‘An absolute natural’, after they finally got her broke, according to former part-owner/trainer Brad Maxwell, Pure Ivory dominated the Canadian trotting filly scene with back-to-back O’Brien Awards at ages two and three. Now the dam of a Hambletonian winner as well, learn the bizarre story of how Hunterton Farm’s Steve Stewart ended up owning this hall of fame great. By Dan Fisher.

Like most Standardbred racehorses - successful or not - new Canadian Horse Racing Hall of Famer, Pure Ivory’s career has consisted of three main phases: Born and raised - racing career - retirement and/or breeding career. 

In her case however, the line she’s followed from A to B to C hasn’t necessarily been a straight one, and her story is as unique as her ability on the racetrack was.

“I learned a lot from Bart Glass when I was first in the business,” shares Pure Ivory’s former trainer, Brad Maxwell.  “I like to follow the breeding careers of mares that I’ve had success with on the track, and one thing that I look for in babies is that I like when fillies look more like their sire and colts look more like their dam. I trained [and won a Canadian Breeders Championship with] Image Control, Pure Ivory’s dam, and not only was Pure Ivory a beautiful baby, but she looked just like Striking Sahbra [her sire]. I trained Control’s dam too [Control The Moment’s dam, Lifesliltreasure] and he looked just like her, so that theory has worked out pretty well for me I guess,” laughs Maxwell.

“We also liked that Harry [Rutherford] was her breeder because we had a lot of success over the years buying off of him and Joey. I compare them [Cool Creek Standardbreds] and their numbers to Brittany [Farms] you know… they concentrate on quality over quantity and have produced a lot of good horses considering the smaller number that they put out every year.

“We bought her for $62,000 in London and I actually only had 75% of her sold, so Harry said ‘Don’t worry about it, I’d love to stay in for a quarter of her’, and he did. We [Brad and his wife Chris] had a quarter and so did Harry, Steve [Condren] and Jerry Van Boekel. 

“Steve is the one that deserves a ton of the credit with that horse. We had a great team overall, but the way Steve used to educate young horses… I think some of that is lost on people today. He was just the best at educating one and teaching them. He insisted that we take her to Kawartha for a [OSS] Grassroots race for her first start. Then we took her back there again for a Trillium event a week later. She won them both and had almost $15,000 made in two starts, and never had to beat 2:01 doing it.” 

“That Trillium series they used to have for young fillies was really great,” agreed Condren, a hall of famer himself who is being joined there with his former star pupil. “Going to Kawartha for those first few starts was key… we were able to educate her a bit without having to ask her for too much speed too early. After that we went back to Mohawk for one of those stakes they had [the Robert Stewart] and I think she jogged by about five [lengths]. Those first few starts were really a huge key to her future success,” Condren insists.

The young filly may have been automatic in those early starts, but that was definitely not the case from day one, shares Maxwell. “She was actually really bad to break, so after I fought with her for a while I just said ‘forget this’ and I sent her down to my son Ryan in Florida,” he laughs. “Chris and I kept the stable in Canada all winter at that point, and Ryan had some for us in Florida. He did a great job with her, and when he finally got her going and I was down there watching her jog one day I said, ‘Well you don’t have to worry about her again’. He asked why, and I said ‘Look at her gait - it’s perfect. There’s no shoeing or anything else that can change that… she’s a complete natural’.

“By the end of her three-year-old year, at that point of my career, she was BY FAR the best horse I’d ever had,” smiles Maxwell. “And I had some nice horses before that. To this day, her and Control The Moment are the best two I’ve ever trained, and that’s saying something, because for a fairly small stable we’ve been lucky enough to have won eight O’Brien Awards,” smiles the trainer with 834 career victories and over $17.3 million in purses.

“Pure Ivory was the kind that made her trainer look good,” he laughs, “but we all actually played a role. My wife Chris was the one that looked after her for her entire racing career. She gave her great care, and always had her spoiled with bananas and carrots. That filly never wanted for anything, and she definitely paid us back on the track.”

