Imagine raising a brood of potential world-class athletes. They each weigh 1,000 pounds and are as unruly as kids on a playground. Not necessarily blood related, they are bonded by an enormous expectation: to be the fastest of their kind in the country.
That’s where Karen Dennehy Godsey comes in. A petite blonde powerhouse, Godsey can be as commanding and demanding a taskmaster as any NFL coach. It’s her job to train young horses to race.
Working with a staff of eight or nine grooms and four or five riders, Godsey trains 57 or more horses each racing season at Eagle Point Farm near Ashland, one of the area’s largest and oldest thoroughbred training facilities.
The farm, which has been in operation since 1947, is a family legacy. Co-owned by Godsey and her mother, Donna Dennehy, the 200-acre farm has a 44-stall training barn, a half-mile track and a three-stall starting gate. It’s host to as many as 80 horses, most of them there for just one thing.
“Here, it’s teaching them how to be a racehorse,” Godsey says. “I get their bodies used to being athletes. I work hard to harden them, to focus them. They graduate from me and then go to their jobs at the track.”
Hopeful owners, each of whom believes that their young horse is the next Kentucky Derby contender, hire Godsey to break and train their horses. But it’s not just outