Owner-trainer Kayla Warren talks about the eight-year-old gelding who racked up a series of wins far from the bright lights at Turf Paradise and on the Rocky Mountain fair circuit
The Equibase rankings reckon he’s a 10. Hot stuff, for sure, but Sharp Warning isn’t a ten.
Instead, like the numbers on the amplifier dials in the cult film This Is Spinal Tap, Sharp Warning goes up to 11. It’s one more, and it’s more than enough to make him the winningmost horse of 2025 in the US.
More than 42,600 horses made at least one start in the US, Canada and Puerto Rico during 2025, and Sharp Warning, an eight-year-old gelding – although he’s nine now, of course – led them all.
His ten ‘official’ victories were gained mainly in the minor-league exotica of the Rocky Mountains fair circuit, through which he travelled like a chestnut whirlwind, rolling across state lines with the vigour of a presidential candidate, reaping a mighty harvest.
He was unbeaten in three races at Great Falls in Montana, went two-for-two at Blackfoot in Idaho, picked up two more at Turf Paradise (Arizona), and reached double figures by singling at Miles City (Montana), White Pine Racing (Nevada) and Arapahoe Park (Colorado), all between 5¼ furlongs and 6½ furlongs.
That’s the Equibase ten. In early October, though, Sharp Warning took his fearsome appetite for the winner’s circle to the Fort Pierre fair in South Dakota, where even a 6½-furlong race goes around three turns, and bumped his tally up to 11.
Fort Pierre is not recognised as a Thoroughbred track by Equibase, but we know, and Sharp Warning knows, and his owner-trainer Kayla Warren knows his little secret.
Amazing horse
“He’s been awesome, he’s a pretty amazing horse,” says Warren, who is well prepared for the inevitable question, answers it almost with a shrug.
“I honestly can’t tell you what’s different about him this year. People have been asking me and there’s no obvious answer. He isn’t different.
“But I suppose I’ve managed to pick the right spots for him, and maybe the time off he had in the fall of 2024 is a factor. Look, he’s just the easiest horse to run, he turns up and gets it done. It’s just really weird that he started doing it at the age of eight.”
That’s not the only unusual thing about the California-bred son of Elusive Warning, this most unconventional celebrity. Sharp Warning was unraced at two, won at Golden Gate Fields on his debut in May 2020, and the next time he caught the judge’s eye was in a quarter-horse race at Los Alamitos the following year.
He made 17 starts in the quarter-horse sphere, endured a 23-race losing streak through 2022 and 2023, and then won twice before joining Warren. He may have worked the claiming beat assiduously, but Sharp Warning didn’t come Warren’s way through the claims box.
“I bought him for $4,000, which certainly seems like a bargain now,” she says. “I’d seen him run a few times and I knew his trainer Jim Crotts, who also owned him.
“One day Jim asked me if I’d like to buy him, and I said okay. We did the deal. I’m glad I did!”
Getting away with it
Warren saddled him for the first time in May 2024, bit her nails through a couple of claimers – “I didn’t want to lose him, but he was eligible for $4,000 claimers, and I got away with it” – before winning two races at Great Falls, then gave him a well-earned break and began 2025 with just an ordinary eight-year-old gelding. She ended it with an extraordinary one.
“I suppose you’d call him quite a docile horse, a serious type, doesn’t show much emotion, 100 per cent professional. And he loves his work,” says Warren.
“He just loves to train. I give him three days off after a race and then he’s back on the worktab. He loves to run back to back, a week, two weeks between races, and he knows when he finishes second, doesn’t like it – watch out next time.
“The race that really sticks in my mind was a claimer at Turf Paradise in February. We changed his style of running – previously he’d break fast but then we’d rein him back. That time we decided to let him go and he just opened up, his heart got big, he put his ears forward and drew away from the field.
“He ran 1:08 and change for the six furlongs – amazing for such a cheap horse.”
Warren, a native of New Mexico, is based at Buckeye in Arizona for the winter, with Turf Paradise on her doorstep, but when spring settles on the Rockies it rouses her wanderlust and she heads north for the Fair circuit.
