Daily Racing Form National Digital Edition
McPeek goes after long-sought Oaks win
Ken McPeek has unfinished Kentucky Oaks business.
Take Charge Lady is the most accomplished horse McPeek has trained. She went 11-7-0 from 22 starts, earning just shy of $2.5 million. Twice she won the Spinster, Keeneland’s most important dirt route for older females, and she nearly beat the great Azeri in the 2003 Apple Blossom. Take Charge Lady came into the 2002 Kentucky Oaks after romping wins in two Fair Grounds stakes, earning Beyer Speed Figures of 109 and 107, and a 4 1/2-length score in the Grade 1 Ashland, with another 109 Beyer. The 3-2 favorite at Churchill, she fell a half-length short, worn down by Farda Amiga.
“I’m still disappointed she didn’t win,” McPeek said.
Eighteen years later, McPeek might have his best horse since Take Charge Lady. Swiss Skydiver enters the Oaks after open-lengths victories in the Alabama, the Santa Anita Oaks, the Fantasy, and the Gulfstream Park Oaks, a crosscountry tour de force running from March through August. She lost nothing finishing second to the elite 3-year-old colt Art Collector in the Blue Grass Stakes, and now faces Gamine, the even-money morning-line favorite in the Oaks.
Gamine, first across the wire in her four starts, won the Grade 1 Acorn by almost 19 lengths and the Grade 1 Test by seven. Bob Baffert trains her. Michael Lund Peterson bought Gamine for $1.8 million at a 2-year-olds in training sale. Swiss Skydiver? Owner Peter Callahan, on McPeek’s recommendation, paid $35,000 for the filly during a quiet session of Keeneland’s 2018 September yearling sale.
A win in the Blue Grass and Swiss Skydiver could’ve been aimed at the Kentucky Derby, and since the filly has sufficient qualifying points for that race, Churchill Downs officials gave McPeek the yellow saddle towel used to identify Derby horses during morning training, along with her pink Oaks towel. One day last week, McPeek trained Swiss Skydiver in the yellow towel, trolling the public. Later in the day, he trolled Gamine’s camp online.
“Everyone relax,” McPeek tweeted. “The intention is to run in the Kentucky Oaks. Let’s decide champion 3yo Filly [sic] on the racetrack. Gamine has ducked us long enough.”
McPeek. 58, doesn’t mind this kind of attention. His first starters came in 1985, though he didn’t win his first graded stakes until 1994, with Tejano Run, the horse that put him on the map. McPeek was raised in Lexington, Ky., growing up in Thoroughbred country but not in a Thoroughbred family. Just 23, he lit out on his own training, in part with support from his father, not taking time to sit at the feet of master horsemen. Even early on, he prided himself on his eye for young horses, though his first several years he trained mainly claimers. And he wasn’t wrong. Tejano Run, runner-up in the 1995 Derby, was plucked for $20,000. McPeek was brash, didn’t mind talking about his accomplishments, which only amplified his outsider status in the Thoroughbred world. Years later, snarky turf writers kidded one another, “Did you know Ken McPeek won the Belmont with Sarava?” The joke was that McPeek rarely failed to bring the fact up in conversation. But, yes, McPeek had won the Belmont, won it with a 70-1 shot! And, after Tejano Run helped lure clients, he found a slew of talented yearlings
buying on a bigger budget. The same year Take Charge Lady came out of the Keeneland sale, so did Repent, second in the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile and one of the favorites for the Derby before injury struck. Later in 2002, Repent was beaten a halflength by Medaglia d’Oro in the Travers.
McPeek is the kind of horsemen who requires new challenges. Pushing boundaries seems to provide as much satisfaction as nuts and bolts of daily training. Think of him as the Elon Musk of trainers. For a good chunk of the aughts, McPeek spent nearly as much time in South America, scouting bloodstock, buying horses, as he did in North America. That was no mere vanity venture. McPeek came up with excellent runners like Hard Buck, a Grade 1-class longdistance turf horse. McPeek, during the summer of 2004, brazenly sent Hard Buck to England for the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes, one of Europe’s most important races. Hard Buck finished second.
