Kentucky Derby hero’s small-time owner-breeder Perry Martin tells Steve Dennis about his horse of a lifetime – and opens up about what he describes as a ‘labour of lost love’
USA: He was and is a dream of a horse, in so many ways. California Chrome arose from humble beginnings, blessed with dreamboat looks and a charismatic can-do, will-do attitude, and his unlikely pathway to glory made him the racing embodiment of the American Dream, his journey following the same trajectory as that fabled yearning shared by so many millions.
Now his joint-owner/breeder Perry Martin has written the inside story of his horse, piecing together the fragments like a man who keeps a notepad on his bedside table to scribble down his dreams as he wakes up, and then finds they have come true. California Chrome: Our Story is a good book, an absorbing read, but one also marbled with a dark vein of sorrow, as Martin explains.
“The book is best described as a labour of lost love,” he says. “My wife Denise and I had been talking over a book about California Chrome for some time, something to set the record straight about Chrome and detail what it was like to own a champion racehorse.
“When Denise died suddenly last June, there was a large hole in my life that I decided to fill by working on achieving the goals we had set for our ‘retirement’. The five-month effort to write the book, our story and his, really helped me start to heal emotionally.”
California Chrome did it all
The public story of California Chrome needs little retelling, although the process is a luxurious diversion that encourages repetition. The hero is a copper-coated ball of muscle with four white socks and a sprawling white blaze, cheaply bred by a couple of racing rookies in Martin and his partner Steve Coburn. They started out as two of many in a racing syndicate and soon wanted more from the sport, so they bought cheaply one of the mares they had previously co-owned and sent her to a young, inexpensive stallion.
From the union between Lucky Pulpit and Love The Chase came a horse who would win 16 races, including two of the world’s most prestigious contests, earn $14.7 million in prize-money – on his retirement a record for a US-trained horse but one now surpassed by Arrogate – and be taken to the hearts of the racing public like few others have been. California Chrome did it all.
In 2014 he won the Kentucky Derby and two years later won the Dubai World Cup, two of his seven top-level successes that also included the Preakness Stakes and the Santa Anita Derby. Of all his high days, though, it’s Chrome’s victory in the 2016 Pacific Classic that Martin recalls with the greatest affection.
“I was feeling very good, as my stress level was low,” he recalls. “I visited Chrome at the barn at Del Mar in the morning and he was feeling very strong that day. With the wonderful scenery and weather where the surf meets the turf in southern California, everything just seemed perfect. His easy five-length win was just the icing on the cake.”
Martin, 65, is a no-nonsense native of Chicago who was known as the quiet man beside the much more vociferous Coburn, but it takes little prompting for him to lyricise about California Chrome. Comparisons between the great horses are an everyday pastime, and Martin relishes the debate.
“How do you measure the greatness of horses?” he asks rhetorically. “Twice during his career Chrome won six races straight, one streak against his own age group across 2013-14 and the other against older horses in 2016. And I think he would have won the Triple Crown if he hadn’t been stepped on at the start of the Belmont Stakes [he finished fourth]. I would match him against anybody.
Adoring army of Chromies
“What made him great? It’s hard to say, but Chrome’s most important quality is that he is a very intelligent horse and learned to love human attention at an early age. As a result, he adopted behaviour that makes people happy – one example is turning toward clicking cameras and hamming it up for photographers.”
He certainly made a lot of people happy. His vast and adoring army of fans became known as the Chromies, and to them this big, flashy chestnut evolved into more than a horse, became a talisman whose power stretched beyond the white rails of the racetrack.
“The Chromies felt a special connection to him,” says Martin. “All the various Chrome ownership groups made allowances for access to the horse. There were dozens of calls and emails from Chromies whose dying wish was to pet Chrome or feed him a horse cookie. Our trainer Art Sherman and his crew, and Taylor Made Stallions, made those visits happen.
