating officer/general manager Jason Settlemoir, adding with a laugh, “You know I like to have my cake and eat it, too.”

While president/chief executive officer Jeff Gural said, “I agree, a minimum of six if it’s a competitive field.”

According to comments in Dave Little’s Road to the Meadowlands Pace sent on May 22, four of the top 10 horses chose last minute to qualify or race in sire stakes at Harrah’s Philadelphia because The Meadowlands race did not fill.

Ryder’s American Son and DePinto’s Papis Pistol finished 1-2 in a qualifier at The Big M last Saturday.

In addition to four qualifiers this year, American Son had one pari-mutuel start on May 3, which is one more than DePinto’s colt, who has had just three qualifiers this season. Both are in Canada this weekend for Saturday’s [May 31] Somebeachsomewhere.

Trainer Ron Burke, who will have some heading north next week for the North America Cup elims, said he’s not as affected if a Meadowlands race like that one doesn’t fill.

“I don’t sweat it as much as all the rest of them do,” Burke said. “If I have to race at Pocono or race at Chester or race at The Meadows, I just go race somewhere else, so, I’m probably the worst one to ask. And if I’ve got to qualify instead of race, I’m fine and to be honest, if I’ve just got to train them, I’ll figure it out, you know what I mean? I don’t sweat that kind of stuff.

“You’ve got to deal with what you’re dealt, and, you know, I get it, they don’t want to write a race for five horses; they don’t want to write a race with a 1-9 shot. I have always gotten what the business model is too, so, like I said, I don’t sweat it. It’s not my biggest worry. I’ve got bigger worries.”

Burke’s top colts had races elsewhere, so he didn’t drop anything in for that race last week at The Meadowlands, but would have if he had been asked.

“They know I’m good about that, but the thing is Karen’s good about that, too,” Burke said. “If she was one horse away, she would have called me. She must have not even been close.

“They don’t want to go with six. Jeff and Jason don’t want six-horse fields. And people can’t be mad that they don’t want to go with six-horse fields… You know, it’s not just about us, they’re trying to make money, or, at least, not lose money.

“I mean, Ake [Svanstedt], do you ever hear him cry [if he doesn’t get in]? He shows up off two years off and wins, because he just doesn’t worry about that s–t. You can only worry about the s–t you can worry about, the stuff that you can’t, you just work around it.

“I have an advantage, too, if I want to make my own race, I can make a race. I have enough good horses, I’ll put them against each other and we race them. I think that’s what Ake does, too. I think he has enough good horses, he puts five of them together, four of them together, and they go at it. The bigger barns, maybe it’s not such a big deal.

“People ask me, ‘Hey, are you going any speed at this time?’ I’ve got like 60 to choose from, I can find three that want to go fast.”