Delay No Bar to DeVaux Ambition

Cherie DeVaux remembers a 2-year-old by Giant's Causeway coming in one summer. He was hot and raw and really wasn't showing a lot. Then, at Palm Meadows, she breezed him on turf for the first time.

Now Chad Brown has a lot of horses and DeVaux watched plenty of others that morning. And they were just breezing, after all. So it took something special to make her call her boss, away for his Christmas break, as she walked back to the car.

“I'm telling you,” she said. “This horse is a monster on the grass.”

DeVaux pauses and grins. “Well, if that horse didn't try to make a liar out of me every time he breezed after that!” she says. “Never repeated it. I guess, being so immature in the mind, he just started messing around. I remember a conversation with Chad, going back and forth. 'Are you sure that horse went as well as you saw?' Really had to stick my neck out. But now we know what Bricks And Mortar came to be.”

Now that she supervises a stable of her own, DeVaux tries to remember that lesson.

“Once in a blue moon, one will breeze-and it can be a quarter of a mile-and there's just a special presence about them. And you try not to get your hopes up, because more often than not, they're going to disappoint you. But if you're confident they have talent, you don't want to push them before they're ready. They can go through a growth phase, their condition changes, their coat, color, weight. Your reward will be so much better if you just let them take you there. Especially if you feel that the horse is worth the time, but it's true for every developing 2-year-old.”

Such seasoned acuity, plainly, is uncommon in a trainer who saddled her first winner only a year ago. But a long perspective, right now, cannot be confined only to her horses.

Fortunately DeVaux is way too smart, and too steely, to feel sorry for herself. In fact, she stresses how lucky she feels, to be able to get outdoors and tend her horses. At the best of times, after all, the barn is where she's happiest. But the fact remains that the coronavirus lockdown could hardly have come at a less convenient moment in her career.

For here's a young trainer who had ended 2019 on a roll that transparently confirmed a talent to watch. Her last 10 starters of that first full year included three winners and three seconds. And while she did at least squeeze TDN 'Rising Star' debutante Remanded (Elusive Quality) into the Gulfstream winner's circle, before the shutdown, like everyone else she now has a stable in suspended animation.

“I'm very happy I get to escape the confines of my house,” she says. “And very fortunate to be stabled at Payson, where we can keep training, and have the option to give some horses turnout, or adjust them to different training regimes. But yes, the pandemic has definitely thrown a wrench in our plans. We had everything primed for a spring campaign in Kentucky. The struggle all trainers share is that we don't have a target for when racing will resume. So we're trying to maintain a balance between keeping the horses fit, both physically and mentally, without over-training them or risking injury. The problem we'll all face is the logjam when racing does resume.”

In one respect, DeVaux has been especially unfortunate-having long resolved, as her consolidation strategy, to target the 2-year-old sales.

Certainly they proved fertile ground last year, notably through six fillies assembled for Belladonna Racing: five starters, four winners. Once again, however, DeVaux has sought a silver lining. Having managed to pick up three fillies from O.B.S. March, she has meanwhile accompanied her husband, bloodstock agent David Ingordo, on a scouting trip to Florida consignors stranded by an unpredictable sale schedule. “We found it a great opportunity, to get some very promising prospects that were fairly priced and did not have to go through the rigors of a sale,” she explains.

Even so, the loss of momentum is vexing for a trainer who had been obliged to build from a standing start. It is two years now since she quit Brown's service: her last day was a Sunday, the first day of the rest of her life was the Monday. From an entirely blank slate, she initially assembled just a handful of horses.

“It was really hard to have the patience,” she admits. “I was trying to do all the things I knew to be right: like we were just saying, to let the horses develop, give them the time. But when you have eight horses sitting there, you really need to have faith that it's going to work.”

Whatever your numbers, it comes down to a reliable sense of whether an individual's graph-lines are rising or falling. Brown and the other “super-trainers” can only do this so long as they can delegate to assistants of sufficient caliber. With those guys, as DeVaux says, “you're buying into a program” rather than a specific trainer. In her own case, then, the goal is not to become too spread out.

“Because the key, for me, is to be able to see all the horses,” she says. “So in the summertime, when we were in Kentucky and Saratoga, I split my week: three days in one place, four mornings in the other. Of course, in both you still need people you can trust, people that care enough to be on top of things the way you would be. It's about not missing those nuances. When I worked for Chad, it didn't matter if I had 20 horses in my care or 100, I would check them all myself.”

For now, the only “stretch” arising from a string of around 40 concerns stalls space in Kentucky. (And that was true even before the congestion that looms once the calendar is renewed.) Being so attuned to the quiet prompts of a horse under the stress of training, DeVaux is uncomfortable with pressure to match stall allocation with starts. She would love a Payson Park in Kentucky.

“I don't blame the racing secretaries. They have a business to run,” she says. “But it can be hard to justify your stalls when you're trying to develop horses the right way. At Payson, thanks to clients who are on the same page, we have the opportunity to do just that.”

Not that DeVaux is unduly conservative with her youngsters. If anything, quite the reverse. Back in school, studying physical therapy, she learned about bone as living tissue.

“Without some kind of stress, bone doesn't build strong,” she explains. “Studies of shin fracture, and splints, have shown that if you do short, fast works, it will stimulate bone regeneration. That's why, with a 2-year-old that isn't early or precocious, it's important you still train them. It's almost irresponsible not to. But you also don't need them in full training, and obviously you don't run them before they're ready because that will cause other issues. So, for me, it's a cycle you have to be on top of.”

