Gay Stevens Fragale will be in full regalia at Churchill Downs today for the running of the 2022 Kentucky Derby.
However, will she actually be paying attention to this year’s crop of thoroughbreds and riders poised to burst from the gates for the fastest two minutes in sports?
Nope, she laughed. Not the full 100%.
Fragale, you see, is already looking two lengths ahead to next year’s race.
“I really do think we have a shot of being in the field for 2023,” she said. “It’ll be fun to watch and see what might happen.”
Note the “We.” That’s because she’s now a thoroughbred owner — well, part-owner, anyway.
And there’s a decided north-central West Virginia connection all the way around.
Fragale owns and operates StoneWorx Custom Landscaping with her husband, Sam, a Morgantown native and St. Francis High graduate.
She and Sam love to watch the ponies run, and when they found out there were some new opportunities out there for racehorse ownership — particularly for women, in what is decidedly a male-dominated enterprise — they shot off the line just like Secretariat.
Gay signed on with It’s All About the Girls Racing, an all-female enterprise founded by Anna Seitz Ciannello.
The husband and wife met up with Ciannello last month in South Carolina to watch Moontap give it a go on the track.
Moontap is the horse Gay now owns with another group of women across the country. Moontap is a 2-year-old filly who loves to run and is quick in the stretch.
Symbolically, the racer is also burning down some country roads to Almost Heaven. That’s because of the aforementioned West Virginia connection.
Sam picks up the tale: “So, we meet Anna, and we’re talking. I happened to mention I was from here, and she lights up.”
“It was one of those, ‘Wait — did you say West Virginia?’ things,” remembered Ciannello, whose Bonasso relatives hail from Clarksburg and Harrison County.
Ciannello, who grew up on her family’s horse farm in Kentucky, has done just about everything in the field except jockey a horse in a race.
She worked across the U.S. and Europe for leading equestrian trainers before coming back home to launch It’s All About the Girls Racing.
Multiple owners make it easy to afford the upkeep for the expensive animals. Owners automatically get equal cuts of the purse if their horse crosses the finish line first.
“You have a stake in it,” she said. “You get to make great and lasting friends. And it just makes things fun and interesting on the race circuit.”
“Interesting,” has been the watchword for the Kentucky Derby in recent years.
The 2019 winner, Maximum Security, was disqualified after the Derby victory that year after judges said she strayed from her lane, thus interfering with the other horses and their jockeys.
COVID almost scratched the whole deal in 2020 — it would be September before the bugle call for the horses and riders would sound.
There was the suspension last year of marquee trainer Bob Baffert, after the horse he was working with, Medina Spirit, failed a drug test after the race.
The horses this year will likely be racing Mother Nature as well as one another: Forecasters are calling for a 50% chance of rain on race day — downpours and thunderstorms included.
No matter, Cianello said. Symbolically, she said, it just doesn’t rain on the Kentucky Derby and the community that has grown around it.
“Yeah, it’ll be wet and yucky,” she said, “but we’ll all be together.”
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