‘I’m Going To Take The Ballydoyle Concept’: Stewart Plans New Training Center

[Wandering Eyes]

John Stewart's Resolute Racing farm in central Kentucky, located on the grounds of the former Shadayid Stud, will be expanded to include a new training facility, Stewart said on Nick Luck's Live From Royal Ascot podcast Tuesday.

“It's our second year [on the farm],” said Stewart. “Last year we bred 31 mares, this year we bred over 50. We've got some fantastic diversity on the farm and we're really excited about that. We've got out first yearlings that were bred on the farm coming up so next year they'll be 2-year-olds. So it's all coming along pretty well. We've grown the farm from 800 acres to 1,300 acres and we're planning to build a training center on the property. So it's going pretty well.”

Stewart's farm roster includes a who's who of successful race mares and broodmares led perhaps most notably by Puca (Big Brown), the dam of GI Kentucky Derby winner Mage (Good Magic), GI Belmont Stakes winner Dornoch (Good Magic) and this year's MGISP Baeza (McKinzie). His aforementioned yearlings are by top international stallions such as Wootton Bassett (GB), Siyouni (Fr) and Frankel (GB) while his American-bred yearlings feature the full-brother to Mage and Dornoch along with a Flightline half-sister to 2-year-old champion Forte (Violence).

“You can't just get involved in racing and want to win” he said. “Because then you're just taking from the sport. If you're going to get involved in something, you have to get involved with all aspects of the sport and you have to want to support everything. For me, that's competing on a global stage. I think it's important to be in these historic venues. Ascot is definitely at the top of the list of races I want to compete in. So much so that I'm building a replica of the mile uphill on my farm. I specifically bought an additional farm because it has a 1 1/2-mile of property so I can build a proper uphill gallop. I think if we want horses to come over here [to Ascot] and race, you have to train them in environment you want them to compete in.”

Asked by Luck if Resolute would keep an in-house trainer on site or if the facility would only include pre-training, Stewart said, “Not going to go with my own trainer. I'm going to require every trainer that wants to train with me to have a division at my training center. I'm going to keep all my horses there in America and I'll ship them to the races just like they do at [Coolmore's] Ballydoyle. We're building a training center with 400 stalls. It's going to be state of the art. I'm going to take the Ballydoyle concept and take all the latest technology and implement it and try to up the game. There's a lot of incremental things we can learn from sports science. So much we want the horses to be athletes but we treat them still like farm animals. I think there's a lot of opportunity to makes things more competitive and to give the horses every opportunity and also to take care of [their] wellness from a training standpoint.”

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