Winning Envelope provides big score for trainer turned farrier

ARLINGTON HEIGHTS, Ill. – When Winning Envelope galloped across the finish six lengths best in a 2-year-old maiden race on the Arlington Million card Aug. 11, bets were cashed. The filly paid $13.20 to win despite having turned heads during morning work for a couple of months before she raced.

Nobody won bigger than Winning Envelope’s owner, Hutch Holsapple.

There were six-figure offers for Winning Envelope before she ever started, but Holsapple elected to roll the dice and see if Winning Envelope could boost her value in a race. Did she ever.

Earlier this week, the prominent Minnesota owner Bob Lothenbach paid several times the prerace price to acquire Winning Envelope.

Holsapple? He bought her for $3,000 at the Keeneland sale in January.

Winning Envelope is by the very good sire More than Ready and from a solid family that includes the graded stakes winner Lilly Capote, but at the Keeneland auction, the newly turned 2-year-old was marketed as a future broodmare, not a racing prospect.

“There was supposed to be something wrong with her stifle, a cyst or something,” Holsapple said. “I liked her so much I bought her anyway.”

A prominent Kentucky-based trainer, hearing about Winning Envelope through the grapevine, called Holsapple and told him he’d contacted the filly’s breeder, Ramspring Farm. Winning Envelope, he was told, was never supposed to be able to race.

“She’s vetted out twice now,” said Holsapple. “I’ve never found anything wrong with her.”

Holsapple, 48, has been a blacksmith on the Chicago circuit since 2000. Raised in a small southern Illinois town, he came here in 1998 as a low-level trainer from the bush tracks and county fairs, couldn’t fully make ends meet going that route, and so took up the farrier trade. Every winter, Holsapple goes to a couple of Kentucky sales hunting bargain buys, and he has found some decent horses. The 2017 model, a $1,000 filly named Espressa, was bought with a paralyzed arytenoid flap that compromised her breathing, but she managed to finish third in the Arlington-Washington Lassie last September.

Holsapple still tinkers on the training side and kept a close eye on Winning Envelope as she progressed for trainer Justin Johns, and while doing blacksmith work for trainer Chris Block, Holsapple extolled his filly’s virtues.

“Hutch is a good friend of mine, and we’ve been talking for quite some time,” Block said. “He let me have [Carlos] Marquez work her one day, and he came back and told me she was the real deal.”

Block’s father, the owner and breeder Dave Block, took a run at Winning Envelope, but Holsapple resisted, betting that his filly would show as much racing as she had training. And she did. Going straight to the lead, Winning Envelope floated over the local Polytrack and won without ever being asked by Marquez. She ran 5 1/2 furlongs in 1:04.21 and earned a good 77 Beyer Speed Figure.

Now, Lothenbach owns her and Block trains her, and Holsapple doesn’t see who can beat Winning Envelope next month in the Lassie. Flush with the profit from his big score this summer, perhaps at the sales next winter Holsapple will dabble in the higher end of the market – something above $5,000 or so.