July was an exceptional month for Kenwood Racing runners with 6 wins and 3 seconds from 11 starts. All our horses ran well. Congratulations to the owners of Life On the Edge, Rapstorerocks, Giuliana Vee, New Found Treasure and No Good Deed on thier impressive victories. Rather than just revel in a good month, we like to use both hot and cold streaks as ‘teachable moments’ that apply not only to Kenwood Racing but to the racing game in general. A few thoughts to share;

1. It’s never as good as it seems when you are winning, it’s never as bad as it seems when you are losing.  Racing is a game of ups and downs, hot and cold streaks are common. Statically the ‘average’ owner wins about 11% of the time, the top stables win about 20% of the time. In other words, even successful owners lose 8 out of 10 races and that means lots of periods when you aren’t in the winner’s circle. Hard as it is, people who enjoy and succeed in this very tough game find ways to emotionally deal with the ups and downs, not to get too high or too low, and keep a long term perspective.
2. 90% of horses don’t make money. Of course most sales companies, syndicates, sellers, etc. aren’t going to talk much about this but the fact is, just like most people don’t make it as pro athletes, most horses don’t either. About 1/3 never run, about 1/3 never win, and most of the rest are lower level claiming horses. That’s why you don’t want to overpay for any horse, even the most promising. If you purchase within a sensible budget, a decent claiming horse can make you money and when you come up with a really good horse, it can pay for most or all of the others. A very smart businessman named Ralph Pastore who is learning about the game while partnering with Kenwood on a number of horses, summed it up perfectly with this quote; “My philosophy is to expect minor wins and hope for lighting to strike eventually”.
3. Much of winning (and losing) is about the level of competition. Almost any horse will look bad when overmatched and almost any horse will look good when running against lesser competition. That’s why it’s so vital not to do what many less experienced owners end up doing a lot of i.e. run claiming horses in allowance races, allowance horses in stakes, etc. Looking at the horses that won so impressively for us this month; many of them were up the track in much tougher races at Gulfstream this winter. With most tracks closed due to Covid 19 virus, we didn’t have anywhere else to run them for a while, but as soon as we did and they moved to easier circuits and faced lesser competition, the same horses that were running 5^th, 6^th, 7^th, 8^th were standing in the winner’s circle. While this may shock a lot of people, their speed figures were mostly the same or better when running off the board at Gulfstream as they were when winning elsewhere. In other words, it wasn’t that they started running faster-better so much as they faced less skilled horses running slower.

With all our horses running well and our two year old crop starting to run, we are looking forward to a very successful second half of 2020 but we try not to forget these important lessons.