Christina Maxwell adds, “Almost all of her big races were out of the Detention Barn back then. I’d walk into the D-barn, and even if she was at the far end, as soon as she heard my voice she’d have her head out over the gate calling to me,” she beams. “I guess I spoiled her a little. All of the security guards in there used to laugh at us,” recalls Chris, with much more pride in her voice than embarrassment. 

It’s fair to say that the horse spoiled her connections just as much as they spoiled her, because in two years of racing at ages two and three, the filly won 22 of 33 starts for almost $1.4 million in earnings and two O’Brien Awards.

“It was an incredible run,” agrees Brad. “She won almost everything there was to win except a Breeders Crown, and she had a second and a third in those as well. But then after we raced her a handful of times at four, an agent came calling for some guy from Finland who apparently had a ton of money. We normally never would have sold her but they just offered too much.”

“I was so mad at Brad when they sold her,” shares Chris. “I don’t think I spoke to him for two weeks.”

* * * *

Exit stage left at this point for her breeder, owners, trainer, driver and caretaker, and enter the aforementioned mysterious Finnish millionaire (billionaire?).

* * * *

NOTE: Parts of the following is from our feature, A ‘Magical’ Acquisition, written by Justin Fisher, in the September, 2019 issue of TROT.

In August, 2019, Pure Ivory’s fifth foal, Forbidden Trade, won the Hambletonian for owner Determination, trainer Luc Blais, and driver Bob McClure. Feature stories in the September issue of TROT that year included an interview with the breeder of Forbidden Trade, and current owner of Pure Ivory, Steve Stewart of Hunterton Farm in Kentucky.

“After her four-year-old season, she [Pure Ivory] was sold to Ahti Vilppula in Finland and eventually bred to Muscles Yankee via frozen semen... she arrived here [at Hunterton] in the fall of 2009, in foal. We got her due to my relationship with Marti Ala-Seppala, a longtime friend and business partner, and also an agent. Marti called me and told me that he had this mare, Pure Ivory, and she was being sent back to the States because ‘She was too good a mare to be left in Finland’. She was in-foal, and then we would breed her to Muscle HIll next. ‘Great’, I told him… She lands on our doorstep and we foal her, and do the subsequent work that comes with it.

“She’s bred to Muscle Hill for foals two and three but unfortunately, those foals and the Muscles Yankee were extremely bad individuals. They were small with poor conformation.”

This was reflected in both the declining sales price of the foals, which severely dropped from the first to the third, and in their on-track performances. Their sales prices dropped from $170,000 for the first foal, to $135,000 for the second, and a mere $5,500 for the third. On the track the foals combined for 10 starts, $6,185 in career earnings, and zero wins.

Stewart joked that he thinks it’s harder to sell a Muscle Hill foal for $5,500 than for $100,000.

With little success coming from the first trifecta of foals, Stewart realized there was another problem - payment.   

“By this time I realized we had never been paid. Somebody told me they had Googled him [owner, Vilppula] and he was some industrial type who was involved in multi-million dollar construction projects in the Amazon Rainforest. He seemed like a recluse and the kind to disappear.

“And sure enough he had,” chuckles Stewart, reminiscing about the past. “It was crazy, the guy literally disappeared, and I’m sure this mare wasn’t very high on his worry list.”

After years of never getting paid for the work they had done, Stewart enlisted the man who brought him the mare, Marti Ala-Seppala to right the ship in 2014. 

“We ended up with her on the books because he just disappeared and never paid us. Marti was able to [eventually] get the signatures from overseas and that’s how she ended up in my name.”

Even to this day, Stewart wonders what could have happened to his former business associate. “I even asked Marti recently [in 2019] if he [Vilppula] had resurfaced at all since 2014... he hadn’t. Nobody had seen or heard from him in nearly five years - and now, it’s been nine years. He never paid anyone. Apparently Jimmy Takter had a filly for him too, and at that time he had never been paid either.” 

