Sharp off to explosive start at Fair Grounds meet

NEW ORLEANS – Joe Sharp, who has been winning races at a high rate since going out on his own as a trainer six months ago, has kicked into overdrive recently at Fair Grounds.

From Feb. 12, when Whyalwaysme and Liberal Spin combined for a $250.80 Sharp exacta, through Thursday, the trainer sent out nine winners, seven runners-up, and two third-place finishers from 23 starters. The run included two other Sharp exactas and a race in which he saddled the winner and third-place finisher.

For the meet (through Thursday), Sharp has 26 wins, 23 seconds, and seven thirds from 80 starts, and moved into second place in the trainers’ standings, six wins behind leader Tom Amoss. Among trainers with more than two starts, Sharp leads in win rate (33 percent) and is tied with Amoss for the highest in-the-money rate (70 percent).

For any trainer to win one-third of his or her races is exceptional. For a 30-year-old, first-year trainer to have such a high batting average at this point in a meet is exceptional.

Sharp points to fundamentals to explain his success.

“The biggest thing overall is to have the horses’ overall health as good as possible,” Sharp said. “Lead them over there as good as possible, and get them in the best spot you can.”

His winning also stems from having “a good group of owners,” good help, and racing luck, Sharp said.

“My owners have been pretty good at letting us run horses where we want,” he said. “We’ve got a good crew. Rosie helps out a lot.”

Rosie, of course, is his wife, retired jockey Rosie Napravnik, who is due in June to give birth to the couple’s first child.

Sharp said he is running his stable similarly to how he did things as an assistant to trainer Mike Maker, for whom Sharp worked for three years.

They talk once or twice a week, Maker said.

“He’s got off to a great start,” Maker said. “He’s grown up in [racing]; he knows the business inside and out. So it’s not really a surprise.”

Sharp has racing on both sides of his pedigree. His father, Marc Sharp, is a longtime Mid-Atlantic trainer. As a child, Joe said, he was reading condition books for all the area tracks. “I was very comfortable with the condition book,” he said.

His mother, Sara Escudero, is an exercise rider for her boyfriend, trainer Bret Calhoun, who for years has been one of the top trainers at Fair Grounds.

Like Maker, Sharp has been adept at making productive claims, often winning with horses stepping up in class. Sharp, who said he has 36 horses at Fair Grounds and six at Oaklawn Park for 26 owners, said the size of his stable roughly has doubled since the beginning of the meet. Through Thursday, when he claimed three horses, he had claimed 31 horses at Fair Grounds.

Sharp said he doesn’t want to be labeled as a claiming trainer. Claiming has been a means to build up his numbers, he said.

“I wasn’t going to just sit there with five horses and hope somebody would send me some allowance horses,” he said. “The best way to get your barn full is to win.”

By May, he said, he expects to be training 60 horses. He’s planning to have a stable at the Trackside training center near Churchill Downs as well as 20 horses at the Belmont Park spring meet under recently hired assistant Stuart Cliverd.

“It’ll be nice to see the 2-year-olds come rolling in when we get to Kentucky,” Sharp said.

Coming from a racing background and as a former jockey, exercise rider, and assistant trainer, Sharp understands that there are naysayers at every track – people who might speculate that he must be doing something against the rules to be winning so many races so early in his career. Sharp said that no one has said anything to him along those lines. “I know they’re out there,” he said.