Two Classic Winners Make Ingordo Hungrier for the Next

[Wandering Eyes]

Alpha to omega, A to Z: few men can have achieved as exhaustive a grasp as David Ingordo of what turns an unbroken Thoroughbred into a champion. Or make that Z to A. For in Zenyatta (Street Cry {Ire}) and now Accelerate (Lookin At Lucky), an agent who is still only 42 can be credited with finding two Breeders’ Cup Classic winners as yearlings in nine years.

Zenyatta he famously picked out for just $60,000; Accelerate, also at the Keeneland September Sale, for $380,000. Anyone familiar with this intense and driven figure, his eyes burning into the raw animal before him, will acknowledge the professionalism that yielded these discoveries. But that does not alter the fact that both were made for people he views more or less as family–and whose joy duly compounded Ingordo’s sense of fulfilment, in business or career terms, with a highly personal satisfaction.

Zenyatta was trained by his stepfather John Shirreffs for Jerry and Ann Moss, whose stable is managed by Ingordo’s mother Dottie. And John Sadler, who trains Accelerate for Hronis Racing, he considers virtually an uncle.

Funnily enough, Sadler’s barren record at the Breeders’ Cup had become as much of an albatross as had once been the case with the late Bobby Frankel, a cherished mentor to the young Ingordo. (His mother had served Frankel as bookkeeper and business manager.) And when Catalina Cruiser (Union Rags) disappointed as hot favourite for the Dirt Mile, and Catapult (Kitten’s Joy) was collared late in the turf equivalent, the team could have been forgiven for wondering if some malign destiny was against them at Churchill 10 days ago.

But that’s the thing about Accelerate: he just soaks up whatever you throw at him. The span of his career can be judged from the fact that he shared the podium with none other than Arrogate (Unbridled’s Song) when both contrived to be beaten first time out in a Los Alamitos maiden.

“In a lot of ways he’s a throwback,” Ingordo reflects. “Even down to the weight he’s carried, something people don’t tend to think about anymore; and even down to how he looks. He’s not a real speedball type, he looks like a Classic racehorse and that’s the way he runs as well. But he does it on the bridle, he’s not coming out from way back. Everybody was amazed when he went to Lane’s End the next day, he was in such good nick. For a horse that had just run his eyeballs out to have such good coat, such good flesh, is a testament to his constitution. That’s why he has done what he has, and why we hope he’ll be a good stallion.”

The horse’s destination, moreover, means that Ingordo’s involvement really has been alpha-to-omega: a yearling purchase broken by his regular collaborators at Mayberry Farm, and now set to stand at Lane’s End, one of his key patrons of recent years.

Not that Ingordo claims any such diamond can be spotted without the help of fate; without the sun coming out from behind a cloud, just as you walk by; the momentary glint that makes you stop and look again.

In the case of Accelerate, that glint had been a son of Scat Daddy on whom Ingordo had been outbid at a 2-year-old sale in Florida. The following year, Ingordo took care not let his yearling brother slip through his grasp at Keeneland and, as Daddy D T, he made the podium in the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Turf for Sadler and Hronis Racing. So naturally they were interested in the next foal out of the mare–and that was Accelerate.

It had taken a similarly lateral journey to introduce Ingordo to Kosta Hronis. He had bought a War Front filly as a weanling pinhook at the 2011 Keeneland November Sale, and it turned out that she had a Scat Daddy half-sister about to run in a maiden at Churchill. She got up on the wire, and Ingordo jumped in a car to size her up.

Who to call? Sadler, of course. Ingordo knew he had his complete trust. When he told Sadler he had found a filly to buy, he knew exactly what the response would be.

“No problem, David, go get it done.”

“She’s 200.”

“Great.”

“I mean, so, who do I get the money from?”

“Bill it to this man, he’s a new guy I got.”

That man was Hronis; and the filly was Lady Of Shamrock, subsequently a dual Grade 1 winner sold for $2 milllion. And even better was to come: Stellar Wind (Curlin), likewise bought after breaking her maiden, was sold for $6 million after six Grade 1 wins.

“I try to play the stallions like a stock,” Ingordo explains. “When I think one’s going to get hot, I try to buy before the market gets too high; and when he gets too high for me, I drop down. Curlin wasn’t a household name yet. My mother deserves a lot of credit, she said you need as many of those Curlins as you can get.”