“I love to tour, it makes life fun. I love to travel with the horses,” she says. “It helps support a lot of small tracks as well, supports the people involved.
Pretty popular
“It’s not hard to get in the races and the grandstands are full of horse fans, people who really know about horses. Sharp Warning made himself pretty popular this year.”
The itinerant lifestyle means that Sharp Warning doesn’t have a regular rider, but he’s a hard-working professional and doesn’t need special handling. Seven jockeys partnered him to victory through his whistle-stop campaign – including the splendidly named Richard Birdrattler – and Warren never has to worry about finding a rider.
“Whoever gets on his back loves what he does,” she says. “All types of jockey get on well with him, and he covers the whole spectrum of age and experience. Fernando Gamez, who won on him at Blackfoot, is 64.”
Sharp Warning’s exploits helped make it a banner year for Warren, her best campaign since she took out a licence in 2012, with a career-high 28 wins and record earnings of $146,000. She has 18 in the barn, a third of them quarter-horses, and enjoys the contrasts between the two disciplines.
“I like training both because they aren’t trained in the same way,” she says. “Perhaps I might have a tendency to overtrain the quarter-horses, which means I have to freshen them a little more, but I appreciate the different challenges.
“Sharp Warning’s quarter-horse days are done, though. He still has plenty of speed but not quite enough for that.”
Homespun operation
It’s a boutique, homespun operation, with just four members of staff including Warren, who adopts a Trumanesque buck-stops-with-me doctrine when it comes to hard graft.
“I want to know what’s going on with my horses, I like to be hands-on, it’s a tough job but I enjoy it,” she says.
“I have the right number of horses. I do this to have fun, so I don’t want to get too big. I’ve been offered more horses since Sharp Warning’s been on his streak, but I prefer to be faithful to the owners who have stuck by me through the not-so-good times.”
The good times might yet have embraced the big time, too, as Sharp Warning was expected to sign off for the year in the lucrative Claiming Crown series at Churchill Downs, an event regarded as the blue-collar Breeders’ Cup for the unsung heroes on every racecard.
He was entered for a $100,000 contest – more than ten times his usual purse, and twice as much as his yearly earnings – but Warren wouldn’t be seduced by the siren song of the six-figure pot.
“He didn’t have a problem, nothing like that, I just saw how tough the race was and I didn’t want to put him there after all he’d done this year,” she explains.
“He’s been so good to us I didn’t want to break his heart, so I turned him out instead and gave him a bit of a holiday.
“He’ll be back maybe February or March, ready for the same sort of schedule. He still has his starter allowance conditions, so he’ll begin at Turf Paradise and then we’ll all head to Montana in May, maybe run in a few little stakes up there.”
It is asking a great deal for any horse to win 11 races in one year, and perhaps asking the impossible to expect Sharp Warning to post similar figures again. Tennessee Moon, 2024’s winningmost horse, won ‘only’ three times in 2025 and a regression to the mean is a far more likely outcome than otherwise.
So Warren will roam racing’s less-travelled byways in hope rather than expectation, tracing a sinuous path through the Rockies from fair to fair where even Equibase sometimes fears to tread. What better way to spend a summer?
“I know all about the highs and lows with horses, and I don’t expect the same again,” she says. “Maybe he’ll come back strong – you just never know with horses.
“I just hope everything goes smoothly, and we have some fun. He’s my buddy, and I feel blessed to have him.”
North America’s winningmost horses in 2025
11 (not 10) Sharp Warning
As above
9 Silver Slugger
Loved the Florida vibe, going six-for-seven at Tampa Bay Downs, alongside stakes wins at Delaware Park and Monmouth Park
9 Busk
Made hay in starter allowances and claimers and relished the big-track spotlight when winning twice at Keeneland and Churchill Downs
9 Motown Dynamic
Never off the board in 14 starts, with four wins at Prairie Meadows alongside victories at Churchill Downs and Keeneland
9 He’s In Charge
Finished out of the first two just once and went unbeaten in six starts at Delaware Park in optional claimers between June and October
9 Pacific Blue
Puerto Rico’s finest, a standing dish at Camarero, with all nine wins coming in sprint claimers and never out of the first four
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