Post by Christine on Aug 20, 2008 13:11:09 GMT -5
Sunday, December 25, 2005 - The Courier-Journal
Horse Rescuer - A home for Old Friends - Ex-movie critic founded farm as haven for retired racehorses
By Chris Poynter cpoynter@courier-journal.com
MIDWAY, Ky. -- The sun's amber rays filtered through the cracks of the old wooden barn when Michael Blowen stepped inside, a groom's brush in his right hand.
Sunshine Forever, a 20-year-old champion thoroughbred, needed grooming.
It was 8:30 a.m., guests were scheduled to arrive in three hours at Old Friends Farm, and Sunshine had mud caked thickly on his legs and mane.
"Hey, buddy, let me brush this off you," Blowen said, his breath visible in the 25-degree winter as he rubbed down the stallion's muscular body, dust particles erupting into the air.
A handful of sliced carrots, the size of thick quarters, was Sunshine's reward, snatched from Blowen's outstretched palm.
Three years ago, Blowen -- after retiring as a movie critic for The Boston Globe -- founded Old Friends Farm as a haven for retired thoroughbreds.
Too many owners and breeders abandon their horses once they stop making money, Blowen said, a point painfully evident in 2002 when 1986 Derby winner Ferdinand was slaughtered in Japan.
"Without these horses, there is no sport, there is no industry," Blowen said. "At the end of their racing careers, they should be treated better."
And Blowen is one man trying to do that.
'A real, legitimate do-gooder'
After two decades of reviewing films and interviewing stars like Dustin Hoffman and Jack Nicholson, Blowen discovered his passion was no longer in journalism, but in horses in a Kentucky town, population 1,614, with no stoplight, no fast-food restaurants, no big-box stores.
"There are a lot of people who claim to want to do good in this business," said Kristie Jakeman, a horse owner and racing manager from Florida who supports Old Friends. "I can say Michael is a real, legitimate do-gooder. He's 100 percent committed to these animals."
Although some horse farms rarely open their gates and manicured pastures to picture-snapping outsiders, Blowen hosts anyone and everyone -- at no charge and for no salary.
During spring and summer, the tourists came in droves, 400 people a week from around the nation and world.
Sunshine Forever is one of 15 horses -- mares and stallions -- now retired at Old Friends, located on 25 acres at Hurstland Farm in Midway.
With eight wins in 20 starts, Sunshine earned more than $2 million on the track -- and raked in millions more when he was shipped to Japan to stand at stud.
But when he stopped breeding, the 1988 Eclipse winner for Outstanding Turf Horse was simply another animal that needed to be fed.
Blowen purchased Sunshine in 2004 for $10,000 and paid $18,000 to ship him back to the rolling landscape of Central Kentucky, where he was foaled.
"As a movie critic, I hated happy endings," Blowen said, sitting behind his desk, his ears sticking out from under his hunter-green Old Friends cap. "But I like to have a few in life."
Horses bought and donated
The horses that arrive at Old Friends come in two ways. Blowen, using an agent familiar with the global horseflesh trade, purchases some. He took out a loan, co-signed by his mother-in-law, to bring back some thoroughbreds.
Others, like Bonnie's Poker, the dam -- or mother -- of 1997 Kentucky Derby and Preakness winner Silver Charm, are donated.
Bill and Kristie Jakeman gave the broodmare to Old Friends after she suffered complications while delivering a Fusaichi Pegasus colt.
"My husband and I have been active for 15 years in the industry, and we have seen a change to more corporate farms, versus the old breeders, the mom-and-pop farms," Kristie said. "It's about the bottom line."
Old Friends, she said, is a place for racing fans "to get up close" to thoroughbreds, which they can't do at other farms.
Ruhlmann, an eight-time stakes winner, was donated to Old Friends this year by Jerry and Ann Moss, his original owners. The couple visited Ruhlmann at Old Friends the Thursday before this year's Kentucky Derby. Two days later, their horse, Giacomo, was draped with the Garland of Roses.
The Derby win, Blowen believes, was karma.
Drawn to the backside
Born in 1947 and raised in Connecticut, Blowen was not much of a horse fan as a child or young adult. Then, in 1981 when Blowen was 34, Robert Taylor, the Globe's arts editor, invited Blowen to the races at Suffolk Downs.
Opened in 1935, in the mud flats of East Boston, the Downs was Massachusetts' first major racetrack, but by the time Blowen visited, it was a horrid place, he said, with barbed-wire fencing and rough characters, often drunk, working the backside.
Horses featured in Suffolk races were cheap claimers or thoroughbreds that long ago should have been retired.
Blowen was so smitten his first day at the track -- he made money -- that he began studying the Daily Racing Form. He became a regular at Suffolk and every year would take a week off work and travel to Saratoga Racing Course, in New York, for opening week.