He saw the video of this one winning at Laurel in December, and took a flight to Baltimore the next day. It was five degrees when he arrived on the backstretch in the morning. Friends ran into him: “What you doing here, man?”

But if Ingordo must often be a man in a hurry, it becomes a very different story once the deal is done. “With Accelerate, Mr. Hronis was so good, giving John the time,” he stresses. “So many things we see happen to horses are down to trainers doing the wrong thing because they feel pressure, in today’s world, to perform immediately. Accelerate was very forward mentally: he could have been a 2-year-old in any program, if they’d wanted. But he’d have been a one-and-done.”

Ingordo had admired exactly the same circumspection in the case of Zenyatta. “You don’t have to be horsemen to understand that the people working for you are doing the best for the horse, and that rewards them in spades,” he says. “My wife [Cherie DeVaux] is a young trainer starting out. I told her: ‘You’re not going starve, we’re okay; do right by these horses and don’t feel any pressure, the horse will pay you back.’ Quite frankly, if anyone but John Sherriffs had Zenyatta, she would have been lost to history as the ugly mare that brought 60 grand. He never forced her to do anything; he let her be her own person.”

But nor has Ingordo ever lost sight of the ultimate purpose of these animals. And that reflects his immersion, through his formative years, in the track environment. (Besides his mother’s work for Frankel, his late father Jerry was agent to a string of top jockeys.) Think about it: how many other agents look through a prism first shaped by walking hots at 14? How many of them even like to wager on races, as Ingordo does, on the basis of what he sees in the paddock? The bloodstock market is so focused on monetising stages of development, between cover fees and weanling and yearling and juvenile values, that it often overlooks the abiding priority of producing a runner.

“My greatest advantage was having worked at the racetrack,” Ingordo agrees. “I had to have a special licence to work as a child. I remember talking to Charlie Whittingham when I was little, remember things he said to this day. The day we got the first Juddmonte horses, I went with three other guys and picked them up and walked them over to Bobby’s barn. And then seeing horses my mother was involved with, with Mr. Moss. So I’m always waiting to see that horse again.

“I have the mindset of a trainer, I love to watch trackwork. You have to know what a horse should look like that wins races. Certain flaws I think give you a higher percentage of failure. I see people, intelligent people, buy horses with things I could never live with. I don’t give on the physical too much. They’re not all perfect, don’t get me wrong, but they’ve got to have the structural components, the presence. We’re starting out with the raw product, we’re picking a horse on the phenotype, if you will; a horse that’s designed to win races.”

Sure enough, the people with whom he likes to work share a knack similarly developed on the track. Jeanne Mayberry’s late husband Brian trained a Kentucky Oaks winner, Sardula in 1994; while their daughter April was an assistant to Bob Baffert.

Frankel himself never even went to the sales. One of Ingordo’s great regrets is that Frankel asked him to come back and work for him just as his illness brought him into the home stretch. As it was, a valuable stint with Juddmonte having run its course, he instead hooked up with Lane’s End.

Ingordo stresses his debt to Juddmonte manager Garrett O’Rourke. “I’d never seen a foal in my life until I went to Juddmonte from college,” he says with a grin. “I thought horses were born out of the back of the airplane.”

Having gained some experience there while still a student at the University of Kentucky, Ingordo had gone back to Juddmonte full-time after a spell at Walmac. Young as he remained, he already felt an affinity to the farm. As an adolescent, after all, he had worked with Toussaud, the dam of a promising juvenile named Empire Maker.

“She was smarter than most people,” Ingordo remembers. “Around the barn she was a sweetheart, but she just had her things. We used to train her backwards. Some of these mega-trainers today could never have had a Toussaud: they would have given up, it would have been too much. That’s why Bobby so respected the work John did with Zenyatta. John was one of the last people Bobby talked to. They were great friends in the end.”

This whole business of sensing when a horse needs time and space is vividly distilled by Ingordo’s recollection of a call from Jeanne Mayberry as early as the Thanksgiving after breaking in Zenyatta.

“David, you need to get down here.”

“What’s happened?”

“That black filly.”

“Is she okay, what’s wrong? Look, she cost $60,000. She’s insured.”

