Beholder: Always A Queen

Thoroughbred racing fans are used to saying good-bye. All too often we are forced to say good-bye to our favorites far too soon as they are rushed off to the breeding shed. However, that was not the case this year. This year we are saying good-bye to horses that we knew so well, we felt like they were ours in a way. We say good-bye to California Chrome, who will garner most of the farewell wishes, but we also say good-bye to another great one, when we bid farewell to four-time champion Beholder.

“She gave us a lot of thrills,” B. Wayne Hughes said of his champion. “I had a tendency to want to run her another year, because she’s totally sound and she’s been having such a good time. But we realized we couldn’t do this forever, and it was time to send her to Kentucky.”

One person who was reluctant to say good-bye was Richard Mandella, who at times, looked like he was Beholder’s favorite person in the entire barn, especially when you consider that he would give her a mint every few minutes. Whoever said candy wasn’t the way to a woman’s heart?

“It was very difficult, getting her away from Richard Mandella. He refused to send her to Kentucky, and I had tell him ‘Richard, we’ve got to send her to Kentucky, we can’t send the stallion there.’ So, finally he relented and let us bring her to Kentucky.”

On the plus side, not all good-byes last forever as Mandella recently came by to visit Beholder, according to Hughes, who said she recognized her friend immediately, and came right over to greet him. Hughes went on to say that Mandella would stop by for another visit to Beholder in March.

While Hughes is very excited about the Beholder’s prospects as a broodmare, he, along with everyone else, will miss what she brought with her to the track.

“She had a great run. We had our ups and downs, but overall she gave us a lot of thrills,” Hughes said. “My favorite race would have to be her last one in the Breeders’ Cup Distaff. She was running against a true champion in Songbird, and they were both ridden by the best jockeys in America on them, and it was a battle. That was our greatest race."

“Sometimes you think that just because you won, that someone else got defeated, but really, Songbird did not get defeated. She got out-bobbed.”

Through her career, Beholder won four championships, winning them at age two, three, five, and six-years-old. She also became the first horse since 1976, of either gender, to win a grade one event at two, three, four, five, and six-years-old. However, during her five-year-old season, Beholder rose so high that she could have ran among the stars. It was that year, that she ran an overwhelming performance in the Pacific Classic, and was doing so well that Hughes and Mandella chose to enter her in the Breeders’ Cup Classic.

“The Pacific Classic was the race where I decided I was never going to sell her,” Hughes said. “Before that race I had all these agents making offers on her, some for 10 million, some were more, and I thought that maybe I should sell her, but after that race I had no business selling her.”

Beholder was doing so good in 2015, that Hughes believed she had a chance to defeat American Pharoah, before his mare was scratched, after it was found that she had bled during one of her morning gallops. 

“I really do believe we could’ve won the Classic. American Pharoah had never run a race as fast as us,” Hughes said. “Bob Baffert, after they had the draw and we drew outside, had a meeting where he and the others were trying to figure out how they were going to beat her. As they are talking his son says ‘Dad, you don’t have to worry about her, not until she turns on the afterburners.’”

Unfortunately, the clash of American Pharoah and Beholder never came to be as Beholder was withdrawn, and American Pharoah went on to dominate the Breeders’ Cup Classic. However, he retired that year while Beholder came back to give us another year of thrills. One person who can be thanked for all of that was Seth Simkin.

“When we bought Beholder, we bought three or four yearlings at the same time,” Hughes recalled. “Seth said then, that ‘I will take this horse here, over all of the others’ referring to Beholder. He was always really, really high on her. He was the main person, right from the beginning, even before we put a saddle on her, that told us that we really had something. So, he gets the credit for picking her out, for sticking with his opinion, and because his opinion was right!”

With all that she accomplished on the track, winning three Breeders' Cup races, earning over 6 million in purse money, capturing 10 grade one events over a five season career, earning championships in four of those seasons, Hughes believes his mare should be ranked right up with the best mares of all time.

“It is hard to compare horses from yesteryear to horses of today, because they are in different races against different horses, so you don’t really have good comparison,” Hughes explained. “But I read somewhere, where people rate them, and they rated her as the fifth best mare in the history of racing.”

These days though, Beholder doesn’t partake in ranking wars like the rest of us. Nope, instead, Beholder spends her time eating grass and playing in the mud. She even has a pasture buddy that Ned Toffey, Hughes’ general manager, hooked her up with, that she bonded with over course of a single day.

“She hadn’t been on grass for quite a while,” Hughes said of his mare. “So, when they turned her out she began eating, which wasn’t easy because of all the mud in there, she got mud all over her face, but she wanted the grass. She would not eat the hay.

“Since then, she’s been doing really, really well. She’s with the same mare she bonded with the first day, and she is very happy. She is a little ornery though. I’ve been told she’s good, until you try to get her to do something she doesn’t want to do. Then you’ve got your hands full.”

With what she accomplished, it comes as no surprise that Beholder would believe she is nothing less than a queen. She was the top lady on the track for five consecutive years, and now she has seamlessly moved into the life of retirement. However, her retirement will never mean losing her legacy. That will live on forever in the history books. Beholder will always be great, she will always be a queen.