2021 Breeders' Cup Juvenile Fillies Turf: Leonard taking newfound success in stride
DEL MAR, Calif. – George Leonard III already had a stable star.
Leonard, a trainer, and an owner named Dave Hearn claimed a 5-year-old gelding named Zanesville for $5,000 in August 2020. The new connections moved Zanesville into starter-allowance competition – the gelding has not raced for a claiming price in the 18 starts since Leonard dropped the claim – and Zanesville won four times through the end of last year, banking about $65,000 in purses.
Maybe that doesn’t seem like much. But Leonard’s entire racing stable took in roughly $267,000 during all of 2020, and Zanesville, grinding out a decent living, was about as good as it got for Leonard over the last several years. Zanesville just raced Oct. 20, finishing third in a starter-allowance at Indiana Grand, Leonard’s spring, summer, and early fall base. By then, he’d been supplanted in the barn’s pecking order.
A week earlier, Leonard ran a horse in a graded stakes race for the first time in a 30-year training career. He’s undefeated. California Angel, whom Leonard drove himself from Indiana, came out on top of a blanket finish in the Grade 2 Jessamine Stakes at Keeneland.
The Jessamine is part of the Breeder’ Cup Challenge Series, a Win and You’re In offering guaranteed fees-paid entry into the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Fillies Turf. Leonard and the filly’s owners, Chris and Alan Walsh of Columbus, Ind., are all in. And Leonard, whose horses never have earned more than $754,000 in a calendar year, has a horse who’s already banked more than $200,000 ready for a $1 million race.
“To be honest there’s no pressure,” Leonard said on a recent Breeders’ Cup media teleconference. “I am just hoping for a little luck and the right scenario to work up. I have the best horse I’ve ever touched.”
Leonard, 55 and a native of Elton, La., first touched a horse when he was a tot.
“I’ve loved horses from time I was a little boy,” said Leonard. “My dad had a horse, and my grandfather had horses. And it’s just been something that I’ve always loved to do. We were weekend warriors, and I went to school, my dad had a job, and we’d train. We fed before school and when my dad got off of work late at night. We ran on weekends.”
Leonard said he rode Louisiana bush-track Quarter Horse races as a kid, with his jockey career cut short as an early teen by his size. Indeed, Leonard stands over a good swath of ground, his height accentuated by an omnipresent cowboy hat.
His filly tends toward slight. Leonard and the Walshs made a winning bid of $5,500 on California Angel at a Florida 2-year-old in training sale on June 11. Some horses need down time after the zing of a breeze-up sale, but less than a month later California Angel posted her first official workout at Indiana Grand.
At the sale, California Angel had worked a furlong in 10.3 seconds, good but not great, though she extended herself nicely breezing over the synthetic surface used by the Ocala Breeders’ Sales Company. A chestnut, the filly is out of Sea Mona, a stakes-placed daughter of Tiz Wonderful, and like her sire, California Chrome, she sports plenty of “chrome” – a white face and three white socks. California Angel bears a strong resemblance to Derby, Preakness, and Dubai World Cup-winner California Chrome, while Alan Walsh, an older gentleman with a white mustache, doesn’t look unlike California Chrome’s vociferous part-owner Steve Coburn.
Zanesville had won a starter-allowance race during the 2020 Kentucky Downs meeting, but during late August and early September, when Kentucky Downs races, Leonard is ensconced in the Indiana Grand season. He has started only a handful of horses at all-turf Kentucky Downs, which runs only a few programs each year and offers bountiful purses, but Leonard deemed California Angel worthy of debuting in a $139,000 maiden race there rather than in Indiana – and was correct. Rallying steadily under Rafael Bejarano on Sept. 8, she drew away late to win by almost three lengths, a 28-1 shot beating eight rivals over one mile.
“She’s always traveled very well, had a very good way of moving. And from the first few times I’ve worked her she’s never shown any signs of fatigue. She’s a horse that gets over the ground really well and does everything relatively easy,” Leonard said. “With other horses, she essentially plays with them, and she showed early on that she was above grade of what I had.”
California Angel closed from seventh in her debut. In the Jessamine, her first try around two turns, she was 12th down the backstretch and eighth in mid-stretch before switching leads and getting up at the wire. But Leonard said the filly has ample early speed. He ran her six furlongs on dirt at Churchill Downs in her second start, California Angel breaking slow before finishing with interest, third of 11 in a first-level allowance race.
“In . . . training she shows an extreme amount of speed. For races, she’s been a little green, a little slow or sluggish getting started, but that’s not her M.O.,” said Leonard. “One of the more exciting things about her is that I know she has so much more potential.”
Maybe. California Angel has something yet to prove. Yes, she got the Jessamine “W,” but only a little more than three lengths separated the first 10 fillies across the wire, a mad scramble of a 2-year-old grass race. California Angel hardly was decisively best, and a Breeders’ Cup race, competition coming from both coasts and overseas, is a horse of a different color.
Doesn’t matter, really, for an operation like this. Leonard in 1992 had more than 50 runners at Jefferson Downs, a defunct minor-league track in Kenner, just outside New Orleans. Leonard’s first training stint came at Delta Downs not far from his birthplace in southwestern Louisiana. Leonard ran at Tampa for four winters, spent a summer at Delaware Park. Itinerant, scraping by, like so many racing people.
“I went to college, had a couple of other jobs – my passion has always been the horses,” Leonard said. “I went back to the racetrack and it just . . . I always feel I never work a day in my life when I do what I enjoy.”