His Faith Rewarded, Owner Holliday Eyes a Championship with “Dancing”

[Wandering Eyes]

Now 5, Come Dancing (Malibu Moon) has developed into the type of mare owner Marc Holliday (Malibu Moon) always thought she could be. She’s a Grade I winner and a victory in the GI Breeders Filly & Mare Sprint would likely mean an Eclipse Award as the nation’s outstanding female sprinter.

“She’s sharp as a tack right now,” said Holliday, who is NYRA Board Member and the Chairman and CEO of SL Green Realty Corp, New York City’s largest commercial real estate firm. “It’s nice to see her realize her full potential.”

Come Dancing’s ascension to the top of her division has been one filled with stops, starts and setbacks. She didn’t win her first graded stakes race until April and looked more like a nice allowance horse than a potential champion until she blossomed this year, justifying the confidence her owner showed in her from the start.

Holliday, who owns Blue Devil Racing Stable in partnership with James O’Reilly, sells many of the horses he breeds. With Come Dancing, he decided to keep her because he knew that a flaw in her conformation would drive her price down to less than what he knew she was worth.

“She was a beautiful yearling and she had a big frame on her,” he said. “But she had a little bit of a conformation issue–she toed out a bit in the right front leg. I knew there was no way I could sell her for what I knew was her fair value, so I kept her. Looking back, it was one of the best decisions I ever made.”

When Come Dancing won in her debut, galloping to an easy win in a Nov. 6, 2016 maiden special weight at Aqueduct, it appeared that Holliday had pushed all the right buttons. What he could not have known is that the filly’s next race would not come until 13 months later. Working toward the GII Demoiselle S., she suffered a fractured pastern in her right front leg.

“I was fairly optimistic that she would race again,” Holliday said. “The question was would she race up to her potential because we knew she had a ton of potential. She had a brilliant first race. To do what she’s done since the injury is a testament to her grit and toughness and her ability to rebound from that injury.”

After surgery, which was performed by Dr. Alan Nixon and required the insertion of four screws in her ankle, Come Dancing returned to the races on Dec. 14, 2017 and scored an easy win in an allowance race. Four starts later, she won the restricted Royal Delta S., but a fifth-place finish in the GI Beldame S. in her next start seemed to indicate she was a healthy cut below the best in her division. Her breakthrough came one start later she was second in the GIII Go for Wand S., earning a career-best 102 Beyer figure. It was not a fluke. After a five-month layoff, she won the GIII Distaff H. in her next start, kicking off a streak that has her coming into the Breeders’ Cup having won four of her last five starts.

“This has been a labor of love,” trainer Carlos Martin said. “She suffered the fracture before what was to be her second start and James and Marc were very patient. A lot of people would have retired her and not brought her back. They really believed in the horse.”

Her most notable achievement to date came in the GI Ballerina S. at Saratoga. After finishing second behind Horse of the Year candidate Midnight Bisou (Midnight Lute) in the GI Ogden Phipps, she turned back in distance for the Ballerina and won the seven-furlong race by 3 1/2 lengths. It was Holliday’s first Grade I win.

“It’s been such a great year and the highlight was winning the Grade I Ballerina at Saratoga with Come Dancing,” he said. “That was always a dream, to win a Grade I in Saratoga and on Travers day. I’m a New York resident, am on the NYRA board and I try to race as much as possible at the NYRA tracks. To accomplish that in Saratoga, I’m not sure if I can really top that experience. It guess we’ll put that to the test in the Breeders’ Cup.”

She prepped for the Breeders’ Cup against five overmatched rivals in the GII Gallant Bloom H., which she won by 3 1/4 lengths at odds of 1-5.

“She really just continued to mature,” Holliday said “She kept getting bigger, stronger and sounder. She had so many gaps in her form that it took her to get into a pattern where she had some consistent training and racing. Since, she’s just blossomed.”

Come Dancing will be Holliday’s first Breeders’ Cup starter, something he has worked toward since starting Blue Devil Racing in 2006. Holliday got interested in racing through his father, Mort, who owned a number of standardbreds. When in high school, Holliday started spending much of his weekends with his father at the Meadowlands and Yonkers and knew then that he wanted to get involved in horse ownership some day.

“I fell in love with the business,” he said.

Though his background was in harness racing, Holliday decided to go into the Thoroughbred business and launched Blue Devil with one horse, Honest to Betsy (Yonaguska), who broke her maiden in 2007 in her third lifetime start and would go on to finish third in the 2008 Star de Lady Ann. S. Specializing in fillies, he estimates that between broodmares, yearlings and race horses he has between 30 and 35 horses. Prior to Come Dancing, the best horse bred by Blue Devil Racing was Unified (Candy Ride {Arg}), who raced for Centennial Farms and won three graded stakes, including the GII Peter Pan S. Blue Devil is not named for Duke University, but for the nickname given to the sports teams at the high school he attended and where he played lacrosse, at Huntington High School on Long Island.

Member of the S&P 500, Holliday, who is also New York’s largest office landlord, only has so much time that he can devote to horse racing, but says he fits the sport in wherever he can.

“Racing is a diversion,” Holliday said. “It’s an exciting business, a thrilling sport and it’s a relief for me.”

The Breeders’ Cup Filly & Mare Sprint will be the toughest race of Come Dancing’s career, but Holliday is confident his horse can win. A year ago, before Come Dancing had so much as won a stakes race, he was mapping out a plan with Martin that would culminate in the Breeders’ Cup and what he hoped would be an Eclipse Award. Come Dancing has done the rest and in what Holliday said will likely be her last start, she has a chance to deliver on the promise her owner always believed she had.

 

The post His Faith Rewarded, Owner Holliday Eyes a Championship with “Dancing” appeared first on TDN | Thoroughbred Daily News | Horse Racing News, Results and Video | Thoroughbred Breeding and Auctions.

View the full article