by Joe Drape
It was not a heart-stopping race for once for the Zayats. Paynter was in control for the entire mile-and-eighth distance and won easily by more than three lengths. Ahmed had watched from California and called Justin immediately. He was proud of his horse, but he was also proud of his son and how grown up he looked leading Paynter into the winner’s circle. Justin, too, was moved to near tears. He had never witnessed in person one of the Zayat Stables’ horses win a big race. He was grateful for the opportunity and told his father so.
By all rights, there should have been a fade out on the Zayats’ year of discontent, and father and son could get on with racing’s second season with renewed hope for winning big races with Bodemeister and Paynter throughout the fall and leading into the 2012 Breeders’ Cup World Championships.
Instead, two days later, Paynter spiked a fever, had a bout with diarrhea, and caught pneumonia and was hospitalized near the racetrack at Mid-Atlantic Equine Medical Center. He was given antibiotics and fluids and seemed to recover well enough to be taken to Belmont Park ten days later to start training for the Travers Stakes at the end of August in Saratoga. His stay there was brief before he was shipped to the Spa. Once Paynter arrived upstate, however, it was evident he was not in racing, or even training, shape to be ready for the Travers. He was scheduled to return to California but got sick again before his departure date. This time Paynter was taken to the Upstate Equine Medical Center in Schuylerville, New York, and was diagnosed with a more serious condition: He had colitis—inflammation of the colon.
Simultaneously, back at Del Mar, Bodemeister was retired to stud after injuring his shoulder during a routine gallop that unseated his rider. The beat was on again for the Zayats.
In New York, however, the medical saga of Paynter was just beginning and it would capture the attention of horse lovers everywhere, largely because of Justin Zayat’s savvy with social media and Ahmed’s operatic way of communicating his emotions in the 140-character-or-less Twittersphere. The poor colt could not catch a break. He developed blood clots, lost 300 pounds—or nearly a quarter of his body weight—and withstood aggressive medical treatment. Under the hashtag #PowerUpPaynter, Ahmed and Justin put out daily updates on the colt’s roller-coaster ride. He developed laminitis, an often-fatal inflammation of the hoof, in three of his feet and was fitted with casts on his lower legs to support them. His primary caregiver, Dr. Laura Javsicas, became his “angel” in Ahmed’s Twitter dispatches. The grave days were given their due—three times the Zayats came close to putting the colt down. The dispatches went viral. The upbeat days were celebrated: @jazz3162 @JustinZayat Paynter update: Been a super day today once again. Eating all day. Happy. Very bright. Playful! No fever. Feet totally normal.
Soon, handmade posters and hundreds of get-well cards started arriving at the Upstate Equine Medical Center; some were from children but many were from adults. By October, Paynter required surgery and was sent to the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Veterinary Medicine’s New Bolton Center. It was where 2006 Kentucky Derby champion Barbaro had been treated and subsequently died after being pulled up in the opening yards of the Preakness with a fractured right hind leg.
When the New Bolton surgeons removed a fifteen-inch bacteria-filled growth from Paynter’s intestines and the colt was given a promising prognosis, the celebration of answered prayers under #PowerUpPaynter exploded. The colt’s illness and recovery were not only voted in a landslide by fans as the National Thoroughbred Racing Association’s moment of the year, but the occasion also cemented the Zayats as a new kind of horse owner: passionate about the sport, willing to promote it, and definitely of the people rather than above them. Even more remarkable, Paynter returned to the racetrack less than a year later. Although he finished second twice, he never won again, which no one ever would have known by the size of the crowds he attracted and the raucous reception that he received each race.
Finally, in the autumn of 2014, things were definitely looking up for Ahmed Zayat. Justin was growing nicely into his role as the stable’s racing manager, allowing his father to focus on the business of breeding. Justin was earning the respect of the stable’s array of trainers—among them two Hall of Famers who were counted among the best of all time, Baffert and seventy-nine-year-old D. Wayne Lukas. Justin knew what he didn’t know and peppered them with questions about everything from training regimens to how to recognize what physical flaws in a horse could be overcome, and which could not. Justin also was the one who assigned the two-year-olds to the stable’s various trainers. Best of all, Ahmed appreciated his son’s effort to share his passion for the game with his peers. The sport needed to grow a younger fan base.
