Preakness start another twist of fate for Wright

BALTIMORE – You can take trainer Blaine Wright out of the Pacific Northwest, but you can’t take the Pacific Northwest out of Blaine Wright.

Wright arrived at Pimlico Race Course on Wednesday morning to look over his Preakness entrant Anothertwistafate while wearing a Seattle Seahawks cap and an Emerald Downs jacket. He’s Washington through and through, and fiercely proud of those roots.

Wright, 44, grew up the son of a trainer who raced at Longacres, Playfair, and Yakima Meadows. Wright then did just about every job there is to do at the track before carving out his own training career, one that is on the ascension. Wright has large stables at both Emerald Downs and Golden Gate Fields, but this spring the exploits of Anothertwistafate have given him more national attention. Wright started down the Kentucky Derby trail, and though he had to make a detour, he arrives at Pimlico with an excellent chance to win a Triple Crown race.

“For sure, for sure, hopefully it’ll be the highlight of my career so far,” Wright said.

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Anothertwistafate earned a free berth in the Preakness via a victory in February in the El Camino Real Derby at Golden Gate Fields. He subsequently was second in the Sunland Park Derby on March 24 and the Lexington Stakes on April 13 at Keeneland, which left him outside the top 20 in points for the Kentucky Derby. Rather than hope Anothertwistafate would draw in from the also-eligible list, Wright and owner Peter Redekop decided to regroup and point to the Preakness.

“I’m all about destiny, and it wasn’t our destiny to get in,” Wright said. “We didn’t have enough points, and that’s why we didn’t waste any time waiting around to see if we’d get in. We had an automatic berth in the Preakness, and we were looking at best for the Derby at having the 20 hole. We decided to go home, freshen up, train up to this race, give him the five weeks.”

Anothertwistafate returned to Golden Gate, where he is 3 for 3 over the Tapeta surface, and worked twice, on May 4 and then May 11, before traveling here Tuesday.

Wright had a far more interesting journey to get to this point.

His father, Richard, trained, but started in racing as a jockey, something Wright also wanted to do when he was younger, before his body grew to resemble a fullback.

“I wanted to be a jockey. Never thought I’d grow up to be a trainer,” he said.

But it was always in his blood.

“I was a regular kid, running around the backside,” he said. “All the kids would play together. We’d be on the same baseball team, the same football team, same soccer team. I’d help around the barns in the summer. I liked being at the track more than school. When school was going, I’d go to the track before school. I was kind of a barn rat.”

He worked several summers at Longacres before it closed in 1992, in concessions, admissions, at a barbecue pit. After attending high school in the Seattle area, Wright moved to Yakima, where he would help his father in the morning and take college courses at night.

One of his first big breaks came when Jerry Paxson, whose Northwest Farms was a powerhouse in Washington, sold Wright a claiming horse.

“How much would you sell him for?” Wright asked.

“How much do you have in your pocket?” Paxson replied.

Wright had more than $1, but that’s all Paxson was willing to take to give the young trainer a leg up. Wright won several races with the horse before losing him via claim.

Wright continued working as an assistant to his father when Emerald Downs opened in 1996 to take the place of Longacres. At one point, he briefly thought about leaving the track and took up a sheet metal apprenticeship while working on the gate crew at Emerald, but the lure of training eventually and permanently took hold.

Wright has gradually built up his stable since going on his own for good in 2006. His best year was in 2017, when he won 119 races and his runners earned $2,146,323. Eight of the last nine calendar years he has won at a rate of at least 20 percent, and he readily credits assistants Pascual Garcia at Golden Gate and Faustino Patino at Emerald as being instrumental to his success.

His home life is stable, too. Wright has been with Risa Walter for 10 years, and they have a 5-year-old daughter, Ava.

Wright’s best runners have included Hudson Landing, who won the 2012 San Francisco Mile, and the popular 8-year-old gelding Alert Bay, a multiple graded stakes winner of more than $1.3 million who has been off since November but is scheduled to return to training next month.

Alert Bay, like Anothertwistafate, is owned by Redekop, the octogenarian British Columbia-based real-estate developer who has been a top owner and breeder in that area for five decades. Redekop’s racing manager, Bryan Anderson, in 2012 sent Wright his first horse for Redekop, the gelding Administer. Now age 10, and with 45 starts to his credit, he’s still trained by Wright and owned by Redekop.

“He’s an old, ornery horse,” Wright said. “Some days he goes to the track and wants to do it, some days he throws a fit and we let him be himself.”

Being able to accept making those kinds of adjustments is what has brought Anothertwistafate to the Preakness. Rather than try and force-feed the Derby, Wright and Redekop took a step back, then focused on this prize instead. Perhaps, as Wright said, it was destiny. But maybe it was fate.