Trainer Ramon 'Mike' Hernandez, worked N.Y. circuit, dies at 99

Ramon “Mike” Hernandez, a trainer mostly on the New York circuit for 37 years, died Sunday due to complications from a stroke, according to his daughter Cathy Hagney. He was 99.

Hernandez loved the track - in particular Saratoga - so much so that Hagney and some members of her family brought Hernandez’s body Sunday afternoon to Saratoga Racecourse and barn 76, where Hernandez had been stabled for years before his retirement in 2011.

“We played Call to Post, we told him it was ‘riders up’ and we sang songs,” Hagney said Sunday afternoon from the barn. “The people from the funeral home helped us out. He’s right here for the last time. I brought him here every day for two years prior to Covid.”

Hernandez, a native of Union de San Antonio Jalisco, Mexico, trained in the U.S. from 1976 through Nov. 2011. According to Daily Racing Form statistics, Hernandez won 603 races from 5,419 starters, and his horses earned $18,820,126 in purse money.

Hernandez trained a plethora of stakes winners, including Vandy Sue, who gave Hernandez his lone graded stakes victory in the 1978 Distaff at Aqueduct. Vandy Sue also won the New York Breeders' Futurity and Finger Lakes Futurity in 1976, Hernandez’s first full year of training in the U.S.

Other stakes winners trained by Hernandez included Adirondack Holme, Cassie’s Birthday, Fratello Ed, Restrainor, Sir Proves It, Three Pack, Ransom’s Pride, Beautiful America, Classic Pack, and Mine Over Matter.

Hernandez first got into racing in 1944 when Hipodromo opened in Mexico City. The following year, he went to Canada, where he met trainer Cecil Locklear, who took Hernandez under his wing and helped get him into racing in the U.S.

“He taught me just about everything and gave me lots of encouragement,’’ Hernandez said in a 2011 interview with Daily Racing Form.

Hernandez returned to Mexico City in the 1950s and met Laz Barrera, for whom he worked for a year. Barerra came to the U.S. before Hernandez, who stayed in Mexico and trained on his own.

When Hernandez did come to the U.S. in the mid 1960s, Barerra helped get him a job at Clermont Farm in Germantown, N.Y., where he trained and broke yearlings for about a decade before taking out his trainer’s license in 1976.

Dr. Dominick DeLuke, owner of Assunta Louis Farms, helped get Hernandez started. The trio of Assunta horses Vandy Sue, Fratello Ed, and Sir Prove It finished one-two-three in the New York Breeders’ Futurity at Finger Lakes.

Hernandez is survived by three daughters - Hagney, Mary Segarra (George) and Teresa Shirmer (Charles) and a son from a previous marriage, Michael Bowles, and nine grandchildren.

Hagney said a church service is scheduled for Wednesday in Saugerties, N.Y. Hagney hopes to have a remembrance of Hernandez’s life during the 2023 Saratoga meet.