“This is my sports team,” Justin Zayat said. “I want people to wear our stable hats like they wear their Yankees hats.”
American Pharoah had come out of the FrontRunner in perfect condition and was continuing to dazzle Baffert and everyone in his barn. The colt was an absolute machine in the mornings and had already tossed off three breezes that are rarely seen from two-year-olds. American Pharoah was powerful as well as polished on the track. The Breeders’ Cup Juvenile was approaching, and everyone around the colt was hard-pressed to come up with a way of how he could lose. Usually it was Zayat who sounded like an overexcited ten-year-old when he spoke to his trainer by phone. Now, it was Baffert speaking buoyantly about American Pharoah, confident that the colt had yet to come anywhere close to running his best race.
“He’s just a monster,” he told the owner one morning. “Sometimes I look at my stopwatch and wonder how he can do this.”
Zayat just knew good fortune was on the horizon. Pioneerof the Nile was having a spectacular year as a stallion, topping the list of second-crop sires with progeny that earned nearly $3.5 million and had captured five graded stakes races. Just like first loves, horse people tend to remember their first big horse and Pioneerof the Nile was that and more to Zayat. He was the very first horse that he had bred himself. Sort of. Zayat bought his mother, Star of Goshen, privately when she was carrying the son of Empire Maker. He was born on May 5, 2006, on the eve of the Kentucky Derby. The foal nearly died a month later after being discovered in a field suffering from a severe bout of colic. He was small enough to be laid in the backseat of a car and rushed to a hospital, where emergency surgery untwisted his stomach to save his life. The episode was the inspiration for the first lesson Ahmed imparted to Justin about the horse business: “You need to be lucky more than smart,” he said. “And always somebody has to be watching out for you.”
In a perhaps prophetic preview of what was going to unfold six years later with American Pharoah, Zayat sent the colt through the sales ring—this time at the 2007 Keeneland September Yearling Sale. Like his son, the yearling barely drew any bidding interest, so Zayat bought him back for $270,000. The following year, the colt, now named Pioneerof the Nile, delivered Zayat Stables its very first Grade 1 victory in the CashCall Futurity. Worse than watching the colt come up short in the Derby was having to retire him after suffering a soft tissue injury the following summer while training for the fall season.
“Bob was one hundred percent convinced that he was going to win the Breeders’ Cup Classic,” he said. “That was his target right after the Derby.”
Instead, Pioneerof the Nile was sent to the breeding shed and after a tentative start was now paying dividends in a variety of ways. He had runners in two of three legs of the Triple Crown, including his top earner for the year, the freakishly fast Social Inclusion. He had broken a track record at Gulfstream Park at a mile and a sixteenth and won by ten lengths; he then finished third in the Preakness behind California Chrome. Pioneerof the Nile was proving that he was versatile, producing winners on dirt, turf, and synthetic surfaces. He was delivering value: The average auction price of his yearlings was $400,000, or twenty times his current fee of $20,000. He was hitting these home runs with second- and third-tier mares. After another of his sons, Cairo Prince, won the Holy Bull Stakes, Sheikh Mo
bought a share of the colt for Godolphin, the racing arm of his Thoroughbred operation. When Social Inclusion won an allowance race, his owners rejected $8 million offered for the horse. All this meant Pioneerof the Nile was putting out quality horses.
He was not getting blue hen mares—as the most royally bred and accomplished females are called—from French breeders such as the Wertheimers, who own Chanel, the perfume and fashion house, or the sheikhs of Dubai or the royal families of Saudi Arabia. Breeders are serious people, and when they propose a mare, they have done their homework and know the bloodlines back six to eight generations and what they are after in terms of offspring.
