| TRAINER OF THE QUARTER |
TRAINER OF THE QUARTER
R I C HA RD BALTAS Bill Heller Eclipse Sportswire, Joe Cantin alifornia trainer Richard Baltas’ path to winning the 2019 $1 million Queen’s Plate at Woodbine in Toronto June 29 was anything but direct. His trip was anything but short. That made the victory even sweeter when his three-year-old ridgling One Bad Boy made his first start outside of California a memorable one, taking the 160th running of Canada’s premier race wire-to-wire by 3 ½ lengths. Credit Baltas with the guts to make an equipment change heading into a million-dollar race.
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TRAINERMAGAZINE.COM ISSUE 53
Without blinkers for the first time in his fifth career start, One Bad Boy controlled the race from start to finish. Baltas had decided to watch the race on TV from Los Alamitos, where he was running a horse that day. “I was jumping up and down,” Baltas said. “It was quite a win.” Score one for sticking with it. Because there was more than one time that the 58-year-old trainer’s career had all the looks of a train wreck. He won three races in his first year of training in 1991, then took other jobs and didn’t even train on his own again until 1995. There was another gap between 2009 and 2011. And through 2012, he’d never won more than 11 races in a single season. In 2013, he won 18 races. He’s won more than 40 races each year since.
“I stuck with it because I loved the game,” Baltas said. “I loved working around horses.” Born in Gary, Ind., Baltas’ family moved to Huntington Beach, Calif. when he was nine. His dad, Gus, took him to the races for the first time when he was 13. When he attended Cal Poly Pomona, he took anatomy courses at the school’s equestrian center. In 1983, he attended the Kentucky Derby with his sister Lorna and found out about the Kentucky Equine Institute. He began mowing lawns, moved up to working in the breeding shed and eventually landed a job with Spendthrift Farm. “Seattle Slew was there and Raise a Native and Affirmed,” he said. “They