by Trey Nosrac

“Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant filled with odd waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don’t always like.” – Lemony Snicket.

Mystical randomness and inexplicable connections happen. The random wheel turns in our sport. Sometimes, fate is kind. Sometimes fate is cruel with a bowed tendon, an aborted foal, or a dozen perils that await players in our game.

The chain of events for this horse began when, on a whim and without forethought, we sent a racehorse in training for breeding during a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, and she got in foal. In the breeding game, events can spin out of control quickly.

Suddenly, we had:

A young broodmare.

A weanling still on the farm.

And now foal number two is standing on wobbly legs.

We had a mother and two daughters who had not raced a single step. We had no income between the trio, only receipts from stud fees and a boatload of bills. At this point, aside from the fact they make a lovely-looking trio in the barn and the field, we have no information about racing performance and need to get deeper into the madness and breed the broodmare AGAIN.

Here, I must confess that my process for selecting a standardbred sire for a broodmare is… problematic. Please stop reading if you are a professional breeding operation.

A procrastinator at heart, I never select a sire for our mare until the baby is born. To have a breeding contract signed and sealed feels pushy and smacks of bad luck to me. Of course, my unorthodox, well, silly, philosophy eliminates the top stallions in the state who fill their books without consulting me. Another ridiculous hangup is that I never breed twice to a stallion. In my bizarre world, giving other sires a chance only seems reasonable. And third, I like to patronize new stallions.

So, there we were. It was May, we had a red foal standing on wobbly legs, and the stallion world was wide open (except for the extremely popular commercial stallions that filled their book five months ago). Never fear. I still have many options for procuring a sire breeding, including charity auctions and onGait listings.

I had not been entirely asleep at the wheel. The previous week, I noticed a charity listing for breeding a minor stallion on their website. I returned to the website. Oops, it was too late; he was off the board. So, I knocked on door number two. My second choice was a very obscure stallion with a touch of Swedish and a very odd name. I had never heard of this horse until I saw a blurb that mentioned him in a paragraph in some harness racing publication. I immediately became infatuated with this potential sire. I called the number listed to acquire a breeding contract. No answer. I waited a day and emailed for information and a breeding contract. No reply. I gave the folks responsible for this stallion a couple of days. Nothing, maybe it was an error on my part, or they did not check their mail – who knows what happened?

Now, we were in a bit of a rush to catch the first breeding cycle of our mare. I took the most straightforward route possible. Just down the road was Dublin Valley Farm. I called and asked Joe Yoder, “Who you got?” He suggested Volstead, who at the time had two tiny crops. We quickly agreed.

As you probably know, Volstead has become a sensation in America and across the pond. This stallion’s booking history was moderate for three seasons in three nations (in the U.S. – 46, 29, and 20). His small crops did big things on the racetrack in each venue, so his stud fee increased, and his book quickly filled. Who saw that coming? Not me. Usually, I get a little overly enthusiastic about the sire that we breed to, but this one, while we very much liked the stallion, was a meh.

Here are some simple twists of fate; If I’m responsible and book early, there is no Volstead yearling in the barn. If the charity website breeding is still on the board the day I looked, there is no Volstead yearling in the barn. If the mysterious Swedish stallion connections answer my phone call, there is no Volstead yearling in the barn.

“Fate, time, occasion, chance, and change, to these all things, are subject,” – William Shakespeare.

BTW, I just looked up the mysterious secret sauce Swedish stallion I desired and took a wild swing at it. He has very few registered foals. I see this as a sign. Maybe if he is still in the stallion game, I’ll try him next year because this situation feels like another fun fate twist.