Pioneerof the Nile was still a new sire, and managing a stallion’s book is a lot like being a Hollywood agent: in good times, you say no often; in bad times, you say yes to cut-rate prices. Neither Zayat, who controlled a significant portion of shares of Pioneerof the Nile, nor the stallion manager at the horse’s home at WinStar Farm so far had the luxury of saying no.
That was about to change. His homebred American Pharoah had given his homebred Pioneerof the Nile his first Grade 1 progeny when he won the Del Mar Futurity and FrontRunner Stakes. Zayat and WinStar had already decided to triple the stud fee of Pioneerof the Nile to $60,000 for 2015. Not only would breeders pay it, but they would also offer better mares. Zayat was already reaping the benefits of his stallion’s popularity. His creditors had to be paid in full by the end of the year, and Zayat was reallocating his assets. He claimed that Zayat Stables cost him $1 million a month to operate, which was a reasonable figure considering that the industry rule of thumb for keeping a racehorse in training is $50,000 a year while raising one is $20,000 or so annually. Zayat had a lot of horses on the racetrack as well as on the farms. He currently was offering some breeding shares—the right to breed annually—to Pioneerof the Nile and they were selling into the mid- to high six figures.
What was most exciting for Ahmed and Justin Zayat was the recognition they were getting as breeders for creating something potentially great: American Pharoah. The farms were already inquiring about his future stallion rights, and none had been more insistent than Coolmore America.
There are plenty of sharp, deep-pocketed breeding outfits in Central Kentucky—Lane’s End, WinStar, Claiborne, and Calumet to name a few—but none carry as much mystery, command more respect, or strike as much fear among horsemen in the Bluegrass as Coolmore, the preeminent stallion station in the world with operations in Europe, America, and Australia and significant reach into the business of racing and breeding in five continents. In the Bluegrass, they are alternately referred to as “the Irish,” “the Gangsters,” and the “cleverest” horse operators in the world. Among its forty-plus stallions, they are in control of the best and most valuable horse semen in the world. Their stallion list reads like an all-star team plucked from the globe’s most accomplished horses: Galileo and So You Think stand in Ireland, Giant’s Causeway and Tale of the Cat in America, and Fastnet Rock in Australia.
In 1975, the original Coolmore partnership was struck when Britain’s leading international owner, the bookie Robert Sangster; the trainer Dr. Vincent O’Brien; and stallion master (and future son-in-law) John Magnier took over a 350-acre stud farm in Ireland. Back then, Kentucky was on top of the global market by purchasing Irish and English horses that the old country could not afford to keep. Coolmore reversed that model and became regulars at the Keeneland Sales, at first focusing on yearlings from the line of Northern Dancer, the 1964 Kentucky Derby and Preakness winner who was already proven as one of the most influential sires in Thoroughbred history. They hit the jackpot early when a colt named The Minstrel was among a group of yearlings that they paid a little over $1.7 million for and won the 1977 Epsom Derby. They bought Alleged for $175,000 and won France’s biggest race, Prix de l’Arc de Triomphes, with him twice. Then Coolmore syndicated them and sold them back to American breeding farms: the Minstrel for $9 million and Alleged for $16 million, or $35 million and $60 million when adjusted for inflation.
It didn’t take them long to spin off more partnerships and establish farms of their own in Kentucky and Australia with revenues from other sought-after sires they had in their barns, such as Sadler’s Wells, Danehill, Southern Halo, Royal Academy, El Gran Senor, and Woodman. They were blessed with another infusion of capital when another successful bookmaker, Michael Tabor, became a partner.
Sangster and company were among the first to get more bang for the buck by shipping their Irish-based stallions to Australia for the Southern Hemisphere breeding season. So instead of being limited to seventy-five or a hundred matings at home, Coolmore stallions could double that number, as well as the farm’s fees, by going south in the month of August for breeding season that begins in September. Everyone agreed that they were smart. It was their swagger at the Keeneland Sales that pumped them up to mythical proportions, though, especially as they became involved in epic bidding battles with Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum and his family. It was like a Bloods vs. Crips rumble, except that the only weapons wielded were wits, bluffs, and bottomless bank accounts. The Coolmore crew moved as a pack with their “lads” and huddled in the back of the sales pavilion to launch their bids. Sheikh Mo also had a modus operandi, looking every bit of a stable groom in a white T-shirt, blue jeans, and a royal-blue satin jacket with Godolphin, the name of his racing stable, embroidered on it.
