Joined: Fri Nov 02, 2018 12:02 pm Posts: 2266 Location: What are you, my mother?
pizza_Place: D'Agostino's
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Joe Orr Road Rod wrote: Obviously, I am against Epicenter. Well then you probably won't like this article then, but I thought is was a good read from a very good writer https://sports.nbcsports.com/2022/05/02/kentucky-derby-epicenter-ron-winchell-donuts-american-dream/Every Derby horse has a timeline – the reverse-engineered explanation of how one horse among thousands arrived in this place (the most famous and influential horse race in America) at this time (the first Saturday in May 2022, the tiniest of bull’s-eyes), against reason, common sense and laughably long odds. A story of genius or luck, or both. Epicenter’s is a story of patient endurance across generations. “A 70-year contract,” says Epicenter’s 50-year-old owner, Ron Winchell, in whose hands this enduring family business – Winchell Thoroughbreds – currently rests. It is also, not inconsequentially, the story of 20th century America, of depression families, of westward migration, entrepreneurship and the American Dream as once constructed. And the pursuit of victory in the Kentucky Derby.
Also donuts. Definitely donuts. Because without the donuts, there is no dream, no Derby. No Epicenter. There is none of it.
In 1930, Vernon Hedges Winchell, then in his early 40s, left his wife and three children at the family’s home in Bloomington, Illinois, and drove west in a Model-T Ford. It was the beginning of the depression, and like millions of Americans, Winchell was in search of opportunity, and a better life. He had been a mail carrier in Bloomington, among other jobs. And he had liked to bet on the horses, especially longshots (hold that thought). He settled in Alhambra, 20 miles east of Los Angeles, in the San Gabriel Valley, and sent for his family – his wife, two sons, and two daughters — who made the trip west by train.
His stewardship has been similar to his father’s Denny’s rescue decades earlier: Measured, steady, largely without swag. And prosperous. Their operation includes approximately 54 horses in training, and also 30 mares, 20 yearlings, and 19 foals; they produce and buy at least a dozen top-level yearlings every year. Winchell’s Gun Runner was the 2017 Breeders’ Cup Classic winner and voted Horse of the Year. And in the present, not only is Epicenter a Derby threat, three-year-old filly Echo Zulu will be among the favorites in the Kentucky Oaks on Friday. But the Kentucky Derby remains a blank line in the Winchell books. There have been seven entries since Tapit, and the best finish was Gun Runner’s third in 2016. It is not a race that rewards repeated efforts.
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