By Bill Finley
There were 13 graded stakes races run in North America Saturday and the combination of Bob Baffert, Chad Brown, Steve Asmussen, Brad Cox and Mark Casse won eight of them. That's three Hall of Famers and two future Hall of Famers. Not that any of this should come as a surprise. The so-called super trainer stables seem to only be getting bigger and more powerful by the day, leaving everyone else to fight over the leftover scraps.
So what chance did Jason Cook have in the GII John A. Nerud S. at Belmont? He has a four-horse stable and in the 34 years he's been training, had never won a graded stakes race.
Now he has.
Three Technique (Mr. Speaker), a horse Cook claimed for $40,000, won the seven-furlong sprint by 3 3/4 lengths, beating, among others, horses trained by Todd Pletcher and Bill Mott.
“To tell you the truth, it didn't sink in until later,” Cook said. “But it was great to win a graded stakes. That's what make this sport so great. Anybody can win on any given day. That's why we run them.”
That Cook has persevered the way he has is admirable. For the last 11 years, he has raised his daughter Peyton by himself. Cook's wife Tracey died from sepsis when Peyton was just 2 1/2 years old. He has had to balance being a single parent, taking his daughter to her soccer games and attending parent-teacher conferences with training horses. He admits it hasn't been easy and that he hasn't been able to devote all his time to training.
“I have raised my daughter by myself,” the 49-year-old Cook said. “That's one of the reasons things have been pretty slow for me. I'm spending a lot of my time going to her soccer games. There are trade offs in life.”
Cook grew up on the racetrack. His father Lois Cook was a jockey who won the 1957 Kentucky Oaks with Lori-El and finished tenth in the 1955 Kentucky Derby. Jason Cook started out as a hotwalker when he was 13 and took out his trainer's license when he was 17. He won his first race in 1993 when he was just 19.
“I never really thought about doing anything else other than training,” Cook said. “It was what I wanted to do when I younger. At that age, you think being a trainer is the greatest thing in the world. You find out it's not. Its not as easy as you thought it would be.”
He won three stakes in 1996 and another in 1997, but his win totals remained modest. Based on wins, his best year was 2008 when he won 18 races. There have also been plenty of years like 2020, when he went 1-for-19, and 2018 when he was 1-for-24. He said he never got discouraged, but the right horses never seemed to find their way into his barn.
“There are a lot of capable people that given the chance might be the next big trainer,” he said. “There's somebody training horses somewhere out there not doing any good and the reason why is they don't have the stock that allows them to show their talent. It all comes down to the horse. You have to have the horses.”
But he says he can see why so many owners flock to the same top five or six trainers.
“Those people who have those big stables, I've never begrudged them,” Cook said. “Todd Pletcher, Bill Mott, they are at the top of the game because they produce very good results. You can't be mad at somebody because of their success.”
To help make ends meet over the years, Cook would haul horses, something he no longer does. His main client was Dale Romans.
“That was something I did to help me make a living,” he said. “I used to go to all the stakes races for Dale. I trained a few horses, I hauled horses for Dale. That's how I got by.”
In the fall of 2021 Cook, who had just two winners on the year at the time, was surprised to see Three Technique show up in a $40,000 claimer at Churchill. Four starts earlier, he had finished third in the same John A. Nerud S. for trainer Jeremiah Englehart and owner Bill Parcells's August Dawn Farm. Just prior to the claiming race, he RNA'd for $47,000 at the Keeneland November Breeding Stock Sale.
“It looked like they were giving up on him,” Cook said. “Yes, I was worried that it was a suspicious drop in class.”
But to be able to acquire a horse for $40,000 that had, only a few months earlier, hit the board in a graded stakes race was something Cook and owners David Miller, Eric Grindley and John Werner couldn't resist. They weren't alone. There were 27 claims put in for Three Technique that day.
“Someone asked me what did you see in this horse to claim him,” Cook said. “I just got lucky and hit the lottery.”
Three Technique lost his first five races for Cook, but broke through to win last year's Knicks Go S. at Churchill Downs at 36-1, giving Cook his first stakes win in 25 years. He would go on a six-race losing streak before winning a May 27 allowance at Churchill. Cook couldn't decide between the Nerud and the July 2 Hanshin S. at Ellis Park, the same race in which he almost beat Cody's Wish (Curlin) last year, losing by just a neck. He decided on the Nerud because he thought his horse preferred one turn.
Three Technique | Joe Labozzetta
Prior to the Nerud, he had never started a horse at Belmont. His lone starter in New York had come in a 1997 claiming race at Saratoga.
“I'm going to try and buck the trend and win one in New York,” Cook said prior to the race. “My dad was a jockey and I like history and that track has a lot of history. My dad was one of the leading riders in the country in the '50s.”
With Javier Castellano aboard, Three Technique won comfortably, looking like a horse who can hold his own against top sprinters.
“I just got to sit back and watch,” Cook said. “The horse had to do all the hard work. He is a very determined horse and he always runs his race.”
One of the first calls he got after Three Technique crossed the wire was from Peyton. She usually joins her father at the track whenever he has a horse in a race, but she didn't make the trip to New York.
“This was one of the few trips she didn't make,” Cook said. “She was home with some friends. She was so excited. She was crying and screaming she was so excited. I wish she would have been here.”
Cook isn't sure where Three Technique will run next. One concern he has is that the horse doesn't like the heat, which could be a factor later this summer in places like Saratoga. That's a problem for another day. For now, he's going to sit back and relax and enjoy the day he beat the big boys.
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