Los Alamitos trainer Aquino still proving people wrong
CYPRESS >> At Los Alamitos Race Course, there's nobody better than Angela Aquino at training thoroughbred horses.
Or at teaching people a lesson.
It's 2015. On a video still floating around online, a couple of trackside broadcasters are heralding a new name at the top of the thoroughbred trainer standings for Los Al's night racing meet. Angie Aquino holds an early-season lead in race victories over Chuck Treece, who has been winning training championships year after year.
One of the broadcasters ends on a skeptical note.
“She just doesn't have the same amount of horses as Chuck Treece,” he says of Aquino, “so there's no way that she's going to be able to carry that all the way through December.”
She almost does, though, taking the contest down to the final week before settling for a close second to Treece in victories and purse earnings.
Now it's 2024. After winning the Los Alamitos thoroughbred training title last year, Aquino is on her way to successfully defending it, leading the thoroughbred standings (nine wins, 22.5%) and overall standings (19 wins, 16.8%) at the track, which features quarter horses and thoroughbreds on Friday and Saturday nights. She has carried her success not just for a season but for going on a decade, moving up to fourth on Los Al's alltime thoroughbred trainer standings with 346 wins.
“I've proven people wrong,” Aquino said one morning this week.
Aquino, 43, began her equine education early as a fourth-generation horse woman.
She's the daughter of trainer Betsy Mora, who's retired, and jockey Carlos Aquino, who died in 2020 at age 64. Her sister, Elena Andrade, trains quarter horses at Los Al. Elena's husband, Oscar, was a jockey before a 2021 racing accident left him paralyzed from the waist down. Their son, Oscar Jr., is a quarterhorse jockey at Remington Park in Oklahoma City — the family's fifth generation in the sport.
Angie was born in Santa Rosa, a stop on the California county fair racing circuit, and she and Elena worked in her mom's barn
SANTA ANITA LEADERS Jockeys / Wins
Juan Hernandez / 53 Antonio Fresu / 46 Flavien Prat / 42 Frankie Dettori / 34 Umberto Rispoli / 28
Trainers / Wins WEEKEND STAKES AT LOS ALAMITOS Saturday
• $40,000 Virginia Hyland Stakes, quarter-horse fillies and mares, 3-year-olds and up, 350 yards
DOWN THE STRETCH
• Santa Anita is off this week after the Classic Meet portion of its season ended Sunday. Juan Hernandez led the jockey standings with 53 victories, and Antonio Fresu and Flavien Prat tied for the most stakes-winning rides with
11. Doug O'Neill took the trainer title with 30 wins, while Phil D'Amato had the most stakes wins with 10. Fresu closed fast, winning stakes together last weekend with Stronghold, King of Gosford and Laulne. Favorites cooled off but still won 43% of races. The Hollywood Meet part of the Santa Anita season runs April 19 to June 16. as soon as they could walk. She considered doing something else, attending Cypress College and working at a supermarket.
“It wasn't my style,” she said. “I missed the horses too much.”
Aquino has run horses everywhere, from glamorous Del Mar, near San Diego, to tiny Ferndale, in Humboldt County, and won at Santa Anita as recently as October with the 7-year-old gelding Mike Operator in a mile race at the $10,000 claiming level.
But, she says, “Los Alamitos is my home.”
In Aquino's barn are as many as 40 horses at a time. She has five employees, and a sheep that keeps the horses company. She owns almost half of the horses herself.
Her personal favorites? “The old-timers,” Aquino says, meaning 5- to 8-yearold horses. “Those old class horses that have gone off form. You know they have it in them. It's just getting them back to their form.”
The current teacher's pet is Around the Dial, an 8-year-old gelding. Aquino trained him more than a year ago, before he bounced among three other trainers, winning once in 10 tries at Los Al's night meets and June, September and December daytime meets. When the horse dropped into a $2,500 claiming race in February, Aquino claimed him.
