Preston Burch

This fine looking fellow is Preston Burch. Born in 1881. I tried in vain to determine date of death. Burch was inducted into the Racing Hall of Fame. He is the son of famed trainer William Burch and his own son Elliott Burch was a trainer of renown for a period of time. A racing family.

I put off for so long reading Burch's 1953 book "Training Thoroughbred Horses" thinking it dated. When I finally did read the book it became my model.

The Burches are distinguished from many trainers in the sport in that their interest seems to be the sport instead of selling the sport to wealthy owners. While there are some few words in his book about the economics of racing and training, without any doubt Burch, as so few in our business, understood he was training athletes and the great care required.

This can be seen by the training and exercise prescriptions in the book which are actual written accounts of the training of the two year olds More Sun and Greek Ship, and the three year olds
Bold and Assault. Interestingly, Assault was trained by Max Hirsch, and the training method of these two noted trainers seems nearly identical. For the uninformed Assault won the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness, and the Belmont. He won the triple crown in 1946 for King Ranch. The extremely informed will pick up the Barbaro connection here. It's my understanding that Michael Matz, the trainer of Barbaro, is married to the grand daughter of Robert Kleberg, who owned King Ranch and Assault. It is a small world.

I used Burch training on a couple of horses for two or three months on my last venture at the track actually racing. I will report on that experience in a later post. For now, just say that this strenous program produced zero injuries, very fast, fit horses, and an almost immediate win. Without a doubt this sort of program--the old time training--will be resurrected. It is only a question of when. As noted in yesterday's blog, i'll be happy if it's a while before this training becomes widely revived. I'm calculating Preston Burch competing with today's training lot is taking candy away from babes.

But, again we digress from our main subject, the yearling Y.

Friday 12/15/06 and time is flying by. The trainer chose this day to move back to early morning training from the prior late afternoon training. So, we did nothing with horses today and will commence about 8am Saturday, which will give about 15 hrs of extra rest between works.