Major interview with expat Englishman who landed Breeders’ Cup Sprint with Straight No Chaser
He is full to the brim with it, full to bursting, as though he has drunk so deeply from the well of happiness that he couldn’t take another drop. Dan Blacker waits courteously for the first question and it acts as a spigot, brings an answer like a flood.
“I feel pretty good,” he says, and it sounds like it. “It’s slowly sinking in, the whole thing is so emotional. I’m just so grateful to all concerned, everyone at the barn, everyone who has been involved with me, with the horse.”
The horse? The swift-footed Straight No Chaser, who put Blacker on cloud nine with victory in the Breeders’ Cup Sprint at Del Mar this month, giving the expat Englishman the biggest win of his career by far and lavish validation for all the hard work and hard choices of his 13 years with a licence.
Blacker, 42, may have been made in England but he has flourished in the US, his accent the only thing untouched by life in the land of opportunity, his story the archetypal fable of a young man going west.
‘I love this country’
“This is why I love this country,” he says, evangelising like a Bible-belt preacher, sharing the rapture. “People are so much more open to giving youngsters a chance. I came to the States with barely a thousand pounds to my name and it’s been a hard slog at times, but even so it’s so much easier for a young trainer here than in Britain, it’s a much more forgiving process.
“I started out at Hollywood Park with three horses – if I had my time over again, knowing what I know now, I’d find some old trainer who was thinking about retirement, work for him for a year or two and then take over his barn.
“I asked the racing secretary at Hollywood for three stalls; I was friendly with Gary Stevens, asked him if he had any equipment I could borrow, he gave me some saddles and bridles; I asked a passing groom if he’d come and work for me. And that’s how I got started.”
That’s how that bit got started, but Blacker had always been cut out for this sort of angle. His father is renowned equine sculptor Philip Blacker, a former jump jockey who finished third on the stalwart Royal Mail in the 1981 Grand National.
Blacker jnr did a little show jumping in his youth and rode out for local trainer Peter Monteith in the mornings before lectures at Edinburgh University, majoring in horses rather than in his course on environmental geoscience. On graduation, the inevitable big question remained unanswered.
“I didn’t really know what I wanted to do,” he says. “Should I get a proper job?”
Flying start at Flying Start
A proper job; anathema. Fortunately, help was at hand in the form of the Darley Flying Start programme, an international educational institution, a skeleton key that opens doors in every corridor of the racing world, saving the hopeful and the wistful from the looming spectre of a ‘proper job’.
One of Blacker’s placements on the scheme was in the US, and he saw the light at Churchill Downs on Kentucky Derby day in 2006, the year of Barbaro.
“I knew I wanted to be in racing, around horses, but when I was in the UK the prospect of training never took hold,” he says.
“But when I came to the US I fell in love with the idea, and that Derby day was the moment it really grabbed me that I wanted to train in America. If it hadn’t been for the Flying Start, I wouldn’t be here today.”
Blacker followed his star to California, worked as assistant to Richard Mandella and then Tom Albertrani before stepping into the unknown with those three horses at now-defunct Hollywood Park. He is now based at Santa Anita, has 30 horses in the barn, and he and wife Christina – an analyst and presenter for FanDuel TV – are quite the golden racing couple of the Golden State.
Naturally, though, life as a work-your-way-up trainer has not been all sunshine and Breeders’ Cup blanket flowers.
‘Many more downs than ups’
“Over the years it has been hard, mentally, to stay positive. There are so many more downs than ups,” he says. “It takes so long to build up a barn, it can really get to you.
“If you get a good horse you think ‘can I take it to the top?’ and then if you don’t you start thinking ‘am I the problem?’ You have to push those thoughts down.
“I want to make my horses stakes horses and it’s hard, all about bringing the best out of every horse. It took ten years and then Hit The Road came along, my first Grade 1 winner [2021 Frank E. Kilroe Mile] and I thought that nothing could get better than that.
“It was a huge boost for my confidence, for everyone in the barn. The next goal was to get a G1 on dirt, prove myself as a dirt trainer which, obviously, is really important over here. But I never dreamed it would be in the Breeders’ Cup – Todd Pletcher, Bob Baffert, Chad Brown, they have hundreds of horses, so what chance have I got?”
