Trainer, Agent, Vet: Kimmel A Horseman Without Limits

John Kimmel had $25,000, and wanted an Exclusive Native filly. But he had to pass up his first choice, at Fasig-Tipton in 1978, after she went to $32,000. She turned out to be Genuine Risk.

A first experience to put most people off, right? Kimmel gives a wry chuckle and shakes his head.

“I'd have been ruined,” he says. “I was a sophomore in vet school. Can you imagine? I'd have been wrecked.”

As it was, he had proved his eye. He continued absorbing the bittersweet lessons routinely dispensed by Thoroughbreds; continued, very often, also to see his judgement ultimately vindicated by others–notably with Thunder Gulch, who began his career in his care. His latest contribution to another barn, however, was made entirely by design. For Kimmel was wearing a different hat, as bloodstock agent, when imploring Sean Flanagan to buy a son of McKinzie at OBS back in April. That colt, under the care of Chad Brown, has turned into GI Hopeful- winning 'TDN Rising Star' Chancer McPatrick.

For here is a man of many parts: trainer, agent, veterinarian, outdoorsman, dad; a man with the kind of hinterland that leaves him uncomplaining of his lot in the era of the supertrainer. The profession has changed enormously since he started out, in 1987. Kimmel is not interested in becoming a chief executive or delegator, with barns in different time zones. He wants two things: to know his horses inside out; but also to retain due perspective on that obsession, the kind you can always renew by riding surf or powder snow.

“I won seven training titles in New York,” he reminds us. “But when I did all that, it was with 44 horses. That was all you got. Woody Stevens, Sid Watters, P.G. Johnson, Allen Jerkens, those guys all had 44. I mean, that's hands-on training. You can't do that with 200, 400 horses: I don't give a damn who you are, there's no way you can do the exact same job. Basically, you have to rely on people that may or may not be as good as you. But for me, having a veterinary background, I can determine when things are in incipient stages. We can stop them now and not wait till the groom says, 'Wow this tendon, or this suspensory, is big…' That's if he could recognize it at all.”

The most he ever reached was 120. Today he must settle for barely a couple of dozen. Kimmel emphasizes his respect for those supervising more industrial operations, but doesn't envy them.

“It's a management skill, it's unbelievable,” he says. “But when I had more horses, I didn't enjoy it as much. There are other things that I enjoy in my life. I have kids. I'm an avid tennis player. You have 200 head of horses, you don't have a life. You have nothing but phones ringing, set lists, owners. I mean, come on. You don't think people get sour just doing that every day? Maybe that's why I'm not resentful. I don't really want to carry all that.”

It was the pioneer supertrainer, Lukas, who took over Thunder Gulch after his sale to Michael Tabor. Kimmel bought him as a 2-year-old for $125,000 (after he RNA'd for $120,000 at the Keeneland April Sale), but then his majority client's partners never came through. Pinhooker Ken Ellenberg, left holding 40%, told Kimmel to get started with the horse and meanwhile find someone to buy him out.

“But when I take the horse to Saratoga, he can't go a half in :50,” Kimmel recalls. “I just want to be able to tell the prospective purchaser that at least the horse can run–and I can't. But then I take him to the gate for the first time, and I'm shocked. He went like 1:01, a really big improvement. Went down to Belmont, worked him out the gate a second time: 59-and-change.”

They could sell him now, no problem. But having waited this long, Ellenberg said they might as well let it roll. They almost repented, when the horses had a nightmare trip when third on Belmont debut, but then he won his maiden, finished well for second in the GII Cowdin Stakes, and was sold outright for $475,000.

“Todd Pletcher was Lukas's assistant at the time, and I told him, 'Put a set of blinkers on this horse, he just looks at everything,'” Kimmel recalls. “And he just woke up. When he won, my 8-year-old comes up and goes, 'Oh, hey, that's a smart dad. Nobody sells Kentucky Derby winners.' But it did a lot for me, as far as people recognizing that I know what I'm doing when I represent people at the sales.”

Yes, he does–above all at the juvenile old sales, where he found Grade I winners like Twist Afleet ($70,000) and Premium Tap (bought for $60,000, sold on for $5.7m!); or others he picked out for his father Caesar, like Flat Fleet Feet ($32,000, sold for $2.3 million) and Fabulously Fast ($87,000, sold for $1.7 million).

Caesar! What a name, and what a guy! And as for Caesar's dad, Manny: that was where the Kimmels' Turf story began, Manny making a book at Saratoga and renting a house on Union Avenue.