She intended to retire Around the Dial, but before she could arrange a new home for him, he started training impressively and Aquino decided he had one more race in him.
On March 24, in a 5 1/2-furlong sprint for $5,000 claimers, Around the Dial and jockey Barrington Harvey overcame a bumpy start, skimmed in the inner rail and rallied from last in a field of six to win by a head and pay $8.40.
• After winning the Santa Anita Derby with Stronghold on Saturday, Fresu paid tribute to Stefano Cherchi, an Italian-born jockey who worked as an exercise rider for D'Amato in 2022-23. Cherchi, 23, died April 3after falling in a race in Australia. “I felt like he was there with me today,” Fresu said. “(He) was an amazing guy, and I want to dedicate this to him.”
• How strong was Stronghold in the Santa Anita Derby? Not as strong as the winners of other major Kentucky Derby prep races, according to publicly available speed figures, which try to rate how fast horses truly ran. Stronghold got an 89 on the Beyer-figures scale, 99 from Equibase and 98 from Brisnet, each last or second to last among the big preps. That made Stronghold, theoretically, about six to 13 lengths slower than Derby favorite Fierceness, whose Florida Derby win rated 110, 110 and 106.
• Kentucky Derby qualifying points standings will be finalized Saturday when the $400,000, Grade III Lexington Stakes, at Keeneland, gives last-gap hopes to several horses. With a win, Hades would vault to 15th in points, Encino could climb to 21st or Liberal Arts to as high as 22nd. The top 20are guaranteed spots in
Aquino thinks the secret with Around the Dial was “freshening him up,” easing back on workouts.
In general, she says, her high win totals are the result of preferring to race her horses instead of work them, and knowing which races they belong in.
“It's more or less placing them in the spots where they'll be competitive,” Aquino said. “Sometimes you have to start them from the bottom, let them win a race, let their heart get big. Then you can work your way back up the ladder, and they can be a good horse again.
“And then, if you just keep them happy and healthy, they'll give you their all.”
Aquino has made some horseplayers happy, too.
At the end of 2023, horse racing statistician Gary Dougherty calculated which American trainers were best to bet on. Based mostly on return on investment on bets to win, Dougherty determined that of the 288 trainers who had 200 or more starters in the United States and Canada last year, the most profitable was Angie Aquino. (Second was Santa Anitaand Del Mar-based trainer Peter Eurton.)
Anyone betting on all of Aquino's thoroughbred runners in 2023 would have made a profit of 31.5%. Dougherty reports that she's keeping it up in 2024, showing a 30.5% profit.
If a trainer's horses are showing a profit at the parimutuel windows, it means they're winning more often than the odds set by the betting public suggest they will.
That's another way of saying Angie Aquino is training horses well and still proving people wrong.
Follow Kevin Modesti on X (formerly Twitter) @ Kevin Modesti. the May 4 Derby, but withdrawals would allow others to get in.
• A hearing is scheduled Monday in Jefferson County, Ky., on Churchill Downs' motion to dismiss the lawsuit by Muth owner Amr Zedan seeking to run the colt in the Kentucky Derby. Zedan is challenging Churchill's decision to add a third year to its ban on horses trained by Bob Baffert after the 2021 Derby disqualification of Medina Spirit. Muth won the Arkansas Derby, which normally would put him in the Kentucky Derby.
• Jockey Jose Nicasio (12 wins, 30%) and trainer Monty Arrossa (13, 20.6%) lead the quarter-horse trainer standings at Los Alamitos.
• Britain's Grand National will be run Saturday (8 a.m. PDT) at Aintree with the field reduced from 40 horses to 34, one of several safety measures enacted after horses died from injuries in each of the past four runnings and an animal-rights demonstration delayed last year's start. The 10-year-old gelding Corach Rambler and jockey Derek Fox aim to repeat their 2023victory in the race over 4miles, 2½ furlongs, and 30 jumps.