Adsit Has Sights Set On a Crown
She never wanted to be royalty, but in her first trip to South Florida Abigail Adsit has her sights set on a crown.
The 28-year-old trainer will saddle steadily improving Flamingo Lane in Saturday’s $125,000 Tiara, one of eight races that comprise the $1 million Claiming Crown on opening day of Gulfstream Park’s Championship Meet.
A 4-year-old filly owned by Tom McCrocklin and Weila Ye, Flamingo Lane figures to be one of the top contenders in the Tiara, 1 1/16-mile turf race for females 3 and up that have been entered for a claiming price of $25,000 or less since January 1, 2013.
“The filly has just run extremely well long on the grass, and she’s run hard race after hard race,” Adsit said. “She goes out there and she’s all heart. If she doesn’t win, she’s second and could have won. We’ve had this in mind, and she’s worked her way up the ladder on the turf. So, we’re here. We’ll give it a shot.”
Adsit grew up in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., where her father, Eric, was a standardbred trainer and Saratoga Race Course is hallowed ground for Thoroughbreds. Though she graduated from college as an English major, her career path was set.
“I grew up knowing I wanted to be a trainer,” Adsit said. “When I was 3 years old and people were like, ‘I want to be a firefighter or a fairy princess,’ I wanted to be a racehorse trainer. I grew up around it, and I rode everything. Everyone jokes that I traded in Shakespeare for the Racing Form. I’ve always wanted to train, and as the old saying goes, hard work pays off.”
The progression of Flamingo Lane and Adsit has gone hand-in-hand. After beginning her career at Santa Anita in October 2012, Flamingo Lane joined Adsit in New York last year and has steadily risen through the claiming ranks, particularly since being moved to the turf full-time in the spring.
This year, Flamingo Lane has five wins, three seconds and a third with $175,500 in purse earnings from nine starts, including victories at the $16,000, $25,000 and $40,000 level. Her runner-up finishes have come by a half-length combined, falling by a neck in an $85,000 entry level allowance on August 6 at Saratoga.
She rallied to capture a starter allowance at Saratoga 25 days later, was second by a head in a starter optional claimer on October 9 at Belmont Park, and came up a nose short in a $67,000 allowance on November 5 at Aqueduct in her most recent effort.
“This will be the best caliber of race that she’s had,” Adsit said. “I think this filly is kind of a great representation of me. She was kind of underrated in the beginning and she just needed to have people have faith in her. She’s gone up and made nearly $200,000. She has nothing to prove. She’s just awesome.”
Adsit worked for trainers Rick Violette, Todd Pletcher and Linda Rice, spending nearly four years with Rice until going out on her own in January 2013. Based in New York, her stable has grown from five to 23 horses including 2-year-old Enjoy the Show, who finished third in a one-mile turf maiden race on November 29 at Gulfstream Park West.
In the first year on her own, Adsit won five races and $147,140 in purses from 58 starters. Her record in 2014 is 18-13-19 from 86 starters with earnings of $580,815.
A daughter of multiple graded stakes winner Consolidator, Flamingo Lane was one of the first horses Adsit got in the barn. After a pair of dirt starts, the filly hinted at her future success when she was third by 1 ¼ lengths on the Aqueduct grass last November. She remained with Adsit despite the lack of winter turf racing in New York.
“I ran her on the last day of turf at Aqueduct, and she ran lights out,” Adsit said. “I told the owners, ‘She’s a turf horse, and you need to send her to Florida.’ They’re wonderful people. They said, ‘I want to leave the filly with you because you’ve brought her this far,’ in spite of the fact that she’s a grass filly and we were on the inner at Aqueduct. When we got her on the grass, baby, it was all up from there. She’s just been a fairy tale story filly.”
Source: Gulfstream Park