“Chrome was twice voted Horse of the Year by the professionals, but I am very proud that he is the only two-time winner of the Secretariat ‘Vox Populi’ award, which is voted on by the fans.”
An outsider in an insider’s sport
And talk about fans in high places. As the old aphorism has it, vox populi vox dei; the voice of the people is the voice of God.
Martin might have been a Chromie if circumstances had been different. He preferred to watch California Chrome’s races from the track apron with Denise, standing among the railbirds rather than being cloistered away in an executive box, and for all his top-level success considers himself an outsider in an insider’s sport.
His background is in analytics, he worked for the US Air Force’s testing laboratory in California before taking it over when the base closed, testing structures for flaws, improving reliability and saving lives in so doing.
Such a career leads irresistibly to the notion that Martin made a success out of failure, which is an apt description of what we are all trying to do in racing. He uses the analytical mind that underpinned his life’s work to focus sharply on racing, not always at a particularly flattering angle, as befits an outsider looking in.
US racing needs to be torn down and rebuilt correctly
“US racing needs to be torn down and rebuilt correctly from the bottom up,” he says. “There is no one thing that is going to fix the sport. Critical analysis may be exactly what racing needs; however, racing doesn’t think so.
“I have read articles that indicate syndicates are the salvation of racing because they bring more people into the sport. As I explain in the book, we used Blinkers-On syndicate as a sort of racing university. We got the full experience of racehorse ownership at a fraction of the price.
“A recent report stated that the average owner in the US can expect a return on his investment of 42 per cent – for every $100 put in you get $42 back. In my estimation, this is the root cause of why US racing is declining. My advice for prospective owners or breeders is to learn what you are getting into before you get into it.
“Middlemen are stripping out sponsorship money, media-contract money, wagering takeout etc and putting that toward corporate profits rather than purses. Horse owners need to reorganise the sport along the lines of other professional sports. No-one is working on this! All of today’s effort revolves around drug testing and cheating trainers. That won’t change the root cause of the decline.”
Chrome was not an average horse
Some will point out that Martin is not a good example, having owned the nation’s former leading earner who paid off at much more than 42% ROI. He accepts this view, but points out that he has also owned plenty of horses who have been very average indeed.
“Luckily for me, Chrome was not an average horse,” he adds. “If you treat horse racing as a hobby, the Internal Revenue Service will disallow your horse expenses. I very seriously treat horse racing as a business. There have been some very good years and I’ve written checks to the IRS exceeding $1m.
“The most exasperating thing, though, is that I can repeatedly point out the reality of the situation, but the industry keeps doing the same thing and expecting different results.”
Martin is steadily reducing his involvement in the US and expanding it in Japan, where the 11-year-old Chrome stands at Arrow Stud, and he derives considerable satisfaction from planning the matings for his broodmares each year.
California Chrome has been well supported by Japanese breeders, and Martin hopes for similar results to those produced by shuttling him for two years to Chile, where he was last year’s leading first-crop sire. Europeans will have an opportunity to see the Chrome genes in action this summer, as his two-year-old daughter Passion Tango will be in training at Rae Guest’s yard in Newmarket. The story, and the dreams, go on.
“I have owned a horse of a lifetime,” says Martin. “But Denise and I discussed this many times, and the greatest pleasure we got from him was visiting Chrome before he was Chrome, when he was called Junior. Before the crowds, before the big races, as a foal and yearling, we would spend as many weekends as we could at Harris Farms just being with him. It was time well spent.
“Of all the horses I’ve owned, Chrome is the only one I have called ‘my Derby horse’. We had high hopes for his brother Faversham but I never considered him in that regard. I am hoping again to have a horse I can look at and just know he is my Derby horse.”
If California Chrome’s career was a monument to the horse himself, Martin’s book is the inscription around the base of that monument, to inform and delight those who come late to the scene. Martin may have another Derby horse one day, but there will never be another Chrome.
California Chrome: Our Story by Perry Martin is available here
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