Daily Racing Form National Digital Edition
Mitchells enjoying the ride with homebred Secret Oath
Rob and Stacy Mitchell take pride in being hands-on owners and breeders, doing their own work with their horses at their Briland Farm in Lexington, Ky. That includes delivering the foals.
“She usually sleeps in the barn and delivers them,” Rob Mitchell said of his wife.
“I call him when the water breaks,” Stacy Mitchell said with a laugh.
And so, as the Mitchells’ homebred Kentucky Oaks winner Secret Oath faces males again in Saturday’s Preakness Stakes, the couple may still be in Lexington awaiting a very special delivery. The last of their three foals for this season is due any day, as Secret Oath’s dam, Absinthe Minded, is still waiting to deliver a foal by Liam’s Map.
“We may be watching the Preakness on TV from Lexington,” Rob Mitchell said.
The Mitchells’ TV has been getting a workout lately – ever since Secret Oath made a powerful move at the threeeighths pole and then held on by two lengths over favored Nest to win the Kentucky Oaks.
“We watched the replay 10 times to convince ourselves we won,” Rob Mitchell said. “It’s still kind of hard to believe, a bit of a blur.”
It was the filly’s third stakes win this year. She won the Martha Washington and the Grade 3 Honeybee Stakes at Oaklawn, then finishing a creditable third against colts in the Grade 1 Arkansas Derby.
With her Oaks victory, Secret Oath may have become the first Grade 1 winner for a Thoroughbred operation that started with a $1 investment. Stacy Mitchell got a Quarter Horse to enjoy riding when the couple bought 90 acres in Fayette County. Seeking a companion, as horses are social, herd animals, the Mitchells wound up acquiring an unraced Thoroughbred mare for $1 from a friend of a friend.
They decided to breed that mare, Chao Praya, to the Storm Cat horse Level Sands, who was standing for a $1,500 fee in 2000. They sold the resulting foal, Level Playingfield, who then went on to win the Grade 3 Kentucky Cup Sprint and win or place in 17 other stakes. Chao Praya also produced Imposing Grace, winner of the Grade 3 Arlington Matron.
The Mitchells had been swiftly bitten by the Thoroughbred bug after their first breeding and foaling experience and decided to assemble a modestsized broodmare band. In the pursuit of mares, they bought the hard-knocking Great Above mare Rockford Peach – winner of 9 of 73 career starts – for $36,000 out of a sale of Adena Springs broodmares at FasigTipton in November 2001.
A little less than five years later, they bred Rockford Peach to classic sire Quiet American, and the result was Absinthe Minded. The Mitchells have developed their small operation around selling most of their foals, but retain a handful to carry their silks.
“We have never put a horse on the racetrack to race that wasn’t born on our farm – kind of the way they did it 100 years ago,” Rob Mitchell said.
Absinthe Minded went to the barn of Hall of Fame trainer D. Wayne Lukas, also the trainer of Secreat Oath, and developed into a gritty campaigner in the mold of her dam, making 35 starts. The filly was a late-developer, breaking through with her first stakes victory as a 4-year-old in the 2011 Bayakoa Stakes at Oaklawn. She proceeded to finish third in the Grade 3 Azeri behind champions Havre de Grace and Blind
Luck, and then was third in the Grade 1 Apple Blossom to Havre de Grace and Switch. Later that year, she was second in the Grade 2 Shuvee Handicap and third in the Grade 2 Molly Pitcher.
Early in 2012, Absinthe Minded enjoyed another successful meet at Oaklawn, winning the Pippin and the Bayakoa and finishing second in the Apple Blossom to the previous year’s Kentucky Oaks winner, Plum Pretty.
Absinthe Minded came home to Briland and produced two winning offspring before being sent to Juddmonte Farm and the late Eclipse Award champion and leading money winner Arrogate, who was standing the first of what would be three seasons at stud. Secret Oath was foaled on March 20, 2019.
Secret Oath was entered in the 2020 Keeneland September yearling sale, but the Mitchells brought her home after there wasn’t much interest in the leggy filly.
“They keep a list of how many people look at a horse, and I didn’t think many people looked at her,” Rob Mitchell said. “And not many people vetted her and looked at her X-rays in the repository. Very few people looked at her twice. You like to see people come back and look two or three times. It was not going to be a situation where you had 10 people bidding on her. So, I’m thinking, ‘Why put her through the ring and not have her bring what I think she’s worth?’ So, I dropped her out of the sale.”
The Mitchells’ commitment to the long game with their stock can be seen in the time invested in Secret Oath’s family. It was almost exactly two decades between bringing home granddam Rockford Peach – who still resides on the farm at 31 – to Secret Oath winning her maiden in October 2021. Much like the process of developing the family behind this filly, the groundwork behind getting Secret Oath to the Preakness was laid long ago. After the filly won an allowance race Dec. 31 at Oaklawn, Lukas began urging Rob Mitchell to make her an early nominee for the Triple Crown.
“Wayne said, ‘We ought to nominate her to the Triple Crown series,’ ” Rob Mitchell said. “I said, ‘Eh, I don’t think so. She’s not going to be a Derby horse.’ He said, ‘No, no. But if she’s really good, then we could shoot for the Oaks and the Preakness.’ ”
Lukas, who says the Mitchells are involved owners who call often, was pleased for the owners when the first half of that plan came to fruition May 6.
“The real satisfaction is when you can put these people that work with these horses and raise them and so forth in that position,” Lukas said. “The real joy of doing this is to let these owners have the opportunity to enjoy this and get that thrill.”
And to think, that thrill might not have happened if there had been more interest in a young Secret Oath – surely now one of the most valuable fillies in America.
“We’re very blessed that the clouds and the heavens worked out just right and she didn’t sell for a reason,” Stacy Mitchell said. “And here we are.”