How Barbadian trainer became racing’s newest star
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — A couple years into Saffie Joseph Jr.’s American experiment, he ran into an owner he used to train horses for at an auction in Florida. The owner wanted to know when Joseph was coming back to Barbados, where he had been something of a wunderkind winning big races as a teenager.
“I told him, ‘I’m not coming back,’” Joseph said.
Not that he hadn’t considered it. Against the advice of his family and pretty much everyone he knew in Barbados, Joseph left home with two horses and delusions of grandeur, thinking success on the South Florida racing circuit would come easily.
But Joseph quickly discovered that nobody cared much about his roots as a third-generation horseman on the island or that he had already won the Barbados Triple Crown. When it came to the basics of building a training operation — even getting stalls at the Miami-area tracks — all people saw was a young, ponytailed guy from a place they associated with white sand beaches and crystal blue waters.
“You figure you’re going to be at the top of the game and then reality sets in after a couple years that it may not happen,” Joseph said. “In most sports like basketball or football you can send a video out to someone and they can say, hey you’ve got talent. In horses, if you don’t have a horse to train, how do you show it? Me telling someone, ‘Hey give me a chance,’ they’d look at me and laugh.”
Nobody’s laughing anymore.
Still just 35 years old, Joseph has become one of the nation’s hottest trainers with a string of approximately 150 horses and most recently the training title at Gulfstream Park’s spring meet, snapping a long streak of dominance by the powerhouse Todd Pletcher barn.
But even more than all that, Joseph has a legitimate chance this week to win the Kentucky Derby with the striking grey colt White Abarrio, who has won four of five lifetime starts, including the Florida Derby in April. Though it’s Joseph’s second time to run a horse in the Derby — he placed eighth with Ny Traffic
in the COVID-delayed 2020 running — this is the first time he has one of the favorites and a real chance to achieve a dream that seemed a long way off just a few years ago.
“I’ll try to control my emotions,” he said. “He needs to improve again to win the Kentucky Derby, but we think it’s within reach. We know it’s a competitive race, maybe seven or eight horses that could win it, but we feel like we have a horse going in the right direction.”
Regardless of how White Abarrio runs Saturday, Joseph’s career is undoubtedly going in the right direction, positioning him to be a factor in Triple Crown races for many years to come. During his first six years in the U.S., Joseph’s horses won a total of 87 races and just north of $2 million in purses. His winning percentages were solid, but his barn was small and mostly filled with cheap horses.
Little by little, though, Joseph started to gain some clients — and believers. In 2019, he broke through with his first major stakes win in the Pennsylvania Derby, which kicked off a real explosion in his
business. Last year, Joseph topped the 200-win mark with nine graded stakes victories and more than $9 million in purses.
But perhaps his biggest victory came when he hooked up with Clint and Mark Cornett, brothers who fell in love with racing as kids in the Dallas area and at one point owned as many as 90 horses, though most of them were lower-level types.
Clint got out of horse ownership in 2010 to focus on his family and growing software business, while Mark remained in the game as a bloodstock agent, picking out horses to buy for others. In the middle of last year, Clint got the itch to get back in and called his brother with one request: “I want to go to the Derby,” he said.
Last September, Mark Cornett was at Gulfstream Park when he watched White Abarrio impressively break his maiden. Sensing an opportunity, he initiated a private purchase — just the second horse he and his brother had bought after deciding to build their stable back up. As the deal got done, Cornett leaned on longtime friend Matt Muzikar, the agent for jockey Tyler Gaffalione, to discuss Florida-based trainers who might be a good fit for getting the colt on the Derby trail.
“I talked to Saffie for about an hour and a half and we clicked on a lot of things, including horse management, shipping program, going into big races and things like that,” Mark Cornett said. “About 15 minutes later, I called him back and told him to go pick up the horse. We already had him bought, paid for and vetted.”
The plan was in place to start White Abarrio in a Gulfstream allowance race (he won), then end his 2-year-old season with a stakes at Churchill (he finished third after a troubled trip) before gearing up for the 3-year-old prep races in Florida.
Though White Abarrio had a couple hiccups this winter, spiking a fever that caused him to miss some training before both the Holy Bull and the Florida Derby, he impressively won them both and got the Cornett brothers to Kentucky faster than they could have imagined.
“It’s a little surreal, to be honest,” Clint Cornett said. “We knew he was good after he broke his maiden, but we didn’t know he was this good. It’s really been a whirlwind.”
And now White Abarrio is giving his trainer a chance to bring international attention to Barbados, a country that has exported a lot of famous musicians, world-class cricket bowlers and even a championship trainer in Sir Michael Stoute, who has been one of the most prominent in Europe for many years.
These days, Joseph is long past the point of proving that he can make it in America. But winning a Kentucky Derby would be something unique, bringing acclaim to his country and validation of dreams that began as early as 1996 when he watched Grindstone flying down the stretch to win the roses.
“There’s always going to be doubters in life until you prove them wrong enough times to become believers, and that’s exactly what happened,” Joseph said. “A lot of people probably doubted in Barbados, and now they totally support me. When I win, I feel like I’m winning for them.”