Trainer who broke his G1 maiden in Belmont Stakes is eyeing further success at Saratoga – but first comes Monmouth Park on July 20
We all start somewhere. Danny Gargan started his days as a G1-winning trainer in the most exhilarating fashion possible, in the Belmont Stakes at Saratoga with his stable star Dornoch.
One being the loneliest number, Gargan already has designs on two, three, four, but there is time yet to reflect on his first Classic, his first G1 victory, his first time in the big time.
“It means everything,” he says, the thrill of it still deep in his voice. “I won a Classic race in my 12th year as a trainer, and so many guys train all their lives and never get one. It validates my methods, my choices. It’s so special.”
There will inevitably be an asterisk in the record books against this year’s Belmont because of the change of venue and distance – Saratoga, ten furlongs instead of Belmont Park, a mile and a half – owing to the reconstruction of its time-honoured home, but the race nevertheless had a bona fide winner in Dornoch, bred in the purple and hinting from his debut that he had the right stuff to fly high.
The brother to 2023 Kentucky Derby winner Mage blew the chance to emulate his sibling at Churchill Downs in May when finishing tenth, but Gargan’s faith never wavered. He knew Dornoch was special right from the start.
“Two months before he made his debut, I knew he was the best I’d trained,” says Gargan, 52. “He’s a big, beautiful horse, not like his brother at all, and I knew he’d need two turns to show his true self.
“He just couldn’t win from the one-hole at Churchill. He was checked after 100 yards, lost position and had a rough trip. Luis [Saez] came back and said ‘we’ll win the Belmont with what he showed despite getting that trip’ and that’s just what happened.
“He’s doing better now than he was going into the Belmont. His skin condition has cleared up, his quarter-crack has just about grown out and his feet are in good shape. He’s like an immature boy that has finally grown into his frame, and I’m confident we haven’t seen the best of him yet.”
It’s probably fair to say that we haven’t seen the best of the three-year-old colts as a whole, with the Triple Crown races shared three ways and no stand-out emerging from the series.
The division is up for grabs, too close to call, and Dornoch will head into the $1m Haskell at Monmouth Park on July 20 on a mission to cement his credentials against a hot field that could include Preakness winner Seize The Grey, Belmont runner-up Mindframe and last year’s champion juvenile Fierceness. Gargan can’t wait.
Something to aim at
“I’m excited about Fierceness being in the race because he’ll be on the pace and my horse likes to stalk, likes to have something to aim at,” he says. “He’ll sit half a length off Fierceness and run hard all the way down the stretch.”
Dornoch is a free-goer whose dull effort in the Blue Grass at Keeneland in April can be ascribed to Gargan’s decision to rate the colt, keep him away from the speed. That didn’t work; the pugnacious Dornoch likes to attack, and when a rival fights back he likes that even more. He re-rallied to see off Sierra Leone in the Remsen in December, and did the same when putting away Mindframe in the Belmont.
“He’s hard to pass,” says Gargan. “When he’s challenged, he re-engages. He has that grit, that mental toughness. Silver Charm had that, and although it was before my time I’m told Buckpasser was the same way. Hard to beat.”
Another factor in the Dornoch story, one that might have added a little pressure even as it ramped up the publicity, is the presence of former Major League Baseball All-Star Jayson Werth among the ownership collective.
Werth’s Two Eight Racing – his baseball jersey number – owns 10% of the colt, and the outfielder’s heartfelt admission that this Belmont victory was comparable to World Series success struck a chord outside the racing bubble.
“Racing needs celebrities like him, professional athletes like him,” says Gargan. “What he said came from the heart, and he’s in the sport because he truly loves the animals. Dornoch is his second-favourite horse, his favourite is the pony – Jayson likes to feed him peppermints. “He’s a great ambassador for the sport,” says Gargan.
“Dornoch is the first colt he bought into, I was introduced to Jayson in a bar and in the conversation I mentioned that Dornoch could be a Derby horse. Two drinks later, he came in for ten per cent.”
Great breakthrough
It was perhaps apt that the Belmont was the scene of Gargan’s great breakthrough, as his father Dan had a cameo role in the most famous Belmont of them all when riding Pvt. Smiles into a distant fourth place behind Secretariat in 1973.
Gargan snr died two years later, when his son was only four, but blood will out and the boy from Louisville was always destined to become a man of the racing world. He just had to work out how.