With Pure Ivory now in his name, Stewart chose to breed her, inexpensively, to Holiday Road, which resulted in a filly named Tusk - foaled in 2015. “Tusk brought $50,000 at Harrisburg. Which helped get most of our money back.

“By that point Marti had been telling me to breed her to Kadabra. I had reservations concerning fertility issues with Kadabra at the time though, and had become frustrated due to being owed thousands of dollars, which I took out on the mare... which wasn’t smart.”

When finally choosing a sire for Pure Ivory’s next foal, a year-and-a-half before collecting the $50,000 for Tusk, Stewart decided to follow the advice of his friend and went the way of Kadabra.

“You have to hit me over the head a few times before I do things, and finally I bred her to Kadabra, and boom! We get Forbidden Trade… There’s a good breeding lesson to be learned from this, a teachable lesson, you might call it,’’ states Stewart. “A lot of the time when you have a mare and breed them to the king of trotting, which was Muscle Hill, you assume that if she doesn’t produce anything then she must not be any good. 

“How in the world could you breed your mare to the great Muscle Hill and not get anything? That’s a knock against the mare. But the lesson is, sometimes the mix of genes doesn’t mix with the leading sire. It doesn’t mean you can’t go to another sire and strike it rich.”

Stewart knew long before Forbidden Trade stepped on the racetrack or entered a sales ring that he had a potential great horse on his hands. “He was dark and beautiful, and took a great video,” states Stewart.  

Brad Maxwell, following his theory of liking a colt that looks like his dam, had agreed. “Chris and I stopped and saw him [Forbidden Trade] on our way north from Florida, before he sold in Harrisburg as a yearling, and we offered Steve $75,000 for him… he looked exactly like Pure Ivory. Steve thanked us for the solid offer but said that they were still going to run him through the sale that fall. As soon as Luc [Blais] told me he liked him I knew I had no shot of buying him though,” laughed Brad. “Determination’s pockets are a bit too deep for me.”  

“Luc Blais and Determination deserve a lot of credit,” insists Stewart to this day. “They paid $110,000 for him, and even though she was a great racehorse, she was zero-for-four [as a broodmare at the time], and two of those were Muscle Hills. I take off my hat for anybody that is willing to stick their necks out a little to buy something like that... it’s easy to spend a lot on a Chapter Seven, but on a colt who is un-American, out of a mare who is zero-for-four and has two Muscle Hill foals that didn’t turn out, it’s a hard sell. 

“It begs the question, ‘Why in the world would anyone spend that kind of money on a colt like him?’” as Stewart puts it. 

“Anybody looking at the pedigree and the mare, would have said, ‘Oh my god, $110,000, now how did that happen?’ But if you had gone to see the horse or watched his video you could understand how it was possible, not probable though.”

Tapping into Kadabra wasn’t a one-time occasion either, the clearly successful cross led Stewart to dip back into the well. After Forbidden Trade won the Hambo, Pure Ivory’s next two Kadabra yearlings sold for $335,000 and $100,000 respectively. “And Serge Godin bought her two-year-old Kadabra colt from us privately this past winter [2023],” Steve shares. “The colt was sick last fall so we had to pull him from the sale, but my brother broke him for us and Determination called and bought him around January.”  

“Eventually, I definitely heard what they told me when it came to breeding her to Kadabra,” Stewart laughs. “Once you hit me over the head a few times, I’ll usually listen and do the right thing.”

* * * *

Now, as part of the Class of 2023, and after years of being good to those who have been good to her, Pure Ivory takes her rightful place in the Canadian Horse Racing Hall of Fame. It may not have been the typical direct route horses often take to the shrine, but eventually, like her owner did when it came to breeding her to Kadabra, she got there.

 This feature originally appeared in the June issue of TROT Magazine. Subscribe to TROT today by clicking the banner below.