The Thrill of the Thoroughbred
For Kim Cole, the payoff involves much more than dollar signs
By Lisa Broadwater

In the world of Thoroughbred horseracing, there are people who spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a foal in the hope that it will one day win them millions of dollars. To do so, they may spend hundreds of thousands more in search of that elusive goal. They'll hire a top-ranked trainer, whose stable may handle scores of horses (often for numerous owners) and include a large staff of its own — countless grooms and hotwalkers, a handful of exercise riders, an assistant, a nightwatchman, a blacksmith, a vet — to care for those horses. They'll spend thousands more shipping that horse from race meet to race meet — with any luck, spending the bulk of their time at the better-known, higher-paying tracks in Kentucky. Then they'll sit back and wait for the money to roll in.
Kim Cole isn't one of those people. Kim Cole owns racehorses, yes — with her partner, Jerry Donaldson, she has a handful (four of which are currently in training). But she and Donaldson are strictly a two-person operation. Cole is the trainer; Donaldson, the owner of record. Depending on the day, one of the two also serves as groom and hotwalker (the person who walks a horse for about 30 minutes after each workout to cool him out before he's returned to his stall). They feed the horses, clean their stalls, give baths, bandage legs, apply liniments, haul the horses to the track on race days, prepare them for each race, haul them home after each race, entertain them when they're bored. Often, Donaldson even serves as exercise rider.
They buy horses in the $1,500-$5,000 range. Mostly, they run claiming races — the bottom rung of the racing hierarchy, where each horse entered may be "claimed" (i.e., bought) for a prescribed price. When they aren't at Oaklawn Park, they race in places like Claremore, Okla.; Collinsville, Ill.; and Kansas City.
It isn't an easy life. The job requires a seven-day-a-week, 365-day-a-year commitment. Cole and company can't really call anyplace home; they move from one racetrack to another a half-dozen times a year. For the past few months, they've been boarding their horses at Dr. David Jolly's Step Ahead Training Center in Hot Springs. Usually, they board at Oaklawn, which makes for fewer complications. But this year, they didn't plan to stay for the whole meet and decided to base their operation at the farm instead.
Kim Cole loves what she does. She can't imagine doing anything else. But, in fact, she did do something else — quite successfully — for many years. From the time she was about 10 years old (in 1969) until 1995, she showed horses competitively. Over the years, she showed many award-winning Arabians and National Showhorses (an Arabian/Saddlebred cross). Of those, several made the national top 10 in Western and halter; one was national reserve champion. She also bred several national champions and reserve national champions.
But Thoroughbreds, it seems, are in her blood. Her parents, Jerry and Jayne Cole, ran a successful breeding operation, Colehurst Farm, in Pine Bluff for many years. Jerry was one of the leading Arkansas Thoroughbred breeders in the '70s and '80s — at one point, serving as president of the state breeders' association.
Kim was 7 when the family starting breeding Thoroughbreds. She was 8 when she got her first horse. It was an Arabian.
"I really don't know what made them, particularly my father, decide he wanted to get into Thoroughbreds, but he did," Kim remembers. "He went to the Arkansas Sale, which was very small at the time, and bought two broodmares. That was the beginning of that.
"We sold the first foal we had for $5,000, which at that time was a huge price for a yearling in Arkansas. So, of course, he was hooked. He thought, 'This is easy.' Of course, it's not that easy.
"So I grew up around Thoroughbreds, but really didn't have any thought that I would train on the track."
She was 10 or 11 when she starting showing.
"I had a half-Arab gelding; I started off showing him in hunter classes," she says. "We did that for a while, and he had an accident and then had some tendon problems from that. Since he couldn't do a whole lot for a while, I started riding him Western Pleasure, which I had never done. But it was easy, and he was really, really good at it. He was undefeated for three years in half-Arabian Western pleasure.
"I did almost all of his training. We had a friend that had a Saddlebred background, and she broke him. I had a nice arena at the farm, where I could ride him."
Even as a kid, she attended clinics.
"Oh yeah," she says; "this is all I ever wanted to do. I went to lots of training clinics. I've always liked to study."
She showed the horse, El Viento, in Western pleasure, English pleasure, costume, hunter and continued to show him hunter under saddle.
"I even entered him in a few hunter/hack classes where he just had to jump a few small fences, and he could do that. He did everything. He was qualified for the Nationals in six divisions one year."
By the late '80s, Cole was in the thick of the National Showhorse world (even serving on the board of directors for the registry for four of five years).
