McPeek: Swing High, Swing Hard

Call it going with his gut. Literally. They cut out a whole stretch of it, and with it went much of the caution, the aversion to risk, that seems to stifle so much of the adventure in other trainers.

“The truth is that when I was younger, I was probably real conservative,” Kenny McPeek admits. “Early in my career, I was mostly dealing with claiming horses, with the odd allowance or stake horse here and there. Then I had a misdiagnosed ruptured appendix. It walled off and they did emergency surgery on me.”

When he came round, the surgeon asked whether he realized how close he had come to never doing so. He shook his head.

“Six hours, maybe,” she replied. “If we'd waited another six hours, you would have died. From here on, son, everything's a bonus.”

The appendix had started troubling him in the winter of 1994, but they didn't get it out until the summer of 1996. With six hours to spare. He'd used up nearly his whole rope.

“So I was 33, and I'd had a near-death experience,” McPeek says. “I lost several feet of my intestinal tract. After that, I started to reflect. It was almost a month before I was able to go back to work, but from that moment on, I don't waste time. Because, hey, you just never know. It completely changed my perspective. So I tend to swing high and hard. I like to hit a home run.” He pauses and chuckles. “I'm also prone to strike out. But I don't care.”

And thank goodness for that. Because if McPeek were as timidly conventional as most of his peers, our world would be a lot less fun. McPeek runs horses back, sometimes he runs them in spots that few others would even contemplate. Typically, moreover, these are horses that he has bought himself, a rare distinction in the modern trainer. And here is, with 107 graded stakes winners and nearly $110 million prizemoney; and, for all that he has been training since 1985, he's still only 60.

Who else but McPeek could have given us Swiss Skydiver? He bought her for $35,000 as a yearling, when her sire Daredevil had been banished to Turkey. And even though she couldn't quite win a Classic against her own sex, McPeek promptly ran her against the Derby winner in the GI Preakness S.–and won.

Three years on, he has again hit it out of the park with a sophomore filly in Defining Purpose (Cross Traffic). The GI Ashland S. winner, remember, had been a $14,000 RNA. So whatever the future may hold for the likes of V V's Dream (Mitole), a recent TDN 'Rising Star' debut scorer at Churchill, or indeed the back-on-a-roll Rattle N Roll (Connect), we know it won't be dull.

“I don't put any emphasis into my win percentage,” McPeek says. “I think 'win' percentage is a bit of a misnomer. You can accomplish a lot and not worry about that. And when you hit those home runs, it's pretty cool. Like I say, that experience taught me perspective. I have no fear of failure whatsoever. Failing is part of racing horses.”

So while everyone else jumps through the same hoops, McPeek does things his way. Paradoxically, however, the kind of thing that makes him an outlier today is actually pretty old school. In an era when horses tend to leave the barn to vote more often than they do to race, McPeek believes that a thriving horse has its own momentum. And thriving doesn't even have to mean winning. During her $2.5 million career, Take Charge Lady (Dehere) once won a stakes race nine days after being beaten at odds-on.

“I think we need to run our horses, as opposed to train and train and train,” McPeek reasons. “If they're in the feed tub and aggressive and happy, then why not run? Of course it all depends on the horse. Some do need their races spacing out. You learn from each horse you purchase, each horse you train, all the dynamics that go with it. But when a horse is really doing well, you shouldn't hesitate. Find out how good they are at the right time.”

He suspects that phasing out Lasix, at least in elite racing, has contributed to the way trainers today tip-toe along. But here, again, McPeek marches to his own beat. When Lasix was ubiquitous, he routinely found himself saddling the only runner to have declined the option. Salty Strike (Smart Strike) was a case in point, in both races, when she won the GIII Dogwood S. two weeks after a seven-length win.

“I actually think you can run a horse back quicker without Lasix,” he argues. “Lasix can dehydrate horses pretty badly, and then it takes more time for them to recover. So if you've got the right horse, and don't think Lasix is necessary, you can run them back quicker. When I was a claiming trainer, a lot of the horses we would claim were extremely dehydrated. We'd hydrate them, lower or eliminate the Lasix, and they'd run better.”

With his willingness to experiment, McPeek has been a fascinated observer and/or participant in the diverse racing theaters of Europe, Australia and South America. He was ahead of the curve, certainly, in sending runners to Britain. Once upon a time even Wesley Ward had to ask McPeek how it all worked over there. (McPeek told him not to worry about the detail. “Bring a fast horse,” he said. “You'll be okay.”)

But patrons may sometimes be as reluctant as rivals to depart from orthodoxy. To that extent, they can be emboldened by McPeek's willingness to retain some equity in his purchases. For instance, he owned a quarter of Hard Buck (Brz) (Spend A Buck)–the first horse he took over the pond, for the G1 King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Diamond S. at Ascot in 2004. He ran second at 33-1.

“I would rather have 10% ownership than a commission,” McPeek explains. “And then obviously I have to pay 10% of the bills. So it doesn't do me any good to buy an average horse, or to keep one. And that also gives me a bit of leverage and trust in the sense that they can say, 'Hey, why's he doing this if he's going to incur part of the cost, of the trip or entry fee or whatever?' So I think a lot of my clients feel comfortable with me having a stake in the game.”

