Fair Grounds notes: Leggio still winning at age 80

NEW ORLEANS – A longtime fixture at the Fair Grounds, trainer Andy Leggio turned 80 on Jan. 15. Running a 20-horse stable, he’s still going strong. Skip the Pinot’s victory in the last race Thursday gave Leggio four wins at the meet and put him 11th in trainers’ earnings.

Leggio was 14 when he arrived on the Fair Grounds backstretch, going to work for trainer Odie Clelland. “I was cleaning stalls, walking horses, and he was teaching me how to gallop,” Leggio said.

A fond memory of his early days in racing, he said, was earning $10 from jockey Johnny Longden at an East Coast track to wash his Cadillac, and driving the car while Longden was riding.

A trainer since 1970, Leggio has collected 871 victories and memories of working with many talented horses, the best being the Grade 1-winning Louisiana-bred filly Happy Ticket. Among his other stakes winners were Candid Glen, a turf standout who earned more than $1 million, St. John’s River, Sarah Lane’s Oates, and Ole Rebel.

Leggio has seen the game change. “Nowadays, you have to have knowledge of medications, mainly the rules about medications,” he said. “In the old days, you could just run and run. In the old days, we didn’t know what to do with bleeders.”

To keep a horse from bleeding, a trainer would burn the herbal powder Asthmador in a bucket, and the horse would inhale the fumes, Leggio said. “Odie Clelland used to do that,” he said. “That’s what I would do.”

Years ago, some trainers thought that tying copper to a horse’s tail would prevent bleeding. “We did it, but we never believed in it,” Leggio said, smiling. “Just in case. I think it was a voodoo thing.”

Sweet win for Giannini

Ricky Giannini is taking a winter break from his food truck while helping trainer Brad Cox win races.

Giannini is the assistant overseeing Cox’s five-horse stable at the Fair Grounds while Cox stays at Oaklawn Park. On Monday, Giannini saddled the 6-year-old mare Point to the Wild for a victory in a second-level optional-claiming turf sprint.

Since Cox claimed Point to the Wild for $10,000 in October at Keeneland, she has won two of three starts at the Fair Grounds. “She trains like a nice horse,” Giannini said.

Her next race might be the Mardi Gras Handicap on March 4, he said.

After assisting trainer Neil Howard for eight years, Giannini took last winter off to build his food-truck business. “I do special events in Louisville, farmers’ markets,” he said.

His specialties are crepes and gelato.

Giannini began working for Cox in mid-November. Giannini’s wife, Ashley, gallops horses in the mornings and then works in the horsemen’s bookkeeper’s office. After the meet, Ricky Giannini will go back to his truck.

“I came up in an Italian family,” said Giannini, 31, who is from Chicago. “You learn to cook as soon as you learn to walk.”

No regrets selling Vicar’s in Trouble

Vicar’s in Trouble, the Louisiana-bred who won the Lecomte, belonged to Louisiana breeder Clyde Taylor for several months, but he said he didn’t intend to race the colt and doesn’t regret pin-hooking him.

Taylor, who paid $8,000 for Vicar’s in Trouble in September 2012 at the Equine Sales of Louisiana yearling sale in Opelousas, sold him in May for $80,000 at the Fasig-Tipton Midlantic 2-year-olds in training sale in Timonium, Md.

After buying Vicar’s in Trouble, Taylor hired Al Pike to get the colt sales ready. “Al told me he could run, but you just don’t know,” said Taylor, who is from Youngsville, La. “You don’t know what they’re going to do.”

A son of Into Mischief and the Vicar mare Vibrant, Vicar’s in Trouble was bred by Spendthrift Farm. He was foaled at Elite Thoroughbreds in Folsom, La., where Vibrant was residing.

“He was a pretty baby,” Elite co-owner Michelle Rodriguez said. “Pretty correct.”

Ria Antonia, Untapable work

Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Fillies winner Ria Antonia worked a half-mile Jan. 18 in 49.60 seconds with Elizabeth Dobles, assistant to trainer Jeremiah Englehart, riding. “It was an average work,” Dobles said. “I didn’t push her. She did it herself.”

The workout was Ria Antonia’s first since she arrived from New York on Jan. 10. She is being pointed to the Risen Star.

“Yesterday was actually the best day she’s trained here yet,” Dobles said Thursday. “She was really eager to go, on the bit.”

Ria Antonia was scheduled to work again Saturday, Dobles said.

Pocahontas Stakes winner Untapable, being pointed to the Rachel Alexandra by trainer Steve Asmussen, worked a half-mile Monday in 51.60 seconds. The workout was her first since she finished third in the Hollywood Starlet.