Canadians’ Career-Changing Hambo

A few seconds can change your life – in this case, 113.2 seconds, to be precise. When the Doug McIntosh-trained and Trevor Ritchie-driven Yankee Paco won the 2000 Hambletonian and became the first Canadian-sired horse to win racing's most prestigious event for sophomore trotters, the careers of those involved would never be the same.

Yankee Paco was under the care of McIntosh, and the hands of his groom, Reggie, for the entirety of his illustrious racing career. He was blessed with great handlers. Regardless, the road to the pinnacle of racing was nothing short of special for ‘Paco,’ a chestnut son of Balanced Image.

Yankee Paco faced problems with his gait early on. He showed breaks in five of his first eight charted lines before Trevor Ritchie took over the reins in October of his freshman campaign.

“I always drive mine at the start, I’m more comfortable with them... but once I think they are ready, I hand them over to the guys who make the money,” McIntosh recently said from his home in Wheatley, Ont.

McIntosh chalked the early miscues up to both immaturity and the colt not being comfortable with the whole process of racing. He also stated that Yankee Paco’s breeding played a role early on. “I’ve trained a lot of Balanced Images and they are kind of unbalanced at the beginning, so they are better off later. I’ve always said Labour Day is Balanced Image Day. With Paco, he was shy and tentative, but not crazy – he just needed a few more lessons.”

Both Ritchie and McIntosh said that Paco was a horse that you had to know. McIntosh said that he wanted to hand the reins over to Ritchie, but it had to be the right time. “Giving him to Trevor at just the right time was important for the growth of the horse.”

Clearly, the jump from McIntosh to Ritchie was made at the right time. In his first start with Ritchie at the helm, Yankee Paco broke his maiden, as he trotted in 1:58 to collect a victory in a $100,000 Ontario Sires Stakes Gold Final at Mohawk Racetrack.

“I really liked him from the start,” Ritchie explained, “but if you would have told me, ‘you’ve got a real Hambo contender,’ I probably would have rolled my eyes.”

When asked about guiding him to a maiden-breaking score in the OSS Gold, Ritchie, who is now retired from the sulky, said, “Whenever you win a $100,000 race you are going like the horse.”

The plan was to always race Yankee Paco late into his two-year-old campaign according to McIntosh – he said it was normal for him when he was training down Balanced Images. Yankee Paco went on to win four times as a rookie, and finish his year with a win in the $106,800 Canadian Breeders Championship on November 20. His freshman earnings, from nine starts, would total $124,776.

After having spent the winter before his freshman campaign in the sunny heat of south Florida, McIntosh elected to keep Yankee Paco at his farm in Ontario the winter before his three-year-old year.

His first start back at three was in an overnight on May 29 at Mohawk; and from the seven-hole, the problems that had plagued him early at two seemed to follow him at early at three.

He ran at the quarter, and just five days later he did the same, at the same spot in the mile, in his Connors elimination at Hazel Park.

“The track just wasn’t for him, I don't think. He had trouble getting his footing and spun out of control,” Ritchie said about the Hazel bobble. “That track was never very good. It was always deep and cuppy,” recalled Ritchie, who would go on to be named the O’Brien Award winner in 2000 for Driver of the Year in Canada.

After requalifying at Mohawk, Paco went on to finish second to Plesac in his Canadian Trotting Classic elimination at Woodbine Racetrack. It wasn't until a week later when both Ritchie and McIntosh began to let their minds wander regarding the colt’s ability. A late rush from out of the fog to nip Credit Winner by a head in the $840,100 CTC final gave the connections something to think about in regard to the first Saturday in August.

“After the Canadian Trotting Classic, I thought ‘this horse is serious.’ He didn’t go an easy trip; he battled hard and got up right at the end. There were some really good horses in the race like Credit Winner and Plesac, and we were going for $800,000 that night. Then it hit me, that he might be a contender for the ‘Hambo.’”

McIntosh agreed with Ritchie that winning the Canadian Trotting Classic was also the moment he realized that his colt might be special.

The longest road trip of the colt’s career – to that point – came next, with a sweep of the OSS Gold Elimination and Final at Kawartha Downs.

McIntosh then entered his star pupil in the OSS Gold Elimination at Windsor on July 19. With the Hambo elimination scheduled 10 days later, the plan created a possible scheduling conflict of sorts.

“We agreed, if he was awesome in the elim at Windsor we’d skip the final and go to the Meadowlands for the Hambo,” McIntosh said.

Yankee Paco was indeed awesome in Windsor. Even though he was parked the mile, he still won handily. Given the performance, the plan to skip the Windsor Gold Final and head south of the border for the first time was in full effect. Sacre Bleu and Jerry Duford may have never won the $100,000 Gold Final a week later if Yankee Paco had stuck around.