Eventually he decided that, if he wanted to improve his handicapping, he needed to learn about the horses themselves, their personalities, their strengths and weaknesses.
So, on a dreary day in February 1997, as snow and hail pelted Boston, Blowen walked into the bowels of Suffolk and asked trainer Carlos Figueroa, about whom Blowen had written a feature story, if he could work for him for free.
Yes, Figueroa said.
For a couple of years, Blowen awoke before dawn and rode the train to Suffolk, walking the horses and grooming them before heading to his job.
The experience, he said, made him a worse handicapper. He became emotionally attached to the horses and began betting from his heart, not his head. "It was flesh and blood, not just about numbers anymore," he said.
A career switch
Blowen also learned about the underworld of racing, where thoroughbreds were mistreated and often forced to race when they couldn't or shouldn't.
He saw hundreds of horses, no longer wanted or needed, loaded onto trailers and shipped off for slaughter. The deep guttural screams they made when being loaded -- seeming to know their fate, he believes -- still haunt him. "It was a horrible sound," he said.
In 1999, when the Globe announced it planned to reduce its work force, Blowen took a buyout, leaving the paper, as did his wife, Diane White, a columnist.
Blowen landed a job at the Thoroughbred Retirement Foundation, a charitable organization based in New Jersey. Founded in 1982, the foundation rescues horses and encourages people to adopt them.
The foundation runs The Secretariat Center adoption program at the Kentucky Horse Park and has a program at Blackburn Correctional Complex in Lexington, where inmates care for retired thoroughbreds.
Blowen moved to Kentucky in 2000, figuring the foundation needed to consolidate its efforts in thoroughbred country. He bought a house in Midway, across from Midway College, that overlooks a horse farm.
After 18 months at the foundation, he left, planning to finish a book he started years earlier.
That never happened. Instead, he decided to rescue thoroughbreds.
Horse friends help
His farm, named for the "Old Friends" photo book by equine photographer Barbara D. Livingston, is based at Hurstland, a breeding and boarding farm owned by Alfred Nuckols Jr., a fifth-generation horse farmer.
Three weeks after Blowen started Old Friends, news broke that Ferdinand had been slaughtered in Japan, sending ripples through the thoroughbred industry and grabbing headlines worldwide.
Old Friends operates solely on donations: Feed is provided for free by Triple Crown Senior Feed; blacksmith work is donated by farrier Jan Basson, veterinary care by Jeff Pumphrey and horse halters by Glen Castle.
Old Friends recently hired a full-time executive director, Maya DeRosa, whose main role is to raise money.
When Old Friends officially opened to tourists earlier this year, an average of 400 people visited each week from April through October.
The state recently awarded Old Friends a $50,000 grant to renovate an old tobacco barn into a home for the retired thoroughbreds.
The barn's stalls, of chain-link fence, will be replaced with more stately wooden stalls, with the horses' names on them.
Blowen also hopes to create a media center in the barn where people can watch races of the retired horses. A bookstore and gift shop are also planned.
One stall will be set aside, empty, in memory of Ferdinand, a plaque telling of his life and death.
The slaughter issue
Although Blowen's work has been praised by some in the horse industry, others don't agree with him that owners and breeders care only about money.
David Switzer, executive director of the Kentucky Thoroughbred Association, said many Kentucky farms set aside fields to pension stallions, gelding and mares.
"I can't speak about other parts of the world," he said.
The thoroughbred association favors a plan that requires the original owner and/or breeder to be notified before horses are slaughtered, Switzer said. The note would be attached to the horses' Jockey Club registration papers.
There is a temporary federal ban in the United States on slaughtering horses for human consumption. The ban will end Sept. 30 because it was attached to a one-year spending bill.
Supporters are pushing for a permanent federal ban.
Safety for a Derby winner?
Blowen's next goal is rescuing a Kentucky Derby winner. He's already tracking Alysheba, in Saudi Arabia, and Sea Hero and Strike the Gold, both in Turkey. He's also hoping to open a racing museum at Old Friends, featuring the races of the retired champions.
In early December, on the morning he groomed a muddy Sunshine Forever, Blowen led six people on a tour, including Lynn Niemeier of Daytona Beach, Fla.
Though she was raised in Kentucky, Niemeier had never been that close to champion thoroughbreds.
"We never expected to get out and see them," she said.
Before the tour ended, Blowen took the group, bundled in winter coats, scarves and gloves, to the Old Friends Cemetery. It sits beside the farm's office and already has three graves, including that of Fraise, who won the 1993 Breeders' Cup Turf.
Fraise died in November and during his funeral was toasted with Woodford Reserve Bourbon, distilled near Midway.
