Daily Racing Form National Digital Edition
Keen eye an asset to Liz Crow
Liz Crow was an unknown commodity when she signed the $100,000 ticket as agent on Monomoy Girl at the 2016 Keeneland September yearling sale, so much so that the auction company’s bookkeepers had to have a word with her after the fall of the hammer.
Following the Tapizar filly’s heart-filled stretch drive to prevail in the Kentucky Oaks, Crow’s name was one of the first on the lips of owners Sol Kumin and Michael Dubb. For Monomoy Girl to be the horse that took Crow to her professional high point was especially meaningful, given the filly was the first horse she had signed a ticket for at Keeneland.
Crow said Keeneland even had her name spelled wrong – Crowe.
“They actually emailed me right away and said, ‘You don’t have credit here’ and they spelled my name wrong,” she said. “I had to run into the credit office and tell them I was buying for Sol Kumin.”
Crow, a native of Bethseda, Md., has cast a wide net since graduating from the University of Louisville in 2010, as a partner in bloodstock agency BSW Bloodstock and consignment Elite Sales, and as racing manager for the Ten Strike Racing partnership. She also operates a pinhook partnership with Ocala, Fla.-based horseman Paul Sharp.
Her eye for horseflesh has been one of the driving forces behind Kumin’s rapid ascension into national-level racing, which included acquiring a stake in world-class sprinter Mind Your Biscuits in the midst of his 3-year-old campaign. Mind Your Biscuits recently became the all-time leading New York-bred by earnings.
Crow and Kumin were first introduced when Crow was working as director of racing for the Bradley Thoroughbreds operation of Peter Bradley, of which Kumin’s trainer Chad Brown was a client. When Crow left in 2015 to join fellow Kumin advisor Bradley Weisbord’s BSW Bloodstock and eventually co-found Elite Sales with him, Kumin soon followed with his business.
“It worked out perfectly,” Kumin said. “It was an opportunity to let her take the lead and see what she could do. I knew she was talented. Obviously ethical, hard-working, all the stuff you like to see, but she hadn’t fully done it on her own. This gives her a look of what she can do when she gets a chance. She has done a terrific job and just extremely proud of her.”
Crow’s first assignment from Kumin was to hit the 2016 yearling auction season on the search of economically priced runners.
“He called me in August of 2016 and said, ‘I’m going to give you a shot to buy four or five yearlings. I want you to be in the $80,000 to $100,000 range,’” Crow said. “I was pumped. That’s the only way to put it. Sol has known me a long time, but to say, ‘I’m putting together a group of my most important friends and I’m going to let you buy four or five of the horses,’ that was a lot of confidence for somebody that had no real track record. I had been involved in some nice horses, but I thought that was really going out on a limb.”
Monomoy Girl came before Crow in Book 3 of the September sale, out of the Gainesway consignment. Owing her eye to her time spent working for Bradley and Florida-based juvenile consignor Eddie Woods, Crow said she focuses primarily on a prospect’s athletic build. The pedigree, she said, will determine the horse’s price range, but the physical determines how hard Crow will dig in to buy them.
In that sense, Monomoy Girl hit the target dead center.
“I love her form – she’s got a strong gaskin,” Crow said. “If you look at her hip, it’s very long. It’s unusually long before it drops off at her tailbone, and that’s where horses get their power. They get it from their hind end, and she’s got an unbelievable engine behind her.”
Crow admitted after the Oaks that she stretched a bit for the $100,000 filly. Monomoy Girl comes from Tapizar’s secondcrop, which averaged $53,036 as yearlings in 2016.
“I think a couple people told me I was nuts when I bought her, just because of the price,” she said.
Monomoy Girl developed into a top Oaks threat by first taking the Grade 2 Rachel Alexandra Stakes at Fair Grounds, then romping in the Grade 1 Ashland Stakes at Keeneland – just a few brisk steps away from where Crow signed her first ticket for Kumin.
The parallels of Crow watching Monomoy Girl’s résumé grow beside her own were not lost on her.
“It is fun to watch her confidence build,” Crow said. “That what I think’s really changed, she’s gotten confident in herself. It’s kind of cool to see.”