Daily Racing Form National Digital Edition
Stewart and Fipke’s wild ride at an end
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates – The one-time exercise rider and valet from blue collar New Orleans East walked up to the diamond-mining Canadian geologist and shook his hand.
It was Keeneland’s November sale in 2007, and Chuck Fipke had just paid $2.5 million for a mare named Lemons Forever. Dallas Stewart went to congratulate Fipke, if not simply thank the man. Stewart had gone in as a partner with owner Willis Horton to purchase Lemons Forever for $140,000 as a yearling in 2004. Twenty months later, the filly went out and upset the 2006 Kentucky Oaks. She never won another race of consequence, but on looks, pedigree, and her big win, she was a star of that 2007 sale when Stewart and Horton decided to cash in beyond the $650,000 their horse had earned racing.
“Dallas came over and that was the first time I met him,” Fipke said. “I liked him right there. I think I might even have mentioned I’d send him some horses.”
He did send some, and more than a decade later, Fipke and Stewart are getting ready to say goodbye to Forever Unbridled, the best horse Fipke has owned, the best Stewart has trained. Forever Unbridled was produced by Lemons Forever in 2012, and she ends her racing career Saturday in the $10 million Dubai World Cup.
It’s a race no female ever has won, though eight have tried in 10 editions of the race. Royal Delta was the last American female to ship for the World Cup, but she was undone by the synthetic racing surface Meydan was using at the time.
“This race should be right into her wheelhouse,” Stewart said from his Fair Grounds winter base before departing for Dubai. “We got Mike Smith to ride, and he knows the track. My wife and two kids are coming. We’re excited.”
Racing can make strange bedfellows. Take this pair. Fipke, 71, was born and raised in British Columbia, gravitated toward science, got a geology degree, and put it to use prospecting for precious metals and diamonds. He found them. Fipke’s most famous discovery is the site that became the Ekati Diamond Mine in Canada’s Northwest Territories. His prospecting and the businesses it spawned have made him a very wealthy man.
While Fipke was graduating with a geology degree from the University of British Columbia in 1970, Stewart was an 11-year-old. New Orleans East is bounded to the north by Lake Pontchartrain, to the west and south by industrial shipping canals, and to the east by the Bayou Sauvage marshlands. The area was more middle class when Stewart came up, but already had begun falling into disrepair when it was ravaged by Hurricane Katrina. The neighborhood is part of New Orleans but has areas that feel more rural than urban.
“The kid lived right next door to me was a little bitty guy that wanted to be a jockey,” Stewart said. “I started riding with him, and then my grandfather gave me a horse. There was guy resting Thoroughbreds at ranch next to us, and I started riding them. Then I came over here.”
“Here” being Fair Grounds. Stewart starting galloping horses for trainer Connie Tassistro when he was 15. He’s been on the track ever since.
“I don’t know what I’d be doing if I weren’t doing this,” said Stewart, a youthful 58. “I think about it.”
But maybe Stewart and Fipke share more than the surface suggests.
Both have been underestimated. Fipke can stutter at
times, and his unusual speech patterns unconsciously end many sentences with a Canadian-accented “hey.” His brain works fast but, perhaps, not in the most linear manner. He has become as obsessed with owning and breeding horses as he once was with analyzing indicator minerals to mine gems. Fipke has more than 80 broodmares and breeds many to his own stallions – Perfect Soul, Take of Ekati, and Jersey Town. He races extensively in North America, but also has horses in Ireland, France, and Japan. Fipke wintered two horses in Dubai this year.
“I’m a horrible addict,” he said. “The more horses you have, the less intelligent you become. It’s a one-to-one relationship, and I’m a super moron by now.”
Stewart isn’t known for his loquaciousness. The racetrack was his university, and he has learned to keep his head down and his cards to himself. Time and again, horses only Dallas Stewart thought belonged in a race proved him right.
“I don’t look at numbers, unless I’m thinking about selling a horse,” Stewart said. “You can handicap yourself right out of running.”
Lemons Forever’s $96.20 win payoff is the highest in Oaks history. Stewart gave Fipke a Kentucky Derby thrill when Golden Soul finished second as a 34-1 shot in 2013, and in the 2015 Preakness, Tale of Verve outran his 28-1 odds finishing second behind the great American Pharoah. Commanding Curve wasn’t owned by Fipke but was second for Stewart at 37-1 in the 2014 Derby.
“He shouldn’t be underestimated at any time,” said Hall of Fame trainer Wayne Lukas, for whom Stewart worked 12 years before going out on his own in 1997. “He has proved he can damn sure train a horse. He sneaks up on people all the time in these big races. Suddenly, he’s right there.”
Stewart isn’t afraid to take his shots. He took a big one when, with $35,000 saved from working as a jockey’s valet and a gallop boy, he went to Southern California to claim and train as a 25-year-old in 1985. He lasted less than a year, then caught on with Lukas.
“I thought I’d go out and claim some horses, but I kept getting out-shook,” Stewart said. “It didn’t turn out that great. I was totally still in the learning process.”
Fipke took his shots as well. He got into the Thoroughbred business in the 1980s, but didn’t win his first graded stakes until Perfect Soul, a high-level turf miler, came along and hit his peak in 2003. That also was the year Fipke paid $2.3 million at a 2-year-old in training sale for a colt he would name Diamond Fury. Diamond Fury, a son of the middling stallion Sea of Secrets, had been bought as a yearling for $30,000. He ran in one stakes race during his career and finished ninth, and wound up as a $4,000 claimer.
With Lukas, Stewart had worked with some of the stable’s best horses, and he was the one galloping Winning Colors when the filly won the Kentucky Derby in 1988. Finally Stewart’s time ran its course in the operation, and with Lukas’s blessing he went out on his own. His first big hit came in 1999, when Kimberlite Pipe, owned by John Gunther, won the Louisiana Derby.
This was years before Stewart met Fipke, which is strange, because kimberlite is an igneous rock that appears in the earth’s crust in vertical, pipe-shaped formations and is known for containing diamonds.
Maybe Fipke and Stewart were meant to come together. The mare that united them, Lemons Forever, has served both incredibly well.
Fipke was running a lot of horses but not winning many graded stakes when Lemons Forever’s first good foal, a full sister to Forever Unbridled named Unbridled Forever, made the races in 2013. Stewart’s operation had slipped considerably. Between 1998 and 2006, Stewart won 54 stakes races; between 2010 and 2014, he won a grand total of five.
“Like I tell a couple of these young guys that work for me, if the red carpet comes out from under you and you’re on the dirt floor, what are you going to do?” Stewart said. “Owners fire you, owners die, people don’t send you horses or whatever. If the wheels come back off, put them back on.”
Unbridled Forever was an eye-catching early 3-year-old in 2014. She looked like a serious Kentucky Oaks contender early in 2014 and wound up finishing third, beaten 10 lengths in the race. During the summer of 2015, after a long injury layoff, Unbridled Forever took down a Grade 1, winning the Ballerina at Saratoga when cut back in distance from routes to a sprint.
Forever Unbridled lacked her sister’s brilliance as a 2-yearold and early-season 3-yearold, and when she finished 11th in the 2015 Kentucky Oaks, it seemed fair to assume Unbridled Forever would turn out the better of the sisters with reversible names. But after getting a break, Forever Unbridled tipped her hand winning the Grade 2 Comely that fall at Aqueduct, and she has been getting better ever since.
“This one, she was real talented, but she was big and gawky early on,” Stewart said.
Forever Unbridled’s first Grade 1 win came in the 2016