Amazing year for assistant trainer
Last Saturday, Kris Sankar stood on the track watching Voodoo Song gallop back after winning a thrilling renewal of the Grade 1 Fourstardave Stakes.
His eyes were a little red, and he blinked a couple of times.
“I definitely cried,” he admitted, keeping his eyes on the horse, a smiling breaking across his face. “But don’t tell Tiffany. I didn’t even cry when the baby was born.”
It’s been quite a year for Sankar, who is one of trainer Linda Rice’s assistants. Two months ago, his partner Tiffany Webb, herself a former assistant, most recently to Jimmy Toner, gave birth to their son Connor, and three days ago, he experienced his first Grade 1 win.
“It was a rough night,” he said,
standing in the paddock the day after the race. “Connor didn’t sleep well.”
A native of Toronto, Sankar grew up around uncles and cousins that liked to bet. They’d take him to Greenwood Raceway and Woodbine Racetrack, and while he learned to handicap early, a skill that he uses regularly as he claims horses, the gambling isn’t what drew him to a career in racing.
“I saw something besides the betting,” he said. “I fell in love with the sport.”
As a kid, he created facsimiles of silks and hung them as a border on his bedroom. He’s read the morning paper and circle his selections for the day’s card. On big days when Canada’s historic Sam-Son Farm had a horse running, he’d wear their colors to school.
After high school, he got a job working at the sporting goods chain Champ’s,
and one day, travelling for work, he got stuck in traffic near Adena Springs’ farm in Aurora.
“I looked out at this beautiful farm and thought, ‘Why can’t I do that?’” he remembered. “And that night, when I was watching racing from Mohawk on a simulcast, I saw an advertisement for a program at Guelph University that taught people how to get involved in racing, and I thought, ‘Why not?’”
His parents were not pleased.
“They hated it,” he said, his eyes widening at the memory of their reaction.
He was a city kid who knew nothing about horses, and he started at the bottom. His first job was mucking stalls. That’s it. No contact with horses. After about a year, he learned how to put bandages on, beginning with Standardbreds, eventually working his way up, getting a job with trainer Malcolm Pierce, who trained the horses that carried the same silks that he’d worn to
school as a kid.
“It was a dream come true, working with SamSon horses,” he said.
Seeking more opportunity, he moved to the United States, working for trainers Tim Glyshaw, Ron Faucheux, Mike Maker, and Bret Calhoun. Then he met Webb.
“I remember seeing her when I came to Saratoga with horses, and thinking, ‘Wow, she’s cute.’ Then at Keeneland, our horses were stabled in the same barn,” he said.
He recalls making small talk with her, saying hello, trying to break the ice, but according to him, Webb didn’t even remember him when a mutual friend introduced them. They had their first date when they were both running horses at Kentucky Downs.
As luck would have it, not long afterwards Rice was looking for an assistant, and he was in the right place at the right time: he could move up to being an assistant and move to New York, where Webb was
based. She stopped working at the track late in her pregnancy and hasn’t yet returned, though given that she gave up a career as a lawyer to work with horses, it’s hard to imagine that she’ll stay away forever.
“When I get home, beat up and broken,” said Sankar, “she puts me back together.”
He calls himself a “horse racing nerd,” joking that he can’t remember what he had for lunch yesterday but can tell you every detail of every horse in the $16,000 claimer he took a horse from. He revels in the claiming game at the same time that he gets emotional about a Grade 1 win.
He’s travelled from a traffic jam in Ontario to the winner’s circle at Saratoga, from shoveling manure to changing diapers. Sankar smiles as he remembers his parents’ opposition to what he was determined to do.
“They wanted me to do anything except horse racing,” he said. “But it was what I dreamed about doing.”