Eyes Ahead: Amoss Targets New Talent After Saratoga Success

[Wandering Eyes]

The mission was simple: go to the Keeneland September Sale with half a million dollars and come back with a horse that could get to the Kentucky Derby. Easy, right?

Tom Benson had been out of the sport ever since he purchased the New Orleans Saints back in 1985. But now it was 2014 and he was ready to get back in the game. He recruited three trainers he knew from the Louisiana circuit–Dallas Stewart, Al Stall and Tom Amoss–and laid out the assignment.

The outcome surpassed even the most optimistic predictions.

Amoss bought Mo Tom, from the first crop of Uncle Mo, for $150,000. The colt's GIII LeComte Stakes win was his ticket to the Kentucky Derby. Stewart's $145,000 purchase, Tom's Ready (More Than Ready), finished second to Mo Tom in the LeComte before joining him in the Derby starting gate. He later collected three more graded wins. Meanwhile, the colt Stall bought for $330,000 was only making his career debut on Derby weekend, but the son of Smart Strike went on to become Grade I-winning millionaire Tom's d'Etat.

For Tom Amoss, the experience proved something of a revelation. Until then, the veteran conditioner had purchased only the occasional yearling. This was his first time seriously working the September Sale.

“I fell in love with the process,” recalled Amoss. “I looked at it like a draft class for an NFL team or a recruiting class for a college football team. You recruit the athletes and then they're a part of your team. You develop them.”

In the years since that first foray, Amoss has continued to focus on finding yearlings at Keeneland September that will one day join his stable. This summer, the program culminated in a Saratoga meet to remember, with three trainees earning 'TDN Rising Star' honors. It's Our Time (Not This Time), Big Dom (McKinzie) and Oscar's Hope (Twirling Candy) embody the kind of talent Amoss hoped to uncover when he first began shaping his recruitment model.

“What I like about what we do is that there's a great deal of risk in buying yearlings and we're willing to stand with the client throughout that risk,” he explained. “If the horse is coming to my barn the following year, there's no traditional five percent charge. We're all in it together and it's as simple as a handshake between the client and myself.”

Over the past decade, Amoss has found notable success picking out future winners on relatively modest budgets. Two years after selecting Mo Tom, he returned to Keeneland for Benson's GMB Racing. He purchased Lone Sailor (Majestic Warrior), an eventual Grade I-placed, Grade III winner, for $120,000. The next year he went to $70,000 for a daughter of Alternation who developed into 2019 GI Kentucky Oaks victress Serengeti Empress.

“She was a real diamond in the rough,” Amoss recalled of the dual Grade I winner. “Her pedigree page was nondescript. With those three horses—Serengeti Empress, Lone Sailor and Mo Tom–you could look at the pedigree page and know they weren't going to be that expensive. We thought of it as value investing in terms of looking at a recruit and saying, 'Hey, we're not going to spend a lot here, but this is a prospect that could be a really valuable player.'”

It's Our Time puts on a show in his career debut | Sarah Andrew

“We're looking for athletes,” he continued. “When we get to the pedigree page, it's more about what's in the pedigree that says I'm going to have to pay either X or X squared.”

Three years ago, Amoss assembled a buying team to expand his reach at the sales. Bret Sumja and Chris Richard had both learned under Amoss before launching their own stables, while Ron Faucheux had competed against Amoss on the Louisiana circuit before he retired from training in 2023.

In their first year together, the quartet landed on Quickick, a filly from the first crop of McKinzie out of Graeme Six (Graeme Hall), who won the GIII Winning Colors Stakes under Amoss's tutelage in 2008. Purchased for $550,000 for Greg Tramontin's Greenwell Thoroughbreds, Quickick was twice Grade I-placed at two, including a third-place effort in last year's GI Breeders' Cup Juvenile Fillies, and she most recently captured the Iowa Oaks on July 5.

Stable standouts like Quickick have underscored the guiding lesson behind Amoss's approach: success starts with athleticism.

“The traditional way of looking at a Thoroughbred is always that you start from the bottom and work your way up,” he explained. “That's how most people do it and that's where the most cost is going to lie. If everybody is using the same formula, everybody is going to land on the same horses. I believe the way to look at a horse is from the top down. Certainly conformation is important, but there's conformation you can live with. A perfectly conformed horse that is not athletic is a horse that I'm not interested in.”

That philosophy guided Amoss and his team last year at the September Sale, where they selected the three yearlings who have since emerged as Amoss's team of Rising Stars.

Oscar's Hope, the stable's most recent winner, was purchased for $150,000 on behalf of Amoss's longtime owner Michael McLoughlin. Amoss said the colt stood out immediately, despite one obvious imperfection.

Three TDN Rising Stars and a Breeders' Cup third-place finisher (left to right): It's Our Time, Quickick, Oscar's Hope and Big Dom | Sara Gordon

“When the four of us went to look at him, he wowed you when he came out of the stall,” Amoss recalled. “He was so athletic-looking, but he turned out pretty good on one leg. You had to be willing to accept that. We talked it over and it was something we were comfortable with.”

Even It's Our Time, for whom Amoss stretched to a $425,000 purchase for Elza Mitchum's Double Down Horse Racing, may have been taken off a few lists because of his size.

“He was the smallest of the three,” Amoss reported. “We use Highlander Training Center outside of Dallas and every time I would go down there to evaluate them, I can remember my notes next to It's Our Time saying, 'Please grow.' And he did, but he's still on the smaller end of medium-sized.”

It's Our Time's stature didn't keep him from securing a 17 3/4-length debut win. The son of Not This Time is now pointing for the GI Champagne Stakes at Aqueduct on Oct. 4. Meanwhile Big Dom, purchased at the same sale for Greenwell Thoroughbreds after RNA-ing for $160,000, is aiming for the GI Breeders' Futurity at Keeneland following his six-furlong debut win on Aug. 23.

“This year has been quite remarkable, to be honest,” Amoss reflected. “I think one of the driving forces behind not only training horses but also working sales, at least for me, is fear of failure. It's very public. They keep score when you're training horses and quite frankly, they keep score at the sales too. Leaving Saratoga this week, I was really proud. I hate to say 'I,' because I was really proud of our stable and the buying team. Every one of those horses was picked out of the sale for our barn. That's a good feeling.”

After closing out a banner meet, Amoss now sets his sights on Keeneland, targeting the next generation of star-worthy talent.

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