Both Coolmore and the sheikh have prompted each other into making expensive mistakes. In 1983, Sheikh Mo, trying to catch up with Coolmore, paid $10.2 million for a Northern Dancer colt that at the time was the most expensive horse sold at auction. He was given the name Snaafi Dancer but was so slow that he never made it to the racetrack. He was a bust as a stallion as well, exhibiting fertility problems and siring just four foals. In 2006, representatives of each camp went at it again over a Forestry colt that had blazed an eighth of a mile in 9.8 seconds at a Florida two-year-old-in-training sale. Coolmore won the battle, bidding $16 million, but definitely lost the war. They named him the Green Monkey and raced him three times, where his best finish was a third place. He was retired and stands in Florida for a fee of $5,000.
The gangster part of Coolmore’s reputation came not only from the high theater they performed in tandem with Sheikh Mo, but also the code of silence they kept publicly and the ruthlessness they showed on deals. The Irish, it was often alleged, like to get one over on rival horse people, often entering presale agreements with a seller’s representative for, say, $1 million, then bidding up the horse it already owned so an unsuspecting buyer purchases it for $2 million. They allegedly split the difference with the sales agent. It was the whispers of this underhanded practice that put an end to the Coolmore–Sheikh Mo bidding wars. Without coming out and saying so, the sheikh clearly was not sending any of his mares to Coolmore stallions or bidding on their yearlings or two-year-olds that showed up in the sales ring.
Now John Magnier and one of his top executives, Paul Shanahan, were trying to determine what it would take to secure the breeding rights of American Pharoah from Zayat Stables. Just as they pursued cornering the Northern Dance line forty years ago, Coolmore had been executing a game plan to lock up as many American two-year-old champions as they could as early as possible. Since 2009, it had bought four of them: Lookin At Lucky (2009), Uncle Mo (2010), Hansen (2011), and Shanghai Bobby (2012). The previous year the champion male was Shared Belief, a gelding, and thus had no future as a stallion. The others all stood at Ashford Stud, their American base in Versailles, Kentucky.
American Pharoah was thought to be the next in line. He was the favorite to win the Juvenile, which would seal the deal for American Pharoah and make him a cinch to be named two-year-old champion. It was still early to lock up the juvenile horse’s breeding rights, but it was no secret in the Bluegrass that Zayat was under financial pressure and needed cash to complete his bankruptcy. How much and how soon did he need it was what Coolmore, and other farms, were trying to figure out. The bre
eding business in the Bluegrass may be spread out over four counties, but it is the smallest of towns. Everyone talked and the numbers being passed over the fence post and in the feed shops were that Zayat needed $14 million by the end of the year.
On the fence-post wire, the word was that Coolmore had floated an offer of $10 million with immediate bonuses for a victory in the Juvenile as well as being named two-year-old champion, along with incentives for winning the Triple Crown races. It was a starting point, a reasonable one. No one expected Zayat to accept the first offer. He reveled in the back and forth of negotiations and believed that one of his greatest strengths was his tirelessness. When putting the Al Ahram deal together, Zayat once spoke for sixteen straight hours until everyone fell asleep in the room except for him and the person he was talking to. He told the story with relish, wanting you to know that making a deal to him was a form of combat and that he kept score in terms of what he was getting, not giving away. It didn’t matter if you were a small farm owner or horse breeder. If Zayat was five months in arrears to you, he would give you two months now and call the bill settled. If you offered him $380,000 for a share of Pioneerof the Nile, he’d insist that he was not taking a nickel under $550,000.
Zayat was looking forward to the coming weeks. He had a Big Horse, a special one and now everyone knew it.