A tourist asked if all Old Friends horses would be buried there. "Yes," Blowen said, "and me, too.
Horse Rescuer - A home for Old Friends - Ex-movie critic founded farm as haven for retired racehorses
By Chris Poynter cpoynter@courier-journal.com
MIDWAY, Ky. -- The sun's amber rays filtered through the cracks of the old wooden barn when Michael Blowen stepped inside, a groom's brush in his right hand.
Sunshine Forever, a 20-year-old champion thoroughbred, needed grooming.
It was 8:30 a.m., guests were scheduled to arrive in three hours at Old Friends Farm, and Sunshine had mud caked thickly on his legs and mane.
"Hey, buddy, let me brush this off you," Blowen said, his breath visible in the 25-degree winter as he rubbed down the stallion's muscular body, dust particles erupting into the air.
A handful of sliced carrots, the size of thick quarters, was Sunshine's reward, snatched from Blowen's outstretched palm.
Three years ago, Blowen -- after retiring as a movie critic for The Boston Globe -- founded Old Friends Farm as a haven for retired thoroughbreds.
Too many owners and breeders abandon their horses once they stop making money, Blowen said, a point painfully evident in 2002 when 1986 Derby winner Ferdinand was slaughtered in Japan.
"Without these horses, there is no sport, there is no industry," Blowen said. "At the end of their racing careers, they should be treated better."
And Blowen is one man trying to do that.
'A real, legitimate do-gooder'
After two decades of reviewing films and interviewing stars like Dustin Hoffman and Jack Nicholson, Blowen discovered his passion was no longer in journalism, but in horses in a Kentucky town, population 1,614, with no stoplight, no fast-food restaurants, no big-box stores.
"There are a lot of people who claim to want to do good in this business," said Kristie Jakeman, a horse owner and racing manager from Florida who supports Old Friends. "I can say Michael is a real, legitimate do-gooder. He's 100 percent committed to these animals."
Although some horse farms rarely open their gates and manicured pastures to picture-snapping outsiders, Blowen hosts anyone and everyone -- at no charge and for no salary.
During spring and summer, the tourists came in droves, 400 people a week from around the nation and world.
Sunshine Forever is one of 15 horses -- mares and stallions -- now retired at Old Friends, located on 25 acres at Hurstland Farm in Midway.
With eight wins in 20 starts, Sunshine earned more than $2 million on the track -- and raked in millions more when he was shipped to Japan to stand at stud.
But when he stopped breeding, the 1988 Eclipse winner for Outstanding Turf Horse was simply another animal that needed to be fed.
Blowen purchased Sunshine in 2004 for $10,000 and paid $18,000 to ship him back to the rolling landscape of Central Kentucky, where he was foaled.
"As a movie critic, I hated happy endings," Blowen said, sitting behind his desk, his ears sticking out from under his hunter-green Old Friends cap. "But I like to have a few in life."
Horses bought and donated
The horses that arrive at Old Friends come in two ways. Blowen, using an agent familiar with the global horseflesh trade, purchases some. He took out a loan, co-signed by his mother-in-law, to bring back some thoroughbreds.
Others, like Bonnie's Poker, the dam -- or mother -- of 1997 Kentucky Derby and Preakness winner Silver Charm, are donated.
Bill and Kristie Jakeman gave the broodmare to Old Friends after she suffered complications while delivering a Fusaichi Pegasus colt.
"My husband and I have been active for 15 years in the industry, and we have seen a change to more corporate farms, versus the old breeders, the mom-and-pop farms," Kristie said. "It's about the bottom line."
Old Friends, she said, is a place for racing fans "to get up close" to thoroughbreds, which they can't do at other farms.
Ruhlmann, an eight-time stakes winner, was donated to Old Friends this year by Jerry and Ann Moss, his original owners. The couple visited Ruhlmann at Old Friends the Thursday before this year's Kentucky Derby. Two days later, their horse, Giacomo, was draped with the Garland of Roses.
The Derby win, Blowen believes, was karma.
Drawn to the backside
Born in 1947 and raised in Connecticut, Blowen was not much of a horse fan as a child or young adult. Then, in 1981 when Blowen was 34, Robert Taylor, the Globe's arts editor, invited Blowen to the races at Suffolk Downs.
Opened in 1935, in the mud flats of East Boston, the Downs was Massachusetts' first major racetrack, but by the time Blowen visited, it was a horrid place, he said, with barbed-wire fencing and rough characters, often drunk, working the backside.
Horses featured in Suffolk races were cheap claimers or thoroughbreds that long ago should have been retired.
Blowen was so smitten his first day at the track -- he made money -- that he began studying the Daily Racing Form. He became a regular at Suffolk and every year would take a week off work and travel to Saratoga Racing Course, in New York, for opening week.
