On an August afternoon, Jim and Tina Bond sit at the dinner table in their home at Song Hill Farm in Mechanicville, New York. The house sits atop the eponymous hill, overlooking a paddock of mares and foals. The room is suffused with sunlight, windows that stretch nearly floor to ceiling offering vistas down to the farm’s entrance, dozens of horses of all ages visible, lazing in the late summer heat.
It’s hard to imagine a more peaceful scene, especially on a non-racing day in a Saratoga summer, when the pace is a little slower, but according to Tina, that table has been the site of not a few intense conversations.
“Family dinners can get really interesting,” she said. “None of us is afraid to make our opinions known.”
And, when everyone in the family is involved in the family business, there can be a lot of opinions.
Jim has been training horses for more than 40 years; Tina manages the racing partnership the family established several years ago. After earning degrees in business and finance, sons Kevin and Ryan opted out of the corporate world to join their father in the barn.
Occasional acrimony
“We’ve tried to implement a ‘let’s not talk about racing’ rule at dinner,” said Kevin, the 33-year-old elder son. “But our day revolves around it, and we’re so passionate about what we do, and our family is so close that it’s hard to shut it off.”
Spending time with the Bond family might make one suspicious about these rumors of occasional acrimony; together and individually, they are exemplars of affection, of good humor, of equanimity. It’s hard to imagine them arguing about, say, the choice of a jockey for a particular horse, one example that Tina cited of dinner-time discussion.
Then again, Bond Racing Stable had a lot to be happy about this summer. The family finished the Covid-shortened Belmont spring/summer meet with a 39 percent top-three finishers rate, and that includes seven second-place runners. They boosted that to a whopping 63 percent at the competitive Saratoga meet, compiling a record of 12-8-5 from 40 starters, a 30 percent win rate.
The Bonds own a private barn a short walk from Saratoga Race Course, and their horses regularly rotate between the barn and their farm, where they can be turned out and get some equine R&R.
“The farm gives them a chance to take a deep breath,” said Jim. “We’ve got three paddocks exclusively for horses coming from the track. We’ve got a Eurocizer where they can walk or jog. Sometimes we have riders come out in the afternoon to get on horses or help to break them.”
The farm also features an indoor ring. Though the farm horses usually live outside, except when it’s stormy or excessively hot, the youngest horses get ‘play time’ in the arena during bad weather.
The Bond family concept extends beyond the humans to the horses. Near paddocks where the youngest horses wait to be weaned live the pensioners, the mares and ex-racehorses that enabled the Bonds’ racing success. Among them are the stakes-winning geldings Ruffino and Tomassi, along with the 21-year-old mare Princess Dixie.
Orino is there, too, a horse that had been claimed away from the Bonds and ended his career on the West Coast, running for a $6,250 tag. The Bonds persuaded his owners to sell the horse back to them, and like the others, he’ll live his life out on the farm, and be buried in the equine graveyard that lies beneath an evergreen copse on the property.
Kevin and wife Emily live in a home across the street from the farm; this summer, Ryan lived in the main house on the farm. Both Ryan and Kevin attended college in Florida, and both studied finance, perhaps inspired by their mother, who worked in banking before joining the family business full-time. She traded foreign currency, she was an investment specialist, and eventually, she said, she “managed the bank’s money on a daily basis”.
“It helped me to do what I’m doing today,” she said.
Her sons agree.
“I apply my degree in business management to horseracing more than I thought I would,” said Kevin. “My dad pays attention to every detail, doing weekly inventories, and that helps save money and cut costs. A lot of great horsemen never learned business skills, and it’s cost them.”
Ryan graded right into the slow recovery from the 2008 recession and a correspondingly slow job market. He had worked at the barn since he was a kid, and rather than take a job that he didn’t really want, he elected to work with horses.
“I always knew I didn’t really want to spend my 20s and early 30s working in an office,” he said.
Inflexible training schedule
Instead, he and Emily spent this past winter at the farm on foal and mare watch, learning more about the breeding end of his parents’ business. In addition to foaling their own mares, they also board mares for Bob Edwards’ e Five racing and Fasig-Tipton’s Boyd Browning.
Kevin worked for his father for five years, then decided to work in the business world after tiring of the demanding, inflexible training schedule.
“I’d see my brother running horses all over the place, and I’d be home watching TVG and see our horses run, and I thought, ‘That’s what I really want to do,” he said. “Stepping away for a bit made me realize that.”
“Our parents never forced us into working with them,” said Ryan. “They gave us the tools to decide for ourselves.”
And, while Jim and Tina may initially have discouraged their sons from following them into an unpredictable life and career, they now focus on making sure that the industry that their sons love remains healthy.
Tina serves as second vice president of the New York Thoroughbred Horsemen’s Association, and Jim as a director of New York Thoroughbred Breeders.
“We want them to have the same opportunities I had,” said Jim. “The world has changed a lot.”
“The boys are giving us their best years,” said Tina. “It’s my job to make sure I can leave the industry in a better state for them.”
On June 23 last year, Bond Racing Stable’s Rinaldi won a stakes race at Belmont Park. None of the Bonds were in the winner’s circle, because they were up in Saratoga at Ryan and Emily’s wedding.
On September 4 this year, as the Saratoga meeting neared its end, Rinaldi added the West Point Stakes to his résumé, and this time, the Bond family celebrated in person.
“It doesn’t get any better than sharing with friends and family,” said Jim.
Earlier this summer, Tina characterized the family as a “four-legged chair”, unable to stand without the support of each other.
Ryan agreed.
“We make each other better,” he said.