John Ortiz feeling right at home in first Belmont Stakes
ELMONT, N.Y. – Trainer John Ortiz as a child attended Gotham Avenue School, about a half-mile south of Belmont Park and years later graduated from Elmont High School. His father, Carlos, a Colombian immigrant, galloped horses for some 15 years for New York legend Bill Mott after his jockey career came to an end. It was going to work for Mott at Belmont that steered a 16-year-old John Ortiz toward a life of his own in racing.
Ortiz has hot-walked, rubbed horses, was a longtime exercise rider, worked as an assistant, and in 2016 set out to train on his own. He returns to his childhood home this week to saddle his first runner at Belmont Park. It comes in New York’s biggest race, the Belmont Stakes.
It has been a long road back home, and a blue-collar gray colt named Barber Road has taken Ortiz here. Barber Road acquitted himself admirably as Ortiz’s first Kentucky Derby starter, closing from last of 20 to finish sixth, beaten less than five lengths by shocking winner Rich Strike.
Ortiz himself worked Barber Road from the gate this past Saturday at Churchill Downs. He liked what he felt.
“This horse loves to compete,” Ortiz said. “We know he’s going to show up.”
Ortiz, 36, still rides his own stock when he feels it’s required, but his growing stable requires more time on the ground, less on the back of a horse. Ortiz has maintained a 35- to 40-horse stable in recent seasons and now has about 70 horses split among Keeneland, Churchill, and Ellis Park.
“A lot of 2-year-olds and horses coming off layups,” he said. “A lot of new clients. Things are going in the right direction, but you have some growing pains when you’re doing well. More opportunity, more phone calls. Do you want to move up? This is the turning point in anybody’s career. Can you handle the pressure? Can you handle the quantity and the quality?”
Barber Road started off a long way from the pressure cooker. Like Derby hero Rich Strike, he once ran in a $30,000 maiden-claiming race. Unlike Rich Strike, who was claimed out of that race by his current connections, Barber Road was not. Ortiz had debuted Barber Road in a five-furlong maiden special weight sprint last summer at Colonial Downs. He didn’t think Barber Road would win, but the colt was ready to run and the experience would do him good. Facing talented opposition, Barber Road finished a well-beaten fourth but galloped out after the finish like a house afire.
A plan was hatched.
“We’ll wait and run him for a tag at Keeneland,” said Jared Hughes, who plucked Barber Road out of Keeneland’s 2015 November sale as a $15,000 weanling for owner Bill Simon. “Bill flew up. Before the race, I’m thinking, ‘Please, god, nobody claim this horse. We’re going to have some fun with him.’ ”
Barber Road easily won for the $30,000 tag last October.
Simon, a former CEO of Walmart whose nom de course is WSS Racing, started off with Thoroughbreds about five years ago, first in partnerships. He bought a couple yearlings on his own and then decided for the first time to buy two weanlings. One was Barber Road, the other a Speightster colt, since claimed, named Big Boss Ben, also a $15,000 purchase. Hughes, a close friend of Ortiz’s, oversees the boarding operation at Fallbrook Farm outside Versailles, Ky., and that is where the two bargain weanlings ended up in a field together. Big Boss Ben, a much smaller horse than Barber Road, initially dominated.
“We knew we weren’t [going to] resell them, so we just kicked them out there, didn’t give them a lot of close attention,” Hughes said. “Big Boss Ben, he’d kind of beat Barber Road up, run him out of the feed tub. By the end of the year, Barber Road was ruling the roost.”
Ortiz met Barber Road as a weanling before the colt was sent to Ocala, Fla., where Carlos Ortiz broke him at Nelson Jones Farm.
“My dad from the very beginning, he said this horse is very plain and simple, but he’s got heart,” Ortiz said. “He didn’t show that much, but he showed heart.”
Even now, Barber Road doesn’t turn heads in the morning – at least on the track. With media crowding the Churchill stables Derby week, the colt’s spirited stall antics earned him a minor cult following. Barber Road goofily bats around a Jolly Ball that hangs at the top of his stall door, and cranes his neck out the door to get a look at whatever might be happening down the shed row. He throws himself playfully around his stall – a ham, curious, attentive. But that has started to change.
“There’s nothing difficult about this horse,” Ortiz said. “He is a good boy. He’s obedient, but he’s animated, full of character. The thing I love about him now, from the Kentucky Derby to the Belmont he has enjoyed his alone time. He does love the media. He’s like me: Put a camera in front of me and I’m going to talk to you, be all over it. I want to be known. Put a camera in front of him, he’s the same way. He wants to be involved. But going into this race he’s been a lot quieter. He’s acting like a mature racehorse. I think he’s just growing and becoming better.”
Ortiz isn’t just about the talk. He appears to have a real knack for horsemanship, says he takes special care to tune into every horse’s individual needs even as he trains a growing number of them. Ortiz hadn’t ridden for about four months before he climbed aboard Barber Road on Saturday.
“I know that I’m not a good trainer if I can’t test drive them,” he said. “It’s my personal obligation to know what I got.”
Barber Road worked five furlongs in 1:00.80, still not breaking stopwatches, not turning heads. Ortiz is making two major changes for the Belmont; blinkers off, Joel Rosario on. Barber Road never has worked in blinkers but has worn them since his second start. The colt’s past performances are, frankly, bizarre. Barber Road, by Race Day, showed sprinter’s speed as a 2-year-old yet has been last, or close to it, in his last four races, all routes.
“This horse, he is a very push-button horse,” Ortiz said. “He’s too smart for our own good, and, basically, he figured out he doesn’t have to rush out to compete.”
Ortiz hopes the equipment change brings back some of that natural speed and puts Barber Road into the Belmont sooner than he got into the Derby.
Rosario, who knows Belmont Park well, will try to work out a clean trip in the Belmont. Barber Road has run his heart out in every race this year but still is winless from five starts. At Oaklawn this winter and spring he was second in the Smarty Jones, second in the Southwest, third in the Rebel, and second in the Arkansas Derby. He had some sort of trouble, often at key junctures, in every one of those races, and with better luck might have won any of them.
“He’s a horse who loves to follow directions,” Ortiz said. “We’re hoping Rosario will push the right buttons. I think we need a rider who knows the course, knows the race.
Ortiz? He’s known this course, known this race since he was a kid in Elmont.
“I grew up watching this race,” he said. “This is my ‘need to win’ race. If I don’t do it this year, I’m going to come back and come back and come back until I do.”
Maybe the road to a Belmont win ends this Saturday.