Eventually he decided that, if he wanted to improve his handicapping, he needed to learn about the horses themselves, their personalities, their strengths and weaknesses.
So, on a dreary day in February 1997, as snow and hail pelted Boston, Blowen walked into the bowels of Suffolk and asked trainer Carlos Figueroa, about whom Blowen had written a feature story, if he could work for him for free.
Yes, Figueroa said.
For a couple of years, Blowen awoke before dawn and rode the train to Suffolk, walking the horses and grooming them before heading to his job.
The experience, he said, made him a worse handicapper. He became emotionally attached to the horses and began betting from his heart, not his head. "It was flesh and blood, not just about numbers anymore," he said.
A career switch
Blowen also learned about the underworld of racing, where thoroughbreds were mistreated and often forced to race when they couldn't or shouldn't.
He saw hundreds of horses, no longer wanted or needed, loaded onto trailers and shipped off for slaughter. The deep guttural screams they made when being loaded -- seeming to know their fate, he believes -- still haunt him. "It was a horrible sound," he said.
In 1999, when the Globe announced it planned to reduce its work force, Blowen took a buyout, leaving the paper, as did his wife, Diane White, a columnist.
Blowen landed a job at the Thoroughbred Retirement Foundation, a charitable organization based in New Jersey. Founded in 1982, the foundation rescues horses and encourages people to adopt them.
The foundation runs The Secretariat Center adoption program at the Kentucky Horse Park and has a program at Blackburn Correctional Complex in Lexington, where inmates care for retired thoroughbreds.
Blowen moved to Kentucky in 2000, figuring the foundation needed to consolidate its efforts in thoroughbred country. He bought a house in Midway, across from Midway College, that overlooks a horse farm.
After 18 months at the foundation, he left, planning to finish a book he started years earlier.
That never happened. Instead, he decided to rescue thoroughbreds.
Horse friends help
His farm, named for the "Old Friends" photo book by equine photographer Barbara D. Livingston, is based at Hurstland, a breeding and boarding farm owned by Alfred Nuckols Jr., a fifth-generation horse farmer.
Three weeks after Blowen started Old Friends, news broke that Ferdinand had been slaughtered in Japan, sending ripples through the thoroughbred industry and grabbing headlines worldwide.
Old Friends operates solely on donations: Feed is provided for free by Triple Crown Senior Feed; blacksmith work is donated by farrier Jan Basson, veterinary care by Jeff Pumphrey and horse halters by Glen Castle.
Old Friends recently hired a full-time executive director, Maya DeRosa, whose main role is to raise money.
When Old Friends officially opened to tourists earlier this year, an average of 400 people visited each week from April through October.
The state recently awarded Old Friends a $50,000 grant to renovate an old tobacco barn into a home for the retired thoroughbreds.
The barn's stalls, of chain-link fence, will be replaced with more stately wooden stalls, with the horses' names on them.
Blowen also hopes to create a media center in the barn where people can watch races of the retired horses. A bookstore and gift shop are also planned.
One stall will be set aside, empty, in memory of Ferdinand, a plaque telling of his life and death.
The slaughter issue
Although Blowen's work has been praised by some in the horse industry, others don't agree with him that owners and breeders care only about money.
David Switzer, executive director of the Kentucky Thoroughbred Association, said many Kentucky farms set aside fields to pension stallions, gelding and mares.
"I can't speak about other parts of the world," he said.
The thoroughbred association favors a plan that requires the original owner and/or breeder to be notified before horses are slaughtered, Switzer said. The note would be attached to the horses' Jockey Club registration papers.
There is a temporary federal ban in the United States on slaughtering horses for human consumption. The ban will end Sept. 30 because it was attached to a one-year spending bill.
Supporters are pushing for a permanent federal ban.
Safety for a Derby winner?
Blowen's next goal is rescuing a Kentucky Derby winner. He's already tracking Alysheba, in Saudi Arabia, and Sea Hero and Strike the Gold, both in Turkey. He's also hoping to open a racing museum at Old Friends, featuring the races of the retired champions.
In early December, on the morning he groomed a muddy Sunshine Forever, Blowen led six people on a tour, including Lynn Niemeier of Daytona Beach, Fla.
Though she was raised in Kentucky, Niemeier had never been that close to champion thoroughbreds.
"We never expected to get out and see them," she said.
Before the tour ended, Blowen took the group, bundled in winter coats, scarves and gloves, to the Old Friends Cemetery. It sits beside the farm's office and already has three graves, including that of Fraise, who won the 1993 Breeders' Cup Turf.
Fraise died in November and during his funeral was toasted with Woodford Reserve Bourbon, distilled near Midway.
A tourist asked if all Old Friends horses would be buried there. "Yes," Blowen said, "and me, too.