"I liked the cross," she says of the National Showhorse. "My parents had a lot of Saddlebred friends and liked Saddlebreds. I needed a big horse to ride. I looked better on a taller horse, and I like a big horse with a lot of action, a lot of motion in the trot. And Arabians generally were small. So we started crossing Saddlebreds with Arabians before there was a registry. At one time, we had probably 50 horses, about half National Showhorses and half Thoroughbreds."
Then the market fell out of the Thoroughbred business.
"The horses, when we were selling them, weren't bringing much money. And people were getting these horses so cheap that anyone could buy one, and a lot of them really weren't getting a shot to be successful on the racetrack the way they had before.
"That's when I decided to get my license and train some myself — so I knew that at least they were getting the best opportunity I could give them. It just kind of mushroomed from there."
She got my trainer's license in 1994, won her first race that year and has been racing ever since.

There's a Reality to It
For Cole, the appeal of horseracing isn't the million-dollar payday (although that would be nice too). It's the straightforward challenge.
"After being so involved with show horses and all the politics involved in that — the racehorse business just isn't like that," she says. "There's a reality to it. We're very, very small in the racehorse business. We have cheap horses. Several horses we have are like this pony horse [walking in a round pen nearby]: They're horses that people have given up on and we've come back and have been able to win some races with.
"I like that. You're not going to make a lot of money that way, but I like to be able to do things people say can't be done. One of our best horses is a mare that was given to us as a broodmare. Now, she was right off the track, but I couldn't find anything wrong with her, so I decided we'd try to keep her going. And we did really well with her. I like that kind of thing.
"For example, I can take one of my horses, which we bought for a pony horse, and in his class run him with some of the biggest trainers at Oaklawn Park, and have just as good a chance of winning. It doesn't matter that I've only got four horses, or that we're out here at the farm, and that we paid $1,500 for him. I can run him in a race with a horse somebody paid $50,000 for and have just as good a shot as that person. Just because they spent $50,000, it doesn't mean that horse is going to make a lot of money.
"Certainly, the better horses you have, the better chance you have. But there are a lot of horses in town right now that people have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for that can't outrun any of my horses. That's just the chance you take. You buy a pedigree and conformation and you hope. But that doesn't mean it's going to happen.
"With racing, everybody is on an equal plane. I'm not saying if I had the money to go out and buy horses like that I wouldn't. But you can get lucky and do your work and have a good, sound horse and one with some ability. And nobody cares how much your suit cost or what kind of saddle you have. None of that matters. It's 'Can the horse run?' And that's a pretty nice thing to know."
Cole is also drawn to the Thoroughbred itself.
"I have had all kinds of horses — I've shown horses, raised horses, judged horses, and I still have different kinds of horses — but I've never, ever been around horses that enjoy their work as much as Thoroughbreds do. There's a horse down here in the end stall that's going to be 11 years old; he can't outrun me. But the reason he stays here is because he loves it so much that I can't bear for him to do anything else. I'm going to try to make a pony horse [a horse used to lead a racehorse to the track] out of him.
"The Thoroughbred is such a dependent horse. I guess that's because of the way they're raised. From the time they're yearlings, they're pretty much in training. And they don't really have any social skills outside of what they do. So I'm drawn to that. I feel very responsible for them. They need you very much.
"Since we don't turn them out a lot because they can get hurt out running in a pack, you graze them by hand. You spend a lot of time walking them around. They have more of a one-to-one relationship with you than a lot of other horses do."
As for her progress as a trainer, Cole is content.
"You're always trying to improve," she says, "And the way we do probably isn't the fastest way — we get a lot of horses nobody else wants to mess with. But I enjoy that too.
"I like to see if I can fix things. I enjoy trying to figure out what's wrong and see what I can do to fix it. There's really not that much wrong with a lot of these horses, but they come from a large stable where they may not have gotten the amount of attention they needed."
Horses like Water Run Deep, whose sire is Red Ransom (one of the leading sires in the country, his stud fee is $75,000). She's been racing since she was 3 and has won more than $100,000. Cole and Donaldson claimed her for $5,000.
"We've had her two years," Cole says. "I don't know if we'll run her at Oaklawn or not because the level she has to run at would be tough. We could run her at a lower level, but we would run the risk of her being claimed. And we don't want her claimed; we want her as a broodmare.
"See, if we were just in the racing game, we would drop her down where she could be more competitive, and we'd win more races and more money with her. That's what we'd do with all our horses."