“No, no, you got to come see her yourself. We never had anything like this. Ever. She’s broken 60 days. And she takes one stride to everyone else’s two. We either have a superstar or everything else sucks.”

Ingordo went down around Christmas and, even though it was just an easy breeze, he too was blown away.

“I was like, holy cow!” he recalls. “So I called my mother and said: ‘I don’t know what to tell you but you better give this one a good name.’ I thought this could be a 2-year-old champion: big, does everything easy, just gallop everyone to death. We were right about the championship part. It just took a long time.”

In securing Zenyatta for around a quarter of the ballpark minimum he had anticipated with his mother and Jerry Moss, Ingordo had momentarily feared that he had bought the wrong horse.
“The hammer falls at 60 and in my mind I’m like, yesterday a Hall of Fame trainer bought the wrong horse for half a million dollars–did I just do that!?” Ingordo remembers. “So I cut across the back, where the horses come down, and the guy with the ticket is chasing me! But I see it’s her. Phew. And have to explain I wasn’t doing a runner; that, uh, I was just so excited…”

Zenyatta’s breeder, the late Eric Kronfeld, had been underbidder at his reserve. Ingordo subsequently became a good friend, but it was a while before he dared admit what the budget had been.
“It was just one of those things where you work hard, everyone does their thing, and it ended up it was meant to be,” Ingordo says. “Her final start, I’ve only watched that race one time since and, quite frankly, that was enough. But it’s maybe the one time you could lose and still win. It was the best race she ever ran, and if a legend can double or triple, she did it in that race. But when she won the Classic [the year before], there has never ever been a day like it at the racetrack: not American Pharoah, not Justify, not anything. It takes a lot to get me wound up, but that was the most amazing thing I have ever seen I my life.”

Zenyatta is now at Lane’s End herself, of course. And Ingordo feels no less at home there. Honor Code arrived soon after he came aboard, and he helped set up the highly successful Woodford partnerships. “Though I’m kind of a loner by nature, I do like to work on a team,” he says. “So it has been great for me that way.”

In fact, Ingordo has been working with some people for nearly half his life. Some have their own clients, and he has several different ones himself. But everyone is on the same wavelength.
“Whether they’ve trained me, or I’ve trained them, I don’t know which it is,” he says. “But we have a very good way of looking at it, from a horsemanship standpoint. Because we can’t put a saddle on a piece of paper. Everyone who works with me understands that we’re looking for the athlete first. Then we try to get as much pedigree as we can, for whatever the need is for our client. And then it’s nothing but boots on the ground, going through every barn, pulling out every horse. Remember what we do is an art, not a science. And my mother always says it’s a game of nuances and glances.

“Between working at the racetrack my whole childhood, and now doing this on an everyday basis; and by putting up my own money and having clients who have faith in me; and then seeing the results on the track-you get a pretty good idea of what works. And the biggest component is: you have to get lucky. Everything else doesn’t matter. You have to get lucky.”

That said, he could come away from Louisville echoing its most famous son, Muhammad Ali: “It’s not bragging if you can back it up.” But there will be no resting on laurels; quite the reverse, in fact. As he notes, ours is a sport where the equivalent of winning the Super Bowl brings no guarantees, no enhanced or extended contract. You all go back and start from scratch to find the next champion. So he was determined–having been too young fully to appreciate the 2005 Kentucky Derby success of the Mosses’ homebred Giacomo (Holy Bull); and too stressed by the hype surrounding Zenyatta–that this time he would enjoy the moment.

“I really took it in,” he says. “I knew what the race meant personally and professionally but I watched it as a fan. And, yes, I enjoyed the victory lap round the sales the next day, because everybody out there is trying to do what we’ve done. I’m very proud of what we’ve accomplished and know that to have these things on the resume, they can’t take that away from me.
“But I am more motivated, after this, than ever before; hungry to continue pushing forward. I’m very cognisant of how difficult it is, and how lucky I am. But I’m very keen to go out and do it again. Going to the races that day, I said to my wife: ‘If this doesn’t motivate me, doesn’t leave me more energised, then I need to quit.’ And obviously I left nitrogen-fuelled.

“Look, there’s a big element of luck in this–but it’s cool. And I’m thinking I’d like to do it one more time. I set that goal for myself now, to get a third one.”

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