DeVaux's grounding was actually not with Thoroughbreds: her father trained Standardbreds in upstate New York, at Saratoga and Monticello, and a couple of her brothers went into that world. (One has driven over 5,000 winners.)

“Everything was hands-on,” she recalls. “I was cleaning stalls at eight years old. You learned that if you want to go out and have fun later, there's barn chores first. When I was a teenager we moved out of the business, but I used to barrel race, and participated in a lot of rodeos. So horses have always been a big part of my life; and hard work, too.”

The man who first gave her real responsibility was Chuck Simon, who had started out with her father at the harness track. But she was still at a crossroads when, after six years, she took a summer job with Brown. She was 28, could still go back to school and finish qualifying. But things were beginning to happen for her boss, so DeVaux put her hand up for the winter division in Belmont: if that didn't kill off her sense of vocation, nothing would.

The next eight years are Turf history. Not just grass history, mind-despite Brown's perceived forte. DeVaux supervised the flowering of Last Gunfighter (First Samurai), for instance, and he ended up running fifth in the GI Breeders' Cup Classic. But the highlight was certainly Lady Eli (Divine Park).

“I always get a little emotional,” DeVaux admits, asked to sum up a bond forged during the mare's celebrated recovery from laminitis. “Sitting on a bucket inside her stall for about a week straight… The biggest win was not that she went back to the races and did what she did. It was to get her over the hump in that critical phase. Everything above that was a bonus. The conversations went from her teetering between life and death; to how much quality of life is she going to have; to okay, she's sound and might even make a racehorse again.”

DeVaux is in no doubt that the same inner drive sustained the mare's recuperation and her indomitability on the track. The day she was asked to lead Lady Eli out of confinement, to graze for half an hour if possible, the mare toppled over a couple of times in the first ten minutes.

“Not bad, but she got grass stains on her bandages,” DeVaux recalls. “I looked in her eye, and she was pissed off. I wanted to bring her in. But she was standing there like she would not be defeated. And that was why she not only made it through, but also came back to be a star on the track.”

Last fall DeVaux took her stepdaughter Reagan to visit Lady Eli at Hill 'n' Dale, marvelling at the pacification the ornery mare has achieved in motherhood.

“Reagan walks up to her and she's petting her,” she says. “And it's still hard for me to trust Lady Eli with her, you know, I'm kind of hovering over. But she has completely changed. They said as soon as she had that baby, she turned into mom mode.”

Reagan herself represents an equivalent new experience for DeVaux, whose marriage has incidentally created as formidably sharp, ambitious and dynamic a breakfast counter as there can be on the American Turf. Anyone who knows Ingordo will know that he would not dream of compromising professional judgement with sentiment-and his faith in DeVaux's ability has an unmistakable and iron objectivity. As such, would both parties be delighted when industry people start referring to Ingordo as “Cherie DeVaux's husband”?

“Right,” says DeVaux with a smile. “We'll make him change his last name! I haven't changed mine, though I told him I'll consider hyphenating it when he finds me a horse that has a good shot in the Derby.

“It is a partnership. Marriage takes work, and business takes work. His business is established, obviously, and I'm building my own brand. But from the beginning he has believed in me-including sometimes when I was doubting. And that's important in any relationship, working or personal, to have that belief.

“And for us, it's our life. You know, some people watch TV. We're reading the TDN at night together, or looking up charts. It's all-encompassing. I'm not saying everybody could do it, but it works for us. I'm a strong personality. I run my own business. But he's great for bouncing ideas off.”

So here are two straight-talking, independent thinkers, whose domestic harmonies remain their own business; but whose professional agendas, intersecting not always but often, command esteem not just from each other but from everyone they deal with. Long before Ingordo's input, after all, DeVaux had a long apprenticeship with one of the highest achievers of their generation.

Nor does she just try to get inside a horse's head. As a longtime athlete herself, DeVaux can nearly put herself into its body. She has had her knee injected; she has had shockwave; once she had to do without water for 25 hours, a horrible experience that makes her wary of dehydrating therapies.

“But the real eye-opener was the knee injection,” she says. “Because I went from not being able to walk to being able to do a lot of things, and ended up hurting myself because I overdid it. Horses don't have a voice, so I'm always mindful of making sure we do the diagnostics right.”

And that respect for the horse is indiscriminate.

“When they come in, they're all horses and all need the same level of care-whether they cost $1 million or $10,000,” she insists. “Everyone knows that a $1 million baby can be end up a $25,000 maiden claimer. But in every case you're trying to get the most potential out of them, and it doesn't matter at what level.

“And I need to keep that in mind: to not pressure yourself. If there's a lot of potential, great, but I'm not doing my job if I'm placating an owner by saying, 'Well sure, this horse you paid a lot of money for is really good.' That horse will be the biggest truth-teller when it goes out on the racetrack. So it doesn't matter how much you paid, you give them all every opportunity.”

She gets it. Don't count the milestones to the horizon and hurry breathlessly to the next one. Just take each step right, with each horse, and you'll end up reaching your destination a lot faster. DeVaux is not a trainer in a hurry. She's a trainer going places. And the current hold-up, maddening as it is, won't change either of those things.

“I believe everything happens in its own time,” she says. “If I came out of the box and won a lot of races, I might have grown too fast. And then, right off the bat, you wouldn't be set up right. I'm always a driven person. Where I was last year, I want to be more next year. But you have to be patient; have to appreciate each stepping stone along the way.”