Josh Quintus ruth Quintus counseled a reality check. “Josh, you know, you’ll need to have some other schooling too. There are very few Arabian horse trainers that really make a good living from training horses. You have to be exceptional.” she recalls the incident now. “He stopped and looked at me and said, ‘What makes you think i’m not going to be one of those special trainers?’” nearly three decades have passed since then, and as it turns out, Quintus is one of those headline names. He has owned a national reputation for more than 20 years, has enough trophies to last him a lifetime, and enjoys the respect of his peers. “i have never heard anybody say, ‘i just don’t like that Josh Quintus,’” observes his friend and fellow horseman, Jody strand. “in this business, that says a lot.” Talk to Quintus and you are likely to encounter a teasing wit with a selfdeprecating view of himself—unless you are taking a lesson from him, in which case he has been known to yell and be way too blunt for the faint-of-heart. in between, his friends say, there is the salt of the earth. He is the boy who was brought up by parents who saw to his principles, the kid who lived and breathed horses but sang the lead in his high school production of “oklahoma,” who even played football until its schedule clashed with the U.s. nationals. (“He’s a quarterback?” his mother exclaimed when his father reported in. “Well, he has to be,” Jim Quintus replied blandly. “He can’t run.”) it was an all-American childhood, neither poor nor privileged, and distinguished mostly by the reasoned support of his parents, who took his dreams seriously but expected him to work for them. Looking back, Quintus is clear about how it all started. He couldn’t have done it without his father, but it was his mother who was the real culprit. “Her love for the Arabian horse,” he says simply, “is why i love Arabian horses.”
The Quintus family: Josh, Joel, Ruth and Jim.
Molly Stapleton, with Quintus and Redd Barron.
Half-Arabian Redd Barron (Sir Gazon x Ridgefield’s Flight). Volume 43, no. 7 | 183