In 2006, McPeek purchased Kentucky bluegrass property he turned into Magdalena Farm, which serves myriad purposes. McPeek now can buy yearlings, send them to the farm, break and train them at Magdalena, and maintain control of the entire process of getting a horse from auction to race. Few American horsemen manage such an enterprise. In 2012, McPeek developed and launched a horse racing app, Horse Races Now. The man does not sit still.
McPeek hit 103 wins in 2009, his career peak, but even as he was winning more, he had fewer high-level performers. From 2010-12, McPeek failed to win a Grade 1, though he was not flailing. His stable in 2018 fell just short of $5.4 million in annual earnings, one of his best years, and in 2019 came Swiss Skydiver.
McPeek doesn’t seem to remember signing the auction ticket for Swiss Skydiver. No wonder. The bidding hardly sparked fireworks. And McPeek, at this stage of the game, has seen a ton of yearlings, bought a ton of yearlings.
“I’ll make sure I’m in attendance when a horse on our team’s short list goes through the ring, but I literally will sign the ticket and I’m on to the next one,” he said.
Swiss Skydiver worked three times in late spring 2019 before an ankle injury sidelined her.
“I kept telling Peter over the summer, ‘I think we got a really good filly here,’ ” McPeek said. “He understands the process – he’s very patient.”
Callahan made his mark as a media magnate. Among his major holdings was the National Enquirer, and he once had a share in America’s Turf Authority, the Daily Racing Form. In Callahan, McPeek found an owner content to buy a horse for less than top dollar.
“I say, $35,000, good idea,” Callahan told DRF’s David Grening before the Alabama.
McPeek’s encouraging summer reports to Callahan proved accurate in the autumn. Rallying from ninth in a seven-furlong maiden race at Churchill, her career debut, Swiss Skydiver blew past her rivals in upper stretch and scored by 5 1/2 lengths, a performance especially eyecatching since McPeek doesn’t push horses into their first start.
But the rest, as they don’t say, wasn’t history. Swiss Skydiver’s development stalled. Two weeks after her first start, she put her feet in the ground while leading comfortably into the final half-furlong of a first-level allowance race, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. At Tampa Bay Downs, in her 3-year-old debut, the Gasparilla Stakes, she loomed in upper stretch like a sure winner, hung late, and finished fifth. That race came with some trouble, and Swiss Skydiver lacked clear passage making her two-turn debut in the Rachel Alexandra in February at Fair Grounds, but there, again, a filly full of run at the quarter pole was flat at the finish.
Since the Rachel Alexandra, Swiss Skydiver has been a different horse. Why, exactly, is difficult to say, but some combination of maturation, a switch to routes, and a change in running style triggered massive improvement.
“After the Fair Grounds race, I sent her down to Gulfstream and popped her out of the gate a couple times,” McPeek said. “She had tended to relax leaving there. She’s shown she can rate, too, but since then she’s utilized her speed more.”
Has she ever. Her string of top performances – from Florida to California to Kentucky to New York – brims with the ambition of a trainer like McPeek not constrained by contemporary notions of light racing schedules. Her Alabama, the final race in a series that would’ve broken most horses, produced a career-best 102 Beyer, yet Swiss Skydiver recently weighed in at 1,150 pounds, heavier than when this all started.
“There’s no question she’s stronger,” McPeek said.
Swiss Skydiver loves herself a hearty helping of oats. Back at the barn after a hard race, chowing down, she clanks her feed tub into the stall wall.
“You could feed her more and she’d be willing to take it. I joke around she eats better than me and Dale Romans combined,” said McPeek, a large man referring to a fellow rotund trainer. “And that’s a rarity among fillies. You get fillies that back off their feed. Even in defeat in the Blue Grass, she was done eating in an hour. This filly, she’s sturdier than Take Charge Lady, who was very effeminate, lanky and lean, very, very fast, not quite as rateable.”
It wasn’t only Take Charge Lady who lost as the favorite at Churchill the first week of May 2002. So did the McPeektrained Harlan’s Holiday, seventh as the tepid chalk in the Derby. McPeek feels confident Swiss Skydiver will give Gamine all she wants and more in this Oaks. And he’s already looking for another mountain to climb.
“I’d like to try her on the turf one day,” he said. “I think she’d love it.”