SUMMERFIELD, FL (352today) – It was almost three decades ago, when Kenny McPeek trained Tejano Run who finished second in the 1995 Kentucky Derby. He was 32 at the time.
In the interim, he won the last two jewels of thoroughbred racing’s Triple Crown. He claimed the Belmont Stakes prize in 2002 with Sarava and then added the Preakness Stakes in 2020 with the filly Swiss Skydiver.
He’ll try to add a second Preakness victory Saturday with Kentucky Derby winner Mystik Dan. The bay colt’s chances improved when Preakness favorite Muth was scratched on Wednesday due to illness.
For the 61-year-old McPeek, the sport’s most famous race was an elusive dream.
That all changed two weeks ago. To make the moment even more surreal, he won the previous day’s Kentucky Oaks with Thorpedo Anna.
It was only the fourth time in history that’s been accomplished by the same trainer in the same year, and the first time since 1952. Herbert Thompson achieved the feat in 1933 and Ben Jones in 1949 and again in 1952.
Mystik Dan was sent to McPeek’s Silverleaf Hills Training Center in Summerfield in the summer of his yearling year to prepare for his racing career. He arrived on Aug. 14, 2022 and called the Marion County facility home for nearly 10 months. He departed for Kentucky on June 7, 2023.
Thorpedo Anna, the Kentucky Oaks winner, also spent time in Marion County. Her stay at Silverleaf Hills was shorter, arriving on Oct. 27, 2022. She would leave on April 17, 2023, to start her career as a racehorse.
The training center has paid huge dividends for the runners that have come out of McPeek’s program.
“It gives us a base of operations with our young horses where we can develop them as groups, and the early learning that they get down there. When we forward them north, they’re ready for the task at hand,” said McPeek, in a phone interview Monday morning from his barn at Churchill Downs, in Louisville, Kentucky. “They develop plenty of muscle over that racetrack. They get light gate work in. They learn to run together. It’s been vital to where we are today.”
The two horses not only will be forever intertwined in history after their efforts in the Kentucky Derby and Kentucky Oaks, but also trained against one another prior to the first weekend in May.
More than 20 years ago, McPeek did something similar with two other promising runners – Repent, a 3-year-old colt, and Take Charge Lady, a 3-year-old filly. McPeek’s approach worked, as both horses who were teeming with talent seemed to bring out the best in one another.
“You’re always trying to match horses where their company is equal,” said McPeek “It just happened that they were on the same workday, and they were about at the same stage, and we needed strong works out of both of them. She gave him everything he could handle.”
|POLL: Who’s your Preakness Pick?
In retrospect, McPeek wondered if he could’ve done something different 29 years ago to have won the Kentucky Derby. But, it’s a dream now fulfilled.
“When I ran second with Tejano Run back in 1995, I always wondered if that was as close as I would ever get,” said McPeek. “You just don’t know. But you’re always optimistic and trying to see if we could win it. We’re real pleased to have accomplished it. I’m still relatively young. But, I think I was better prepared this time then I was in 1995.”