Trainer is taking the long view and avoiding the temptation to ship across country to Del Mar with his 6½-length Champagne Stakes winner
It is probably easier to accept a free entry to the Breeders’ Cup than to turn one down. But turn one down is exactly what trainer Chad Summers has done.
Napoleon Solo, the leading light in Summers’s barn, was nothing short of devastating when wiring the field by 6½ lengths on just his second start in New York’s most prestigious two-year-old race, the G1 Champagne Stakes at the ‘Belmont at the Big A’ meet at Aqueduct.
That was on October 4, a month before the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile – the obvious target for any winner of this ‘Win and You’re In’ contest.
But not this winner, as Summers (above right) explains. “When I saw the three-quarter time in 1:07, that’s when you get really scared because that’s almost unheard of for a two-year-old making his second career start,” he says.
“At that point it went to ‘I think we went too fast to go to California.’ I had one eye on the race and one eye thinking it’s going to be very tough to get to the Breeders’ Cup off this kind of effort. We feel like it would be a lot to ask of him to come right back.”
So it’s no to Del Mar, but yes to a three-year-old campaign aimed at the first Saturday in May. “We have a lot of respect for the Breeders’ Cup and a lot of respect for the Kentucky Derby,” adds Summers, who has just 26 horses in his Belmont barn.
“They’re two races I haven’t won yet. It’s not one or the other, it’s that to replicate that race [the Champagne], which he’d have to do against Ted Noffey and Brant and some of the others, you’d have to be 100-plus [on speed figures] and it’s tough to come back again so quickly.”
Too quickly – and too far, as it turns out. “The Breeders’ Cup was supposed to travel each year, but unfortunately it’s been in California for three straight years,” says Summers. “That makes it difficult – especially for young horses. Hopefully it will change.”
Napoleon Solo gave Summers, 41, his first G1 victory for more than seven years since sprint star Mind Your Biscuits landed his second edition of the Dubai Golden Shaheen at Meydan in 2018.
In the interim, Summers seriously contemplated retirement from the career he loves. “There’s been many times I’ve thought about walking away and stopping training, including the day after ‘Biscuits’ retired,’” he admits. “It’s gratifying, and I take a lot of pride in being able to win a G1 with a horse who cost $40,000.”
Summers is a native New Yorker, which gives this latest G1 success extra resonance. “The first job I ever had on a racetrack was working at Aqueduct in 2004, so it brings everything full circle,” he says. “To look at the names of the horses who have won that race … it’s a ‘who’s who’ of champions. Even Secretariat was a demoted second in it.
“It’s a big deal, but we don’t take anything lightly, especially as he’s not been the easiest horse to deal with,” Summers goes on. “He’s a very high energy, playful colt. He loves what he does and doesn’t want to come off the track – he wants to give you a high five instead. It’s made things very entertaining – he’s quite the personality.”
Even without Napoleon Solo, Summers will still be going into Breeders’ Cup battle as stablemate Dry Powder, an agonizing neck second to Clicquot in the G1 Cotillion at Parx, will make the journey to Del Mar for the Distaff.
“We’ll be a little bit of a price in that race but they billed the Cotillion as the race for the top three-year-old fillies and we got beat a whisker,” he says. “I think the Del Mar surface should play to her liking and she just keeps checking every box.”
Like Napoleon Solo, Dry Powder is owned by Al Gold, with whom Summers has worked for five years. Then, as now, he manages all of Gold’s horses, including those with other trainers.
“Al said in the first year, ‘We can take one home run swing’,” recalls Summers. That home run swing was the Brad Cox-trained Cyberknife.
“I told him that he would either win a G1 or never make it to the races and he said, ‘I like your honesty – that’s the true definition of a home run swing!’ I’d never bought a horse for $400,000 in my life but he was up for the challenge.”
Cyberknife more than repaid his purchase price with G1 wins in the Arkansas Derby and the Haskell as a three-year-old – both of them million-dollar events. The son of Gun Runner was also second in the Travers Stakes and the Breeders’ Cup Dirt Mile.
“He’s [Gold] been a member of this industry, gambling, for 50 years and owning racehorses for 25,” Summers says. “He loves this sport and we probably talk about 18 times a day, from 4am until 10pm. He’s all-in, fully invested, and has a loving family behind him.
“He’s lost money, been taken advantage of, over the years and he just kept his head down and said: ‘I’m going to be OK.’
“Winning the Haskell with Cyberknife at his home track, Monmouth Park, was special and he’d love nothing more than to win a Breeders’ Cup race or to win the Kentucky Derby.”
Gold, who has now retired from a successful career in real estate, could be affectionately described as a ‘character’ with a penchant for the exuberant in naming his horses.
The Other Chad offers a nod to Summers’s ultra-successful East Coast training colleague Chad Brown, and then there’s the G1 winner Howard Wolowitz, named after a character in The Big Bang Theory. Napoleon Solo was a spy famously portrayed by Robert Vaughn in the cult 1960s TV show The Man From UNCLE.
The colt’s name has a story, as Summers relates. “His original name was ‘No Male Today’ because you want a Saturday horse, not a Sunday horse, so no mail on Sunday, right?” he says.
“As he got better, thankfully we changed it! Al loves watching old TV shows and sports and naming horses after his friends. He can’t get over the number of people who remember a TV show from the 60s.”
Let the record show that Summers was two decades from being born when the show originally aired. Either way, he is eternally grateful to his senior patron.
“He’s someone that you want to get to know,” says Summers. “He has a heart of gold, but you’ve got to do some digging to get there. “He’s quick to give opportunities to people that maybe others wouldn’t give opportunities to and good things come to people like that. He had to wait a long time on the merry-go-round for his turn to come up but it’s been a fun five years.”
Suddenly, we’re back where we started: to turn down a free Breeders’ Cup place you need an owner willing to trust you.
Gold is a patient man, putting his faith into a talented trainer. Even if he is only ‘The Other Chad’.
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