LOUISVILLE — If you’re lucky at 6:45 a.m. and 48 degrees at the backside barns on the Tuesday before the Kentucky Derby, you’ll wander the annual ecosystem: the clusters gawking at horses and gabbing with coffee cups, the TV stations broadcasting from behind their flower arrangements, the cats sneaking around to find whatever cats find, the horses getting bathed, the people stretching and craning for position to photograph the horses getting bathed, riders speaking Japanese from atop Japanese Derby horses, D. Wayne Lukas riding a horse to the track at 87, two favorites (Forte and Tapit Trice) walking around trainer Todd Pletcher’s shedrow, Pletcher out alone on the track to survey matters.
If you’re uncommonly lucky hours later, you’ll hear Leslie Amestoy tell of her days as a trainer in the 1980s and say, “I got accepted because I kicked their asses.”
You’ll hear this co-owner of Santa Anita Derby winner Practical Move tell of zigzagging among the scruffy racetracks of New Mexico and Arizona and Colorado, and say, “This is the ’80s we’re talking about, right?” Then you’ll hear her and her unmistakable teammate in life, husband Pierre — these Amestoys of Albuquerque — demonstrate that artful knack of life teammates in their 60s: finishing each other’s sentences.
Leslie: “I was one of the first women trainers in the country, and it was hard breaking into the man’s world, but I was accepted once they saw that I could do the job. And I don’t know how many races I won — 250, 350 . . .”
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Pierre: “You did pretty good. Won some derbies and futurities. She did really good.”
Leslie, one question later: “I out-trained them.”
Pierre: “She was a real good caretaker.”
Leslie: “Yes. And I’ve been on a horse since I was a little bitty girl. I won the junior national jumpers when I was 17. So I rode horses all my life.”
Pierre was a jockey agent while Leslie was a trainer, and they rode together across the hushed horizons until they stopped in the early 1990s and began raising two sons. They kept pinhooking with horses, Pierre made a good boom with his construction business, and they bought a farm in Kentucky — Lobo Farm! — until casinos resuscitated racing in New Mexico.
Leslie: “But we have pinhooked for years and years. You know, we know all about every . . .”
Pierre: “We haven’t lately, because we’ve been racing . . .”
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Leslie: “But this is the first time we did the 2-year-old-in-training deal.”
Pierre: “Yeah.”
Leslie: “So it’s a little different — it’s definitely different — but it’s still about the animal, you know.”
They knew the way to the top of other horse worlds — that of quarter horses, for example — but now they’ve found the top of this rare-air world, standing outside Barn 27 with stories. That’s because of what they saw at the 2022 Spring Sale in Ocala, Fla., where this 2-year-old from stallion Practical Joke and mare Ack Naughty with granddad Afleet Alex enthralled them because . . .
Let the horsewoman describe.
“Oh, he’s just a knockout,” Leslie said. “He’s so correct. He’s got a beautiful foot — just beautiful. A nice, long top line. Super nice. Good neck. Super long. Big hip. Huge. I mean, when you see him, even as a 2-year-old, he was amazing to me. I guess, you know, $230,000 is a lot, but maybe if he’d have been, you know, a Tapit [foal] or something like that . . .”
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Pierre: “. . . We wouldn’t have got him . . .”
Leslie: “. . . We wouldn’t have gotten to sniff him.”
“And then,” Leslie said, “his work was impressive because he was quick turn of foot but 17 hands. I could see the speed in him, but yet I could see the stretch, you know, and that’s what he has. He has that turn of foot to get position, and he can carry it, and I really believe he’ll carry the [Derby] distance.”
They allotted $175,000 to buy him, and they figured that would suffice. But the bidding got to $175,000 “in about 15 seconds,” Pierre said as Leslie laughed, so Leslie surrendered and sought refuge at their table, and so . . . “I sat there and watched,” Pierre said, “and I bid again, and they bid, and I bid again, and that’s when I saw [the other bidder], and he was starting at 200, he got to 215, and I could see he was getting to the end, and so I looked at the spotter and I said, ‘Two-thirty,’ and I bid 230, and the guy walked off. I bought him. So I sign the ticket, I go back to the table, and I’m kind of looking like I’m sad . . .”
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Leslie: “And I go, ‘We should have done more . . .’ ”
Pierre: “ ‘We should have done more . . .’ ”
But then: “I got him.”
“You got him?”
“I got him.”
Pierre: “And she goes, ‘Was that the right move?’ We looked at each other, and she goes, ‘Practical move — that’s his name!’ That’s how he got his name! She named him right there at the table!”
So toss another story onto their great bale of those. Practical Move won four times in seven races between August and April and four of the past five — including the San Felipe Stakes on March 4 and the Santa Anita Derby on April 8, the latter as he held off an eager cavalry swarming near his hindquarters. Watch carefully beyond the wire, Leslie noted, and Practical Move still won’t let anyone gallop past him, even as exhibition.
“He’s learned how to use himself,” said trainer Tim Yakteen, a former Bob Baffert assistant who is showing this gilded road to the Amestoys and fellow owner Roger Beasley of Austin. “He was a big horse from Day 1, and as he’s gotten a little bit older, he knows how to use his body a lot more, and he’s learned basically how to put himself in a spot he wants to be. . . . He’s a very tactical individual.”
Now they’re here, with their family and umpteen others here or inbound, and for luck they’ve got a New Mexico flag gifted from Leonard Blach, an owner of Mine That Bird, that gritty New Mexican whose romp up the rail to win the 2009 Derby at 50-1 staggered the parts of Churchill Downs that weren’t staggered from drink already. For the Amestoys of Albuquerque, it’s all the greatest thing since Bishops Tab, the horse Pierre’s brother bought for them and for Leslie’s parents in Kentucky as those ’80s ended, the horse who became the best trainee of a pioneer.
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Pierre: “Listen to this story! We get him home; we have a paddock in our little place. . . . We get him home, and I remember, we turn him out, he jumps the fence!”
Leslie: “He runs onto the highway!”
Pierre: “He’s out to the road! Luckily the other horses were nickering, you know, and he came back to the fence . . .”
Leslie: “He came back.”
Pierre: “. . . and we captured him and got him back in. . . . Her parents were there, and they were like, ‘What happened?’ ”
Leslie: “ ‘What do we do?’ ‘Well, I hope he comes back!’ ”
Pierre: “He came back and turned out to be a fabulous racehorse.”
Leslie: “Oh, yeah, he won half a million.”
Pierre: “He was a good son of a gun.”
Pierre, again: “We’ve got all kinds of stories. I could sit here and tell stories all day long: agent stories and trainer stories and buying-and-selling stories.”
Leslie: “Every aspect of it.”
Pierre: “Never here, though.”
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