The Curious Case of Jonathan Thomas

[Wandering Eyes]

When Rashmi (Oscar Performance), the latest ingenue to punctuate a dynasty of George Strawbridge-bred starlets, made short thrift of the latest running of the GIII Megahertz Stakes at Santa Anita, her win affirmed the charmed run enjoyed by her trainer, Jonathan Thomas, shows no outward signs of lost momentum.

Will Then (War of Will) cruising away with the GIII Jimmy Durante Stakes. Truly Quality (Quality Road) showing rare quality in the GII Hollywood Turf Club Stakes. Mrs. Astor (Lookin At Lucky) doing double Grade III duty in the Red Carpet and Robert J. Frankel Stakes. Rashmi's back for more in the upcoming GII Buena Vista Stakes.

Whatever happens this weekend, it's been a profitable 12 months for the stable, one memorable afternoon after another under a roaring California sunshine. Just don't fool yourself into thinking this has translated into some kind of gilded age for the barn.

“Right now, we're got 19 horses,” says Thomas, at the end of training one recent morning. He had 34 horses at his height last year. Fifty-two is the most he's ever trained. “This is the smallest I've been by far.”

A couple of new owners have gravitated his way the past year. They brought with them an additional five horses. Not many, considering the outsized impact Thomas's small stable has had in California, since he made a serious winter base here towards the end of 2023. And he's lost to answer why.

“It's a good question. If it's all on us, I'd like to know so I could do a better job of attracting more horses,” Thomas says.

Rashmi | Benoit

“I think at the end of the day, you have to take responsibility for the spot you're in,” he adds. “I don't know if we don't advertise enough. Or if it's just a byproduct of where the business is at the moment. I know we've had some really good clients that I adore, that we've done well with, but have joined some super-group partnerships. I know with those, we're not on the receiving end.”

This leaves the Thomas stable at an inflection point–both geographically and figuratively. His Santa Anita barn (number 59) sits at a crossroads. Training track immediately left. Main track straight on. Barn area off to the right. Robert Frost would have a field day.

But for Thomas to break into the next sphere as a trainer, he needs more horses. That's the curve he needs to climb. That a small stable nearly ten years into the job, but which has so consistently punched above its weight, is struggling to attract new well-heeled benefactors poses a conundrum worth dissecting. Luckily, Thomas is in contemplative mood.

He bats back a question about the evolving nature of ownership with an anecdote involving a trainer with a sobriquet that left no room for uncertainty. The Chief.

“He had two horses go to the gate to breeze,” Thomas recalls, of Allen Jerkens. “He had jockeys on. I can't remember who, but he had two good jockeys on. You could tell it was a pretty important workout. One of the horses was just lathered, didn't want to go into the gate. Fractious.”

Jerkens steered his golf cart to the gate and called the whole thing off, told the jockeys to take the horses home.

“He called a complete audible just because he didn't like what he was seeing. He didn't want to add fuel to the fire. There was a chance where maybe you could have blown the horse's brains,” says Thomas.

“I thought that was really cool. If you're an assistant or something, you feel the pressure. 'I've got to do this.' But he didn't give two shits. He did what was the right thing to do,” says Thomas. “He probably brought that filly back and schooled her a hundred times until she was good.”

The lesson here is one of experience–that the confidence to venture off the beaten path comes with a familiarity of the terrain that only time and practice can bring.

“Really, it's not who's winning most, it's who's making the least amounts of mistakes that is the most successful at the end of the day. But you've got to get things wrong to learn how to get things right. You've got to take chances. You've got to try things to learn,” says Thomas.

The backbone of experience is opportunity, however. And one way to foster the sort of environment where opportunities are extended is to approach the trainer-owner relationship collaboratively.

“I tell anyone new, whenever I have the luxury of talking to someone new in the business, 'you have to be okay at embracing when things don't work out,'” Thomas says.

“You have to have the sort of backing where people are allowing you–or maybe not 'allowing,' but be able to understand–that mistakes are palatable, and you can problem solve with the client,” he says.

“'Hey, we're going to be 30-1. It looks silly to run on paper. But I feel the horse is doing well. Would you like to take a shot?' If they're in and you give them equity in the decision-making, if it's a screw-up, it's fine because you're in it together,” he says. “But if it works, then it's great.”

But how do you give the young trainer given so few of these opportunities in the first place the chance to make mistakes? The freedom to shape their skills at the gristmill of trial and error?

The conversation turns to the evergreen topic of the nation's numerically dominant super trainers. More specifically, if training has become an out-and-out numbers game, what hope is there for the smaller outfits?

“They're very good at what they do,” Thomas says, stressing how he harbors no animosity towards the big barns that are simply capitalizing on a welcoming marketplace. “But I've seen the consolidation of things happen faster in the last two years in real time than ever before.”

This consolidation has been across the board. In breeding. In pre-training. “I know some very good smaller boutique places like in Ocala that break horses–they're dying on the vine because those partnerships are now going to one place,” says Thomas.

And with that consolidation has emerged an increasingly select commercial market that “runs racing,” he says.

