Steve Dennis interviews the Florida Derby-winning trainer, who recently won the Gulfstream Park champion meet title and now has his sights set on Churchill Downs
Pop quiz. Name the only trainer with a runner in this year’s Kentucky Derby to have trained a Triple Crown winner. Blank expression? Looking for Bob Baffert, to no avail?
The answer is Saffie Joseph Jr., whose Florida Derby winner White Abarrio is among the leading candidates for the ‘Run for the Roses’, and who became the youngest trainer – just 22 – to scoop the Bajan version of the Triple Crown when Areutalkintome swept the board at the Garrison Savannah in 2009.
The past is a foreign country, literally in this case, and right now Joseph is firmly in the present, just three weeks out from the Kentucky Derby. He doesn’t actually say that White Abarrio consumes his every waking hour, but anyone can tell. After all, what would you expect from a 35-year-old with the biggest race of his life on the horizon?
Doing things effortlessly
“White Abarrio does things so effortlessly, just the way he moves in the mornings,” says Joseph, lifted to lyricism by his elegant grey colt.
“He had a problem before the Holy Bull, he had an issue before the Florida Derby, but he overcame them and won his races well.
“Quality horses can do that,” he goes on. “With an average horse, everything has to fall into place. Good horses can perform in adversity, run a big race despite everything. With a clear run to Churchill Downs, perhaps there’s an even bigger performance in store.”
Sentiment is unceremoniously set aside, Joseph happy to admit that White Abarrio is a much better horse than Areutalkintome, who put him in the record books more than half his lifetime ago. He was almost an old hand at the game even then, having trained his first runner at 18, following in the footsteps of his trainer father Saffie senior.
Areutalkintome, with his Taxi Driver name, with his victories in the Barbados Guineas, the Barbados Midsummer Creole Classic and the Barbados Derby, with his remarkable versatility that brought him high-class success from five furlongs to a mile and a quarter, didn’t tilt the racing world off its axis.
But the horse did open up the world to his young trainer, a third-generation horseman – grandfather Attie was a prominent owner in Barbados – who had naturally spent his childhood helping out with the horses in his father’s barn.
“I always wanted to work with horses, as long as I can remember,” says Joseph. “At first I wanted to be a jockey, but along the way that goal became unrealistic, so training was the obvious thing to do.”
Areutalkintome put him on the map, and then helped redraw it. Joseph had attended university in Florida – or, more accurately, attended Calder and Gulfstream Park – and with the unsinkable optimism of youth planned to return to train in the US, to build a second empire with Areutalkintome as his stable star. Best-laid plans, and all that.
He recalls: “There was an accident in training, a horse galloped into him, and the other horse died but Areutalkintome recovered from his injuries, although he had to have almost a year and a half off and was never quite the same again.
“That made my decision to go to the States easier because I didn’t have him to win races at home. It gave me the push I needed, made me realise that it was time to try something new. My father was against me going – he said it would be hard starting over, but I had made up my mind.”
Very small fish in a very big pond
In early 2011, Joseph waded into the deep end, becoming a very small fish in a very big pond. He describes training in Barbados as being one step removed from a hobby, and now here he was going up against the hardened career professionals on the Florida circuit. His father, with the hard-earned wisdom of age, was right.
“I brought over two horses,” says Joseph, amused at his bravado. “Then I bought a handful more, but I couldn’t get any stalls. I used to go and see the racing secretary at [now closed] Calder every week and ask to rent some stalls, and he’d always tell me they were full, and to come back next week. Next week kept coming around, and still no stalls. It took three months of asking before I could get going.
“When you’re young you have a dream, naive maybe, of being the best – and then you find out that no-one knows you, no-one notices you, no-one cares who you are. You think that you’re capable, you know you can do it, but getting the chance to prove it is very hard.
Joseph trained ten winners in his first year and 13 the next, but was still bumping along in the teens after six seasons. Self-doubt began to replace self-confidence and, like the devil on the other shoulder, started whispering in his ear. Another conversation with his father, one to which he paid slightly more attention, proved crucial.
“He told me that I’d come too far to go back, that he believed in me, that he had faith in what I was doing,” says Joseph. “And I stayed, and things began to pick up. More owners, more horses, more winners. We went from 19 winners in 2016 to 57 winners two years later, and then the following year my first Grade 1 winner [Math Wizard, Pennsylvania Derby], and we are still moving forward.”
That ‘we’ is of course Joseph and his team, but also his father, who acts as a sounding board, a font of experience and advice. Disagreements are common, but accord is never far away.
“We think the same way about horses,” says the son. “We both believe that keeping them mentally strong, happy in what they do, is the most important thing. We argue sometimes, but always end up on the same page.
‘I’m living his dream’
“He really enjoys what we’re doing here. He’d have loved to do what I’m doing. I suppose, really, I’m living his dream.”
This might be the year that all the dreams come true. This month Joseph clinched his first training title in the championship meet at Gulfstream Park, ending the phenomenal 18-year winning streak of Todd Pletcher, a reign that started when Joseph was still a boy in Barbados. To beat such a man made success all the sweeter.
“Anyone coming up in the world looks up to Todd,” he says. “To beat him really meant a lot. Maybe one day, you never know, I can get 17 more championships. And the icing on the cake was White Abarrio winning the Florida Derby.”
Now, perhaps, Joseph can have that cake and eat it. He has had a Kentucky Derby runner before, Ny Traffic finishing eighth behind Authentic in the strange, jumbled year of 2020, but in White Abarrio he has a serious contender for America’s greatest race.
“He had a wide trip last time and was still able to win well,” he says, his voice rising with the excitement of it. “We’ve spaced out his races, the Holy Bull then the Florida Derby, and the Kentucky Derby will be his third start of the year, just right, and if he can move forward two or three lengths …”
The rest goes unsaid, but not undreamed of. That vision has been nurtured since the days at Calder when there was no room at the inn, since the golden afternoon when Areutalkintome provided Joseph with that quiz-time quirk that sets him apart from his peers on the Derby trail.
“My dream is to win the Kentucky Derby,” he says. “To win it, with my father alive to see me win it.”
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