Summers, Mind Your Biscuits still earning respect

LOUISVILLE, Ky. – At 34, Chad Summers is old enough to know that respect is earned only through the passing of time, but sometimes he gets impatient anyway. Summers has been a licensed trainer for less than two years, and that’s one reason he believes his stable star Mind Your Biscuits is often slighted.

“We call Biscuits the ‘but’ horse,” Summers said. “People say, yeah, he’s a good horse – but he’s a New York-bred. But he’s never gone a mile and a quarter. But he’s not in the barn of a super-trainer. It does get a little old.”

Mind Your Biscuits can quiet all the skeptics Saturday in the span of two minutes, which is how long it will take to run the $6 million Breeders’ Cup Classic under the lights at Churchill Downs. The 5-year-old horse ranks among the top contenders for the 1 1/4-mile race when looking to become one of the great Cinderella stories in racing history.

“He’s living proof that dreams can come true in this game,” Summers said.

Having grown up a racing fan on Long Island, N.Y., Summers isn’t exactly a racetrack rookie, despite his relatively short tenure as a trainer. Green but earnest, he worked at a wide variety of racetrack jobs starting in his late teens, both backside and frontside. He eventually focused mostly on buying and selling horses as a bloodstock agent and acquired Mind Your Biscuits as a private purchase after the Posse colt failed to bring his reserve at the Fasig-Tipton preferred New York-bred yearling sale in August 2014 at Saratoga.

In the ensuing 3 1/2 years, the ownership mix in Mind Your Biscuits became extensive and quite complicated as Summers leveraged the colt’s ascendancy to prominence by selling off shares. On Dec. 13, one of the owners, Shadai Farm of Japan, will take control of the colt, and he will stand at stud in 2019 in Japan.

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“Having him leave the barn is going to be incredibly hard,” Summers said.

Mind Your Biscuits was trained at the outset of his career by Roderick Rodriguez, then Robert Falcone Jr., before Summers took out his trainer’s license in Florida in February 2017. In all, Mind Your Biscuits has racked up 8 wins and 10 seconds from his 24 races and has earned $4,279,566, the most ever for a New York-bred. With victories in the last two runnings of the $2 million Dubai Golden Shaheen, and second- and third-place finishes in the last two runnings of the BC Sprint, Mind Your Biscuits clearly has proven himself as a world-class sprinter – but Summers has always strongly believed the horse could be similarly effective at longer distances.

“He’s an unbelievably talented horse,” Summers said.

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Even before last December, when Mind Your Biscuits was second in the Cigar Mile, the BC Classic has been on Summers’s mind. Although he vacillated in recent weeks as to whether the horse would run in a different BC event – the $2 million Sprint and $1 million Dirt Mile also were considered – Summers ultimately settled on the Classic as the best spot, relying partly on his background as a handicapper in arriving at that conclusion.

“The other two races are very tough, and the $6 million purse makes a big difference,” he said.

Mind Your Biscuits and Summers have been in Louisville since Sept. 12, arriving well ahead of the Sept. 29 Lukas Classic, a 1 1/8-mile race that Mind Your Biscuits won by 4 3/4 lengths, earning a 108 Beyer Speed Figure. Since then, by Summers’s own account and those of local clockers, Mind Your Biscuits has flourished in his training and appears to be extremely fond of the Churchill surface.

“He couldn’t be doing any better,” Summers said.

Whatever happens Saturday, little fault can be found with how Summers has handled Mind Your Biscuits. Jimmy Jerkens, as respected as any trainer in the game, has observed Summers closely in Florida and New York.

“Obviously, you’ve got to have the horse first,” said Jerkens, “but I don’t know how anybody could dispute that Chad’s done a great job, both training and managing the horse. He really has been outstanding.”

Summers has already calculated that if Mind Your Biscuits wins the Classic, the winner’s share of about $3.3 million will catapult him to 21st on the all-time earnings list for horses with at least one start in North America.

“It would put him right above Wise Dan ($7,556,160) and Zenyatta ($7,304,580),” Summers said with a grin. “They’re Hall of Fame horses, right? I don’t see why that wouldn’t put Biscuits in consideration for the Hall, too.”

That would be a discussion for a later date. In the meantime, Summers is reveling in being squarely in the Classic mix with a horse whose modest origins have attracted support from all corners.

“It’s all very humbling,” he said. “I just want to enjoy this as much as possible. I really think the horse is going to show the world what he can do.”