“A lot of the expensive horses are, understandably, being bought to end up being stallions or broodmares. If they're stallions, they're only going to a handful of people. And they're only going to a handful of people because for whatever reason, those horses are deemed worth more because of who had them,” says Thomas.

Thomas with Catholic Boy | Sarah Andrew

“I've sat in on enough stallion deals and been a part of those things where it's like, there's this formula for a stallion. Unfortunately, it's just how it is,” says Thomas, who brings up Catholic Boy, his dual GI winner. “It was hard getting a stallion deal done with him.”

Which leads to a curious creation of Thomas's–the idea of a bonus structure that benefits smaller barns.

“What if you had a horse with a guy that had under 30 horses or 40 horses, and they were running for $30,000 or $40,000 more [than the bigger-number trainers] in a race?” Thomas suggests, describing such a system as incentive driven.

“You can't keep taking. People are tired of being taken, and owners are the ones that get taken the most. They're paying multiple entities, multiple places. I pay my staff. We work hard to make sure we take care of everything. But the owner's ultimately paying. That's why you've got to give,” he says. “You have to find a way to incentivize someone to move horses.”

Such a seemingly leftfield proposition–the oft-proposed remedy to the super trainer bugbear are stall limits–belies someone steeped in the sport's traditions, and the notion of standing-on-the-shoulders-of giants.

Indeed, when Thomas first came marching back to his office at training's end, he brought with him tales from a morning spent sifting through the mental libraries at the disposal of Santa Anita mainstay, Neil Drysdale.

“I haven't talked to him as much about actual horse training as much about business. The state of the business, forecasting where we're going to be in a couple of years,” says Thomas.

“I've loved our time here in California, and I'm rooting for this place to keep going,” he says. “I think it's really just a matter of money at the end of the day, isn't it? Wherever the money goes, people follow.”

The operations of another track mainstay have also caught the trainer's eye.

“I really watch [Bob] Baffert's horses. He's able to extricate the innate talent of a lot of these horses with speed. It's kind of like you need to do it because you're preparing a horse for war. If you're training a soldier, you're not going to be soft on them. You got to train them for the battle. He does it as well or better than anyone that's ever done it,” says Thomas.

“The brilliance for a lot of these guys, it's not so much what they're doing when they're breezing, it's when they're not breezing,” says Thomas. And Baffert, he adds, “gallops his horses very gently in between.”

Then there's the knowledge and guidance imparted through the stable's current primary benefactor, Strawbridge, who has patronized the stable for about five years.

“I'm getting through his breeding program the last two years by far the best horses that I've had. They are very, very well-bred. They're leaning on generations of hard work and planning. I always look at it like we're the beneficiary of being associated with someone like him who's got a lifetime of work behind him. Also, he's a very good horseman,” says Thomas.

“He's very easy to make decisions with because he's seen this happen time and time and time again. There are a lot of times I don't have answers, but I'll ask a lot of questions, and through that, we'll get somewhere.

Thomas with Frankie Dettori after a recent win | Benoit

“I'll ask him, 'Hey, I'm not seeing what I think I need to see from this horse. You've had the family, what do you think?'” Thomas recounts. “'Oh, well, I think we stopped on the mother and gave her time. Why don't we turn this one out for six months and come back?'”

Which brings the conversation full circle to the stable's trajectory, and another curious position that Thomas finds himself in–that of an unpaid ambassador for California racing.

One common reason trainers give for avoiding the West Coast is the heightened veterinary scrutiny. While the advent of federal rules has somewhat leveled the playing field nationally, house rules mean California still wields arguably the strictest set of pre-race veterinary hurdles.

“Honestly, I have found everyone that is instituting those rules to be very forthcoming, transparent, helpful, in navigating rules. After a couple months, I felt like it was kind of second nature. All these rules are implemented for the safety and betterment of horse racing, so we're fully behind all of them,” says Thomas.

“In a way it's made life easier,” he adds. “If we've had a horse where you're kind of straddling the fence between do we turn them out, or do we get a little more aggressive with medication, it's an easy answer. You give a horse a time off.”

Thomas doesn't know how many 2-year-olds are headed his way this year. He hopes for a handful or so from Strawbridge. His ideal stable number would be somewhere between 50 and 60.

With so few horses currently at Thomas's disposal compared to so many of his stakes race competitors, does this impact the way he approaches the morning training?

“It doesn't,” he says, adamantly. “I train what I have in front of me. You're going to do the best you can with what you have. What else are you going to do? I can't back off the gas and go, 'Well, I better preserve these because I don't have horses coming in.' It's the wrong thing to do for the horses and the clients,” says Thomas.

“I've got a really good group of employees right now. They're a great crew. But I don't know what the complexion is going to look like in two, three months,” Thomas says. “Honestly, if in three months I'm down to four horses, but we did the best we could with what we have, I can walk out the door knowing I did the best job I could.”

Such bleak words from a trainer who has made such a sparkling impression in one of racing's toughest circuits is a curiosity. No, not just a curiosity. A pretty damning indictment of an industry with its priorities all back to front.

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