“My dad was 15, had no license,” Kimmel explains. “But my grandfather would tell him, 'Caesar, drop me at the front gate, take the car over to the Gideon Putnam and pick me up after the last.' And that's how they spent the four weeks. Manny was a great numbers guy. He made, like, $3,000 to $5,000 a day, huge numbers in the early '40s.”

When the war came, Caesar joined the Marines, got posted to what was left of Pearl Harbor. On his return, he tried various jobs until Manny gave him a break.

“The story that is that this guy lost a parking lot to Manny, playing craps, on Kinney Street in Newark,” Kimmel explains. “So my grandfather gave that to my dad, to start the business that became Kinney Parking. And it grew and grew, they had parking in Manhattan, at Yankee Stadium, at JFK.”

Caesar played up the winnings, hooking up with partners from other businesses until they together took over the movie and record company Warner Brothers, creating Warner Communications.

“Their business was phenomenal,” Kimmel says. “They had Crosby, Stills and Nash; The Rolling Stones; Led Zeppelin. They signed all those guys. And their movie business, too: 'The Exorcist', 'Woodstock', so many good movies.”

Caesar owned a farm in Kentucky with Dr. Edwin W. Thomas, where they stood Our Native (third in Secretariat's Derby).

“And when I graduated vet school, in 1980, he wanted me to just go over there and put a shingle out,” Kimmel recalls. “And I said, 'Look, I can't just come to Kentucky and single-handedly start practice. So I went down to Florida instead, and really that was the start of everything.”

His first mentor was Dr. Melbourne B. Teigland of Teigland, Franklin and Brokken.

“He was a great man to work under,” Kimmel says. “They gave you a truck, gave you the drugs, and they gave you a long leash. Out you went into the field and you learned as you went. If you got in trouble, you could always get somebody on the radio to come over and help.”

After three years he went out on his own, but soon found racetrack practice too routine. Almost everything could be left to an assistant: shots, vaccinations, worming, the occasional X-ray or scope. So he started pinhooking yearlings, as a sideline, and bought a couple of mares. And finally a partnership with Dennis Drazin prompted a first experiment with training.

He had never even been an assistant trainer. What he'd done instead, however, was way better: he'd worked for a bunch of different trainers every week.

“And I thought to myself, if I can't do better than they're doing it, then I should hang it up,” he admits. “There were a lot of guys I worked with, for years and years, that just didn't really have the grasp of horsemanship that I thought they'd need, to be good in their trade.”

All the way through, his own brand of horsemanship proved equally tailored to the sales ring and the racetrack. He bought a Deputy Minister filly at Keeneland in 1997, for Robert Waxman, and trained her to win the GII Demoiselle Stakes and miss her Grade I by a head. Better Than Honour subsequently proved one of the most important and valuable mares of the modern era. But the logical junction between his different skills, at the sales and on the racetrack, has always been the juvenile auctions-where he reckons to have found a dozen Grade I winners.

Chancer McPatrick | Sarah Andrew

“I've been an advocate of the 2-year-old market for a long time,” he says. “They show you that they can handle the intensity of what they're being asked to do. They show a degree of athleticism beyond just watching them walk. You can actually listen to their respiratory tract. Then add all the other technologies out there, the ultrasounds and radiographs and cardiac evaluations. You get so much more information about a horse's ability to succeed on the racetrack.”

Long before anyone else he was timing gallop-outs. In the old days, they would breeze in pairs. Now, of course, they go much faster–not without price, as Kimmel concedes.

“They get pressed pretty damned hard,” he acknowledges. “And that certainly contributes to a high attrition rate. Horses do show the consequences of being asked to do something that they'll probably never do again. But the ones that do hold up, that jump through all those hoops and barrels, you have to say they can handle what's asked of them when racing.

“So you've got to know who you're dealing with. Consignors that I'm familiar with, they're going to tell you the story: if they've had issues, if they've had to do any inter-articular work just to get them there. Things that you'd like to know before you jump in on one.”

One smaller consignor whose work he respects is Saul Marquez of Caliente Thoroughbreds. And it was in his draft at OBS that Kimmel and colleague Nick Sallusto found Chancer McPatrick, who is targeting the GI Champagne Stakes on Saturday.

“The horse had so much class about him,” he remembers. “And his breeze was phenomenal. He worked in :21 flat. And he went out the next eighth in :11.44. So that means he went :32-and-two. And the next one, he shaded :45; and five-eighths, :59. So when you clock hundreds of horses, and you see one do something like that…”

He was going to take a bit of buying. But Flanagan was due a change of luck after being thwarted only at $1.3 million for a son of Flatter in the same ring the previous month.