“I always loved horses, practically grew up on the backstretch at Churchill Downs, but I wasn’t the right shape to be a jockey,” he says. “And being a trainer takes money, so I couldn’t afford it, however much I wanted to.”
He bought experience by working for Hall of Fame trainer Nick Zito, worked so hard and well that he eventually became Zito’s assistant, but still lacked the finance to go it alone. A few years as a jockeys’ agent – “I loved doing that” – put him in the right spot in that regard and in 2013 he took the big leap into the unknown with a licence.
“I wanted to do it, and after I started I never wanted to stop,” he says. “It was in my blood. I wanted to prove that I could do it, and it’s all coming together now with some big horses running in some big races.”
Shifting emphasis
Four years ago Gargan made the decision to shift the emphasis away from claiming horses to buying at the sales and bringing on two-year-olds, a tack that plays to his strength as a trainer.
Patience is his virtue; he cites longevity of career as the way to increase earnings potential, and although slow and steady never won a horse race it has helped Gargan take his career to another level.
“I like to give my horses every chance to fulfil their potential,” he says. “I don’t overtrain my two-year-olds, and hopefully that helps them develop with age.
“I try to maximise every start they have, the objective being to make stakes horses of them, bring out the ability if it’s there.”
Gargan may have grown up at Churchill Downs but he is now established on the New York circuit, providing the time-honoured, logical tactic of following the money and the presence of the ‘best track man in the country’ Glen Kozak – whose business card reads more prosaically ‘NYRA Executive Vice-President, Operations’ – as reasons for upping sticks from Kentucky to his East Coast home.
New York racing is undergoing fundamental change at present, with a new Belmont Park rising from the rubble of the old one and Aqueduct set to close in 2026, and one of the manifestations of that change is the expectation that the new Belmont will race on Tapeta instead of dirt throughout the winter.
Gargan, who retains a small barn in New York during the winter months as well as a facility in Florida, sees the surface switch as an opportunity.
‘What do we have to lose?’
“Some people will cry about it but most people will adapt to it,” he says. “New York had to do something, there’s quite a lot of bad racing through the winter – and what do we have to lose?
“It could be good for New York breeders, because there are a lot of turf horses in training [the turf-synthetic crossover is effective] and they could have the option to breed a different type of horse, find new angles. Of course we’ll have to see what happens, but it could be a positive.”
Dornoch, naturally, is not the type of horse who will ever be affected by the change, and neither will Gargan’s other stable stars as he continues to upgrade his barn. He has big plans for G3 winner Society Man, who also flopped in the Kentucky Derby, which involve a warmer winter than anything downstate New York can offer.
“I’d like to run him in something like the Saudi Cup,” he says. “He’s a gelding who’ll be around for a few years and can run in some of those really big races. His next stop might be the Jim Dandy [July 27] or the West Virginia Derby [Aug 4] and I think he could give us a lot of fun as a four-year-old.”
Society Man is yet another product of Good Magic – Gargan is almost as strong an advocate for the stallion’s prowess as Vincent O’Brien was for Northern Dancer and Jim Bolger about Galileo – and so is the two-year-old filly Snowyte, one of a trio of unraced juveniles along with Dragoneer and Gellhorn who Gargan reckons have “big potential” over the coming months.
Captivated by recent past
They are the future, but Gargan is still understandably captivated by the recent past. There’s hardly anyone out there who doesn’t love Saratoga, but for Gargan it will always be close to his heart as the scene of his belated coming-of-age as a trainer.
“Look, I love Keeneland and Churchill Downs, of course I do, but Saratoga is the greatest place for the races,” he says.
“The whole town revolves around it. Everyone gets it. They know the significance, and to win the Belmont at Saratoga was super-special, as good as it gets. From the farm-like, laid-back environment of the backstretch to the atmosphere of the town in the evening, it’s special.
“On the evening of the Belmont we went to Siro’s outside bar, walked in and everyone started clapping, congratulating us. It was amazing.”
In reviewing his breakthrough Gargan mentions a flood of names, vital staff, important owners, people who have helped lift him to where he is now. In this way he sounds a little like Aidan O’Brien, whose roll call of appreciation for the team at home after every major victory is now a tradition.
O’Brien has won more than 400 G1s. Gargan will never win that many, but one is a start, and it is taking him swiftly in the right direction.
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