His curiosity about other Turf environments was first stimulated as a college freshman at the University of Kentucky. He was a hometown boy, used to come to Keeneland with his grandfather on Saturdays. The old man liked a bet and young Kenny could study his beloved pedigrees. Then, Sundays, he would come back after church with his grandmother–who only passed away last year, at 104-for kids' pony rides. McPeek would ride all afternoon–and the guy would get mad at him for running his ponies into the ground. Now he was supposed to be reading for his degree in business administration, but had found an archive of old Turf periodicals in the library basement.

“By the time I graduated, I had read them all,” he says. “I started in 1902 and worked all the way through. I was an avid reader about the history of the sport: Mahmoud, Ribot, Nearco. Before I ever handled a thoroughbred, I knew quite a lot about the bloodlines.”

He was duly fascinated to visit England, as cradle of the breed, and to observe the variety of facilities and methods used there. Sure enough, he again swam against the local tide when establishing his own training center at Magdalena Farm, outside Lexington, which features a 12-furlong turf gallop.

“I built it to give horses a change of scenery,” he explains. “One of the problems here is that we go left all the time. All the time. We need somewhere we can go right, every now and then, because I think horses fatigue by constantly going left. You can see it when they fall off form. And the racetrack's also a bit of a 24/7, 365-day program. So we've been able to utilize Magdalena just to change their mindset and relax.”

But what really crowns McPeek's propensity to swim against the tide is his record prospecting the sales. Noble's Promise (Cuvee) was a typical McPeek project: a $10,000 weanling, he won a Grade I at two before running fifth both in the GI Kentucky Derby and the G1 St James's Palace S. Most famously, it was McPeek who found Curlin for just $57,000 at the 2005 September Sale. At that time, he happened to be taking a break from training, which is always a bittersweet reflection, but how many full-time agents have found a dual Horse of the Year for that kind of money?

“When I go to auction, okay, I might not always have the biggest budget,” he says. “And I do still have a little envy for guys that do. But if I outsmart them, buy the right horse for the right price, then I can be competitive.

“My first yearling budget was $6,000. I have this base of clients that still want me to buy the bargain, people I've always worked for, and I'm not going to turn my back on them now. They need me to work the last session of the Keeneland Sale as well as the first. And enjoy doing that. There's a bigger rush, or bigger satisfaction, buying a horse for a modest number and beating the game at a different angle. And actually there's pressure, having a horse that you gave too much for. The failure, the fall-off, is a lot more painful.”

McPeek has a virtually photographic memory of the horses he has trained. Every horse that enters his barn, he pieces together pedigree and conformation and running style. Even when he only had claimers, he would go to the paddock before stakes and ask himself what had qualified these horses as superior athletes; and to see how the best sires and broodmare sires stamped their stock. After 38 years with a license, that builds up to quite a matrix.

“There is a rhyme and a reason to the riddle,” he insists. “Really there's something to it. And we've got a pretty serious system by now, for how we squeeze them down. The hip is a big deal. Never seen a top horse that didn't have a great hip. Never seen a top horse that had a bad hind leg. Just doesn't happen. Then balance, and shoulder, there's a lot of moving parts there. But you never know. What's the old saying? 'Buying yearlings is getting married. You don't know how it turned out for two or three years.'”

The reason he never got to handle Curlin? That spring, they had given his mother six months to live.

“My mom was my idol,” he says. “And she was really sick. She needed help. She needed doctors, she needed estate planning. And that turned into another of those things that kind of kick you in the head and say, 'Hey, wait, time out. What's important?' At that time I had well over 100 in training, in Chicago and New York and Kentucky. But it was time to deal with some real-life stuff.”

He was only away for nine months, but in that time he didn't just straighten everything out for his mother and find Curlin. He also bought Magdalena.

“I'd never have bought the farm if I hadn't had time to step back a little, clear my head, get a good picture of what I wanted to do, and then go at it again,” he says.

So this was a second prompt, after his health drama a decade previously, to maintain perspectives on the essential frivolity-a bunch of brown animals running in circles-of our professional obsession.

“Yeah,” McPeek reflects. “Makes you more patient, I think. Certainly you don't get so upset about things that are insignificant. I still got to worry about the payroll, the worker's comp, all those details. But that's why I like having some assistants that have a little age on them: experienced guys that are calm, and understand what they need to do. I have a group that I can trust, we talk about every horse every day, and then they carry out a lot of the game plan.”

He wasn't always so chilled.

“When I was young, I was in the barn every day and an absolute terror to work for,” he admits. “I was so picky, nobody was allowed to leave until everything was perfect. Then I came up with my first Derby horse, in 1994-95, and actually I had that ruptured appendix while I was training him.”

That was Tejano Run (Tejano), a $20,000 yearling who came through and beat all bar Thunder Gulch.

“And he took me from 25 horses to 75,” McPeek recalls. “I was ill all through that time. But then I figured out that you can't pretend you're a better trainer than anybody else. Your really, really good trainers know how to get good horses; and they recognize a good horse when they get one. But there's an old saying, 'Win like you're used to it, and lose like you like it.' So you don't get too high when you win; and don't get too low, when you lose. It's a very humbling business. Win a big one on Friday, lose a bunch Saturday, and you're back to work again on Sunday.”