Daily Racing Form National Digital Edition
Stidham rising up with Godolphin
NEW ORLEANS – Mike Stidham on the morning of March 15 periodically stroked a handsome black and white cat sprawled over the desk in his Fair Grounds barn office. Stidham through the years has disdained pets. Allergies, he claimed. Something has changed; the cats have become beloved. What has not changed, according to the man himself, is the general manner Stidham goes about training the racehorses in his care. This is year 40 in the training career of 63-year-old Stidham, who struck out on his own during the summer of 1980 with a couple horses at Louisiana Downs.
“Not really,” was Stidham’s reply, asked if decades of experience had altered his training approach. Feelings for felines aside, there has been one seismic change in the Stidham stable. As the old racetrack saying goes, the trainer has a new feed program – he’s feeding better horses.
The eight-day period between March 20 and March 27 will be like nothing Stidham ever has experienced. Saturday, he starts Proxy in the $1 million Louisiana Derby. Second in the Lecomte and the Risen Star, Proxy has 42 qualifying points toward the Kentucky Derby. A solid performance Saturday and Proxy will take Stidham to his first Derby.
Sunday, Stidham, with his longtime top assistant and romantic companion, Hilary Pridham, travel to Dubai, where, on March 27, Mystic Guide starts as the favorite in the $12 million Dubai World Cup.
“I’m feeling it,” Stidham said, asked if these were pressurefilled days. “I can feel it inside and I’m not sleeping quite as soundly. There’s little energy going on down there. It’s pretty amazing, though.”
Stidham long has run a successful operation – just not like this. The stable hit at least $1 million in annual earnings for the first time in 1999 and has stayed there, usually with earnings more than $2 million, and with over $4 million in 2019 and 2020. Stidham has trained highlevel runners like Manzotti, his breakout horse from the late-80s, Upperline, Zipessa, Synchrony, Willcox Inn, and others. His client roster was strong and diverse, yet Stidham rarely got young horses who didn’t come with baggage.
“The really frustrating part was over the years we had some truly talented young horses, but from early on they were patchwork horses where we knew they were going to get through a couple races and then they were going to fall apart,” Stidham said. “We knew the road was going to end pretty quick.”
Now, there is not only Proxy and Mystic Guide, but other talents. Pixelate starts Saturday at Fair Grounds in the Grade 2 Muniz Memorial. Micheline began her 4-year-old campaign with a smart win in the Grade 2 Hillsborough at Tampa Bay Downs. The link between all these animals is their owner, Godolphin, and when Stidham began sending out young Godolphin horses during 2018, it changed his career.
“I really wanted to, but until then, I just couldn’t quite get to the next level. I had good horses, but couldn’t break through,” he said.
Stidham is the son of trainer George Stidham, who worked as the agent for legendary jockey Bill Hartack, a close family friend, and early connections made through those two men define his career. The most important involved John Adger, whom Stidham met as an assistant to his father at Louisiana Downs in 1980. Adger gave Stidham his first horses to train, sending him to Southern California. Adger, a Texan, became racing manager for the Stonerside Stable of Bob and Janice McNair, which was bought by Darley, a vehicle of Sheikh Mohammed, Godolphin’s principal. Stidham trained for Stonerside and when Adger stayed on after the Darley acquisition of roughly 250 horses and a 2,000-acre Kentucky farm, Stidham began getting Darley horses, which eventually led to him into the Godolphin fold.
Stidham likes to say he got to see the best of Florida racing, growing up in Miami in the 1970s, where he bore witness to racing legends like Alydar and Affirmed, and the best of California racing during the 1980’s, the era of Charlie Whittingham, Sunday Silence and John Henry. Stidham, set up to train some horses for the iconic Elmendorf Farm of Max Gluck, arrived in Southern California in 1980 and stayed 10 years.
“That was the greatest thing I ever did for the rest of my career. First, I got to trainer for Elmendorf, and second, I got to watch the greatest trainers that have ever lived, like Charlie Whittingham, Laz Barrera, Ron McAnally. For me, that was everything, watching the way they would prepare horses.”
Stidham got up to 120 runners in 1987 before his stable cratered. He had three winners in 1980 and realized his time in Southern California was up.
“I had to do something because I was not making it – I was done. I was down to three horses and had $60,000 in debt.” Stidham went to several prominent trainers with whom he’d gotten friendly, told them he was shifting his base to Northern California, and asked them to send him any lowerlevel horses that couldn’t win in Southern California. “I got up there and within three months had 20 horses. Those guys weren’t sending me good horses, but I could pay my bills and pay off my debt.”
When Harold Goodman, a Texas owner and breeder Stidham had met through his dad and Hartack, asked Stidham to move to the Texas and Louisiana circuit as a private trainer, Stidham jumped at the chance to leave Northern California, which he saw as a dead end. That move led to solid, sustained footing, although Stidham had to reshape his operation again when Arlington, his summer base, fell into decline. Now, he also has de-emphasized Fair Grounds, where he once was leading trainer, running a simultaneous winter string at Tampa and spending the rest of the year at Fair Hill in Maryland.
It’s easy to tell Stidham would relish a Derby runner, but he’s sanguine about going there. Godolphin already has champion colt Essential Quality pointed toward the race, and Proxy will have to earn a Derby start Saturday. He races for the first time in blinkers, which should really help this son of Tapit, who is sound, tall, and strong, and will be a real force if his mental capacity catches up to his body.
“We liked him from the start, but he never did anything flashy. Proxy was a nice mover, good way of going, but it wasn’t until his first start that we thought he might really be all right,” Stidham said.
In that race, a Monmouth maiden mile, Proxy got bottled up behind horses much of the trip before coming with an eye-catching stretch run to just miss. He graduated at second asking in a Nov. 26 Fair Grounds maiden race, but in that start and a subsequent allowance win, Proxy ran in spots, shied from the crop, and acted somewhat babyish. It was his good second in the Lecomte, where he got a 91 Beyer, that suggested Proxy had Triple Crown hope, and his second in the Risen Star came despite the colt dropping the bit and losing position at the half-mile pole. It was that action that prompted Stidham to try blinkers, and the barn has been pleased with their effect during morning work.
“We want to go to the Derby with a horse that’s live, not just to go, so this is a defining race. It kind of tells us which way the arrow’s going,” said Stidham.
Mystic Guide impressed his connections from the start, but it wasn’t until Stidham began racing him in blinkers last summer that Mystic Guide’s star truly rose. In the Razorback, he won by six lengths and got a career-best 108 Beyer. If he can produce that kind of figure in Dubai, he wins.
Stidham sat and rubbed the cat’s ears and thought about it all. “What grounds me in having this success is that I’m aware there’s a lot of horsemen out there that are every bit as good and better than me. I just realize that it’s not about me – it’s about what you got in those stalls.”