Baird family fine with Asmussen breaking the record

Dale Baird would’ve turned 86 in April 2021. His brother John Baird still dabbles with training in West Virginia, and had Dale Baird not perished in a 2007 crash on an icy Indiana interstate, maybe he, too, would still be saddling the odd horse at Mountaineer Park.

Instead, when Baird died, the number 9,445 – the number of races he won during a 46-year career – became frozen in time. At his death, Baird’s North American-record win total seemed unassailable: No other trainer was anywhere near him. Now it’s about to be eclipsed, with Steve Asmussen, just a 55-year-old, bearing down day by day.

Asmussen and Baird crossed paths once, years ago at Hawthorne Park, where Baird had gone on one of his horse-buying expeditions.

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Baird, one of 12 children, the son of a farmer who had become a horse trainer and trader, hailed from Martinsville, Ill., but made West Virginia his training base. Nearly all his wins came at Mountaineer, known as Waterford Park before a name change. Whatever the name, the track carded races for lower-level claiming horses mainly incapable of competing even on middle-tier circuits. Baird purchased them en masse, hauled many of them himself back to West Virginia, and found races for most of them to win.

“He just loved to win races – couldn’t get enough,” said Michael Baird, Dale Baird’s nephew.

Michael is John’s son. The two live 100 yards apart on Michael’s 50-acre farm near Mountaineer, which houses 50 to 60 horses. John, who’s 76, helps keep the farm going.

“He’s retired a couple times, but he can’t sit still,” Michael Baird said. “The next thing you know he’ll want to go to the sale, and he’ll come back with six horses. My grandfather trained horses at the county fair. I guess this is in the Baird genes.”

Dale Baird also had a farm near Mountaineer. A Sports Illustrated story from 1980 describes horses shuttling frenetically between the farm and the racetrack as Baird awaited shipments of new stock from various venues. Coverage from a major sports publication came after Baird became a regular at the top of national trainer standings by wins through the 1970s. He became the first trainer with 300 wins in a year in 1973. Baird topped out at 349 wins in 1981 but had 330 as late as 1999. The work was endless, not just the care of the animals but the logistics of managing their racing schedule. Dale Baird thrived in it.

“I spent a lot of time around Dale,” his nephew said. “He was a driven guy. He had tons of employees, but he was hands-on, and he owned almost all those horses. Even when Mountaineer started to have good slot-induced purses, in his heyday you’d still catch him at Thistledown in the afternoon with a trailer load of horses trying to win races over there, even though the purses were cheaper. That’s just what he did. He liked to run horses. He didn’t have hobbies, didn’t have other interests, didn’t play golf. Dale just liked to race horses.”

Steve Asmussen plays the sport at the highest level – horses he’s trained have won Horse of the Year four times – while Dale Baird, from the available evidence, never had a graded-stakes starter. But Asmussen knows the intricacies of the claiming game, and during the early part of his career scrambled to win races with whatever sort of stock he could find.

“Steve Asmussen, he’s every bit as driven as Dale was,” Michael Baird said. “For my dad and I, there are no sour grapes with us. The record was going to be broken anyway, and when it does get broke, I love it’s going to get broke by a real horseman.”