Coal Battle takes Briley to Rebel & maybe a 1st Kentucky Derby

There is a zest that comes through in a conversation with Lonnie Briley. The trainer would be the dream of racing publicists, what few are left.

Discussing Sunday’s Grade 2, $1.25 million Rebel Stakes, the postponed Kentucky Derby 2025 prep race at Oaklawn, the 72-year-old trainer fielded questions about his three-time stakes winner Coal Battle and wove them expertly with snapshots of his life story.

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“He’s like a little puppy,” Briley said in a telephone conversation this week from Oaklawn. “When you load him up, he’s ready.”

Load him up and move him out. The 3-year-old Coal Front colt that Briley bought with $70,000 of owner Robbie Norman’s money knows his way in and out of a trailer. His first six races were on six different tracks. His training this month might as well have been, thanks to the constant stalking of extreme cold and a relentless winter in the Southwest.

“I was over here, and they shut down for about 12 days because of the weather,” Briley said on Horse Racing Nation’s Ron Flatter Racing Pod. “Then I moved him to Delta (Downs) where I could keep training him regularly. And then I moved him back here, and now we shut down for two or three days.”

Unable to get onto the track in Hot Springs, Ark., before Saturday afternoon, Coal Battle did his training this week with shed-row walks and even jogs. The good news was he got his work in Monday before the Mother Nature turned into a real mother. It was a three-furlong maintenance breeze in 36.8 seconds.

“He didn’t miss a whole lot,” Briley said.

Segue to Briley himself. In more than three decades he never has had a horse as good as Coal Battle. Yet it is not so much that he has missed any previous chance to get to the Kentucky Derby as it seems the Kentucky Derby may find out it has missed him.

With an inviting drawl, the native of Louisiana talked about growing up working with his dad. But not at first with horses.

“I had worked in the oil field also,” he said. “I was breaking babies and stuff, and then the oil field had shut down a little bit, and I went to work at Louisiana Stallions, which was owned by (the late) John Franks. I broke babies there and bred mares and did it all.”

This is going back to when on-the-job training turned Briley into a young, equine nerd. That is meant as a compliment. Dare him to identify a part of a horse’s anatomy. Any part. Inside or out. He knows.

“A horse has got 216 bones in his body, and they’ve all got to work,” Briley said.

Briley laughed as he remembered expanding on his horse sense in his talks with Franks. Not only can he go chapter and verse on everything from the poll to the fetlocks to the muzzle to the hocks, but his voice glows when he speaks of the time he built a horse skeleton in Franks’s office.

“ ‘Lonnie, what are you doing there with that in the office,’ ” Briley remembered Franks asking. “Well, I said, he don’t eat nothing.”

Armed with that impish streak to go along with knowledge that was bursting out of him, a young Briley must have entertained the notion of becoming a veterinarian.

“I had a couple vets ask me to go to work for them,” he said. “But I didn’t. I make the joke that I can’t work for anybody that’s dumber than me.”

He might have been saying that this past week in a barn at Oaklawn, but it just as easily could have triggered gales of laughter at an after-dinner speech. Who knows? Coal Battle, a 10-1 long shot on the morning line for the Rebel, could be his ticket, since a top-two finish Sunday almost certainly would put him in the Kentucky Derby.

Coal Battle already has 20 qualifying points from his wins in the Springboard Mile at Remington Park and in the Smarty Jones at Oaklawn. That most recent one Jan. 4 was over the same 1 1/16 miles he will race Sunday, albeit against a bigger, tougher field.

“I know this race is going to be real tough,” said Briley, who is looking for the first graded-stakes win of his 34-year training career. “And then I’m in the 1 hole. I want to come from off the pace. I think they have four, five, six horses in there that’ll go on out and set the fractions.”

The plan then is for jockey Juan Vargas, who has been on Coal Battle for all but one of his races, to let the likes of Southwest (G3) winner Speed King, two-time restricted-stakes victor Smoken Wicked, third-place Lecomte (G3) finisher Innovator and allowance winner Admiral Dennis slug it out ahead of him.

“Speed King ran really a good race in the Southwest,” Briley said. “Sandman had a little trouble coming out of the gates, and he made up a lot of ground, but they both ran good races in the Southwest.”

Then it would be left to Coal Battle to get first run on the fading leaders, fend off Southwest runner-up Sandman down the stretch, pick up a check for about $750,000 and start making hotel reservations in Louisville. Nothing to it.

Briley has said time and again he never had big Derby dreams. But now that he may be on the threshold of that reality, he cannot help but think about it.

“I guess you can’t help to,” he said. “Everybody calls and talks to you about it and stuff. I mean it’s a tough road. I’m hoping he gets a clean trip.”

Smooth sailing would be different for Briley and Coal Battle. They have bounced from track to track and had their winter turned upside down by bad weather, but they keep on keeping on.

The whole story very nearly got torn up in the writing of the first chapter. The successful $70,000 bid to buy Coal Battle came in August 2023 at the Texas Thoroughbred Association’s summer yearling sale at Lone Star Park. The little bay colt out of Midshipman mare Wolfblade caught the trainer’s eye because of his conformation, another area in which Briley has made himself an expert.

“They had a Street Boss I kept looking at, and they had (Coal Battle), and I just kept going back and forth,” Briley said. “Then I said, no, this is the horse. ... He had a good walk on him. It looked like he had a good mind and a good eye on him and stuff, and I just liked him.”

So, it turned out, did someone else. It might not have been a bidding war, exactly, but hip no. 263 generated a little bit of breeze from the waving of a pair of auction paddles.

“They had another lady looking at him,” Briley said. “The day of the sale she probably went to the barn about three times. I figured she’s going to make us pay a little bit more. And she did.”

If there was a look to Briley’s laugh as he told the story, it would be that of a Cheshire cat.

“I probably would have got him for half that price if she wouldn’t have been involved.”

It would be great to know who that woman was. Alas, Briley never learned her name, so she is a mysterious figure in this yarn.

“She was the underbidder,” he said, again with that knowing chuckle.

If Coal Battle keeps winning, maybe that woman will come forward and identify herself and become part of a fun story as the winter becomes spring and the Kentucky Derby stage lights up.

“Hopefully it’ll work out for us,” Briley said.

A publicist’s dream, indeed.