Would the funds even have been made available for this one, had he managed to land the Flatter colt? “Good question!” exclaims Kimmel. “We'd loved that colt. But every time we bid, the other guy came right back. So we're really looking for a high-end colt, at that point, and wondering would we ever get one.”

But Flanagan was game and this time saw off all competition at $725,000. They gave the horse a month, sent him to Brown. Whenever Kimmel saw his fellow trainer, he'd ask how the McKinzie colt was doing. “Nice horse,” Brown would say with a shrug. But when they got to Saratoga and Kimmel asked again, Brown said: “I'd give 30 horses for this one.”

Kimmel only glimpsed the horse working once at the Spa, and gleaned little.

“With Chad, everything works in hand, in company, :49,” Kimmel marvels. “It's incredible to watch. They'll have six sets of twos, and they're not even done with the first hitting the wire when the second are already starting. I don't know how they do it. Me, I like to watch everything: the gallop out, how they pull up. But he's done a great job with the horse.”

On his debut, they had an early fright. For a second Kimmel thought he might even have taken a bad step.

“Maybe the kickback hit him in the face,” Kimmel speculates. “Head goes up in the air, he loses his action behind, he's last. Well, this is not going to be good. So anyway, he gets himself together, and here he comes at the half-mile pole. Turning for home, he's still four, five lengths behind, and he's wide–but he's picking them off, his stride is super long, and within the last 1/16th, he makes up three lengths and draws off, like, wow.” (video).

But then look who's waiting for him in the Hopeful, odds-on after an eight-length romp on debut: the Flatter colt, since registered as Ferocious, a 'Rising Star' like Chancer McPatrick.

“And when that other horse came into the paddock, we see again that he's a very impressive physical specimen,” Kimmel recalls. “And then our horse gets hit coming out of the gate, the jock has to readjust his left iron, and he's last again. And taking a tremendous amount of dirt, going down the back side.”

But once again he started picking off horses.

“So here he comes rolling,” Kimmel continues. “It looks like he's going to run right by Ferocious. But Irad pulled to the outside and they re-engaged, had a good run all the way to the wire (video). They said that he lost a shoe, he's certainly a very formidable horse, and I think they're going to meet up again.”

The meeting is on hold until the Breeders' Cup at the earliest, as Ferocious goes in this Saturday's GI Claiborne Breeders' Futurity at Keeneland.

Kimmel stresses the value of his association with Sallusto.

“I've known Nick for a long time,” he says. “There's not too many people I have worked with that have very similar perspectives on evaluating horseflesh. He has a training center in Ocala, and prepares those horses well. His knowledge and mine mesh pretty well. I think we've actually learned things from each other that open up our perspective about what we can accept in a horse.”

The key to Kimmel's own outlook is that he can conflate so many different roles. How many trainers do their own scoping? How many can chart different physiological outcomes from training their horses the same way in different environments, on different surfaces? (Not many horse people, moreover, have spouses with such an intimate grasp of the animal, either: Kimmel's wife Dr. Jenifer Garber is also a veterinarian, deployed by one of the industry's elite programs for ultrasound monitoring of the young Thoroughbred in training.)

After decades pairing up sales ring principles to racetrack practice, it's not as though Chancer McPatrick is some flash in the pan. Lurking in his own barn, for instance, Kimmel has a Champagne Stakes rival for that colt in Vekoma Rides (Vekoma), found for $150,000 at OBS June and brilliant on his debut; while Grace and Grit (Munnings), another to win her sole start, heads for the postponed GII Miss Grillo Stakes.

“My horse numbers are not what they used to be,” Kimmel accepts. “The business model of a small stable is very tough. Many of my people have been with me 30 years. They feel comfortable, and they do a good job. I don't really want to tell them they got to go find work somewhere else. But there'll come a day when the rewards are not worth the aggravation and losses.

“I made my whole reputation buying and developing horses. Probably nobody knows my story all that well, but I like to think I'm an honest guy and I like to represent people that appreciate what you bring to the table. There's plenty of people that are misrepresented in this game. So if I can help somebody that would appreciate that direction, I'm their guy.”

Ultimately, talking over the old times just reminds him how lucky we all are to eke out a living with these animals.

“When you look back on it, it went by real fast,” he says. “And I really wouldn't change all that much.”