As it turned out he had a 6-1 chance, the well-fancied Straight No Chaser finishing off to great effect under John Velazquez to claim the $2m Sprint in the final strides, stopping the clock a second short of the 51-year-old track record.
Perhaps it was appropriate that the lightly raced five-year-old was the one to give Blacker his breakthrough score as he has been a searching test of his trainer’s nerve and patience, coming back from a year’s absence to show the form of his life this fall.
“He is naturally really talented, but not the most straightforward of horses,” says Blacker. “As a two-year-old he needed time, and didn’t make his debut until July of his three-year-old year. But it was already apparent that he could be the best I’d had, some mornings I couldn’t believe the stopwatch.
“Overall he is pretty sound, and when things have come up I’ve always given him time. After his win at Pimlico in May last year [G3 Maryland Sprint] he was in line to be part-sold, went through a really thorough vetting process, PET scan on every joint, and we found a high-risk area, although he was nevertheless sound.
“I gave him a three-month break, rescanned him. I thought he needed more time, gave him another two months off, and after that he was perfect.
That unquantifiable ‘something’
“He has quite a light frame for a sprinter. He’s a scopey type, and allied to the physical side he has a wonderful enthusiasm for the job, a great heart, that unquantifiable ‘something’ that good horses possess.”
Blacker calls him a great workhorse, says he’ll do too much if you let him, and it must have taken plenty of mental fortitude on his part to leave this game-changer in the bullpen for such an extended period of recovery.
The patient approach has provided microshare ownership group MyRacehorse with another major triumph following the Preakness victory of Seize The Grey, and there is more to come from Straight No Chaser.
“The idea is to keep him in training, which is very exciting for all of us,” says Blacker. “We’ll let him tell us what he’s ready for, but those big-money races in Saudi Arabia [Riyadh Dirt Sprint] and Dubai [Golden Shaheen] are certainly part of the plan.”
Blacker’s Breeders’ Cup success was made more enjoyable, if that is possible, by its location, as he is a great advocate for Californian racing, keen to promote its virtues that for him easily outweigh the relatively skinny purse-money compared to casino-driven jurisdictions.
It was also a redemptive coda to a year that began with the wrong sort of headlines. Blacker was given a 90-day suspension and fine for multiple violations of a regulation concerning the reporting of pre-workout veterinary examinations, with his assistant Juan Landeros temporarily replacing him on the licence.
He has admitted full culpability for the infractions, and the black mark on his public record is a scar that has not yet healed over. Blacker is not wary of expressing what he feels, how he feels, his emotional candour almost un-English in its directness, and this episode evidently affected him deeply.
Expensive clerical error
“It was a clerical error at the barn and completely my responsibility,” he says. “It was heartbreaking, though, in the way it was written about. Not everyone knows me, not everyone knows what I’m like, but everyone knows this, and I can’t get away from it now.
“A journalist from the Los Angeles Times made it into a horse welfare issue, and then it got out of the racing bubble, people from my daughters’ schools were talking about it. It’s very demoralising.
“But I try to stay positive, and I didn’t lose an owner over it. Thing is, Google my name and that suspension comes up top of the list. It was a tough pill to swallow but I’ve accepted it and tried to move on.”
Straight No Chaser’s exploits should at least give any subsequent Google search results a rosier appearance, and the next time Blacker snr has a chunk of bronze awaiting the muse he could do worse than add the likeness of a Breeders’ Cup Sprint hero to a praise-winning portfolio that includes Northern Dancer, Red Rum, Makybe Diva and Desert Orchid. There was no family reunion in the winner’s circle at Del Mar, but the phone rang.
“Dad and I talked just after the race, and it was really special,” he says. “It was a shame that he couldn’t be there, but he was proud of me and what I’d achieved. I even got an email from Doreen Monteith [Peter’s widow] sending congratulations. People don’t forget.”
Blacker never will. Eventually it will sink in, move down inside away from where it is now, so close to the surface that it bubbles out uncontrollably, and one day this may seem a lesser thing, perhaps through glorious repetition, perhaps when seen through the fog of time.
But not yet, not today, not tomorrow. “It’s just the stuff of dreams,” he says, his cup running over, and he’s right.
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