Paco drew Post 4 for his Hambo elimination. After having been sent away as the public’s 3-5 choice, Ritchie and his charge won fairly handily off of a nice second-over trip. Even though the line looks good on paper, Ritchie has said that Paco wasn’t necessarily at the top of his game that night. Luckily, in the year 2000, the Hambletonian format didn’t involve heat racing. The Canadian trio had a week to go back to work before the final.

Ritchie was over the moon with the work McIntosh did with the horse between the elimination and final. “He wasn’t very good in the elim, even though he won. I let Doug know once we got off the track. I don’t know what he did in between, but he was awesome the next week and the win speaks for itself.”

The day of the $1 million final arrived and Paco had drawn Post 7. “It’s easy to say afterward, but the race went pretty smooth, other than I didn’t get the trip I was looking for,” Ritchie noted with a slight chuckle, possibly recalling that the pair never really saw the rail at any point in the race.

“Trevor can give me chills,” McIntosh said when reflecting on the trip Yankee Paco went in the final. “He’s a master at keeping a horse calm. He looks at the long picture and capitalizes on others’ mistakes. Trevor is the most underrated driver of all time.”

“I just wanted to make sure I was still trotting going into the first turn,” Ritchie said. “I looked up and there were still three or four horses on the outside that were in front of me. I thought not all of them will clear and it will be tough [for all of them] to find a hole, somebody was going to get parked. I had started to move down to the rail, but I moved back out to hopefully get in the flow, get some cover and get pulled into the race. To my surprise, Legendary Lover K (his cover) cleared (at the half) and he was never going to let me go, so I had to switch to Plan B.

“I decided to take a hold, sit it out and rate him for as long as possible until somebody moved from behind, and then we go all we can. Paco relaxed and trotted nicely. Someone tipped three wide at the top of the stretch, then it was time to go and see if we can get the ribbon.”

As they dashed down the lane, Ritchie sat as calm as ever in the bike. He tapped Yankee Paco just four times as Credit Winner closed hard from the outside to get up for second.

“I was never one to use the whip much,” Trevor related. “My thought is that hitting them will actually slow them down at times. They start thinking about getting hit rather than racing. Yankee Paco always gave it all he had, so the whip wasn’t going to make him go any further. It was a useless tool on him.”

“The horse wasn’t a push-start kind of horse. Doug kind of worked miracles on that horse,” Ritchie said.

“He had under-developed stifles, so we would jog him 45 minutes each day, no matter the distance. We didn’t do a lot of medical work on him, just ground work and rubbing on him,” McIntosh recalled.

The Hambletonian triumph showed that Ritchie was a reinsman who could deliver in the big moments.

“Paco winning helped my career immensely,” said Ritchie. “My career was somewhat levelling out when Paco came around and I think him winning helped give my career another five or six years before its levelled out again.”

Ritchie experienced that most lucrative night of his career just two month later, when the Breeders Crown came to Mohawk. He finished the night with three ‘Crown’ wins, and two of those came on horses had never driven prior to the card. Ritchie, in part, credits those catch drives to his triumph months earlier in the Hambletonian.

“The Hambo was personally the biggest day for me. In the early ‘70s I worked for Bill Herbert and I rubbed on Sing Away Herbert, and she went to the Hambo, but I didn’t get to make the trip with the horse, and that was one of the downers of my career.”

In Ritchie’s mind, the Hambletonian is harness racing’s Gold Standard, and his dream was to just race in the revered stakes event.

“It was never a dream to win the race because I never thought it was possible, but I guess I was wrong,” said Ritchie. “I'm not an emotional person, but I got a little emotional when I was pulling up, there might have been a tear in my eye.”

“It was the biggest race you can win, in my opinion” McIntosh said. “The overwhelming support from my peers was unforgettable. People I hadn't heard from in years were reaching out afterward.”

Ritchie was scheduled to fly back to Toronto to drive at Woodbine following the afternoon card at the Meadowlands, but once Yankee Paco won, the plans for the rest of the day changed, understandably.

“I phoned the judges after the races and said ‘hope you guys don’t mind, but I’m going to take tonight off.’ They kind of just laughed and said, ‘fine’. I wasn’t even fined,” Ritchie said, laughing.

Celebrations were necessary. Yankee Paco was the first Canadian-sired horse to win America’s biggest trotting race. It was a life-altering day for the connections, who made their way into Manhattan after the card of racing. It was a good night, Ritchie said, to conclude a special day.

(A Trot Insider Exclusive by Justin Fisher)