Johnston always feels at home during annual Fair Grounds stint

NEW ORLEANS – Fair Grounds is the hometown track for trainer Eddie Johnston, and every season he focuses on having his horses ready to perform their best here.

His results at this meet, as usual, are demonstrating the point. Entering Friday’s racing, Johnston had won 12 of 54 races (a 22 percent win rate), and he was tied for ninth in the trainers’ standings.

“This is it for me,” said Johnston, 68, who grew up a few miles from the track and as a boy delivered milk in the neighborhood. “My whole year is this. If I don’t do well at the Fair Grounds, we’re in trouble. The whole state struggles in the summer. The pots are less. You don’t have the quality of races that you have here.”

Johnston has a shot at achieving his third consecutive top-10 finish among local trainers. Last season, he won a personal-best 21 races from 85 starts and finished seventh in the standings. He tied for 10th at the 2012-13 meet with 19 wins from 78 starts.

A retired industrial-supplies salesman whose clients included Fair Grounds, Johnston has been a trainer since 1981. Nearly half of his career starts and wins have come here. Johnston has won 409 races, 187 of them at Fair Grounds, and made 2,283 starts, 1,125 in New Orleans.

Johnston said he started in racing as an owner in 1976 and learned the game from his uncle, Alex Johnston, who was a trainer at Fair Grounds.

This season, Johnston is running a 32-horse stable, and, as usual, most of his horses are Louisiana-breds. “We start getting them ready in August,” Johnston said. “The 2-year-olds, I get them ready for here.”

The idea, he said, is to come to Fair Grounds with Louisiana-breds eligible for maiden and allowance conditions.

But an older horse, the 6-year-old gelding Too Dim, has been the star of the stable. He beat the speedy Heitai twice last year – in an optional-claiming race in November and in the Louisiana Champions Day Sprint in December – before running second to Bet Seattle in a solid open optional-claiming race last month. When Too Dim will race next hasn’t been decided, Johnston said.

He claimed Too Dim for $20,000 for owner William Deckwa in February 2013 at Fair Grounds, and in 18 starts since the claim, the gelding has won eight races and earned $256,122.

Johnston said he’s working for nine owners. Keith Plaisance, for whom Johnston has trained since the late 1990s, has 20 horses in the barn. “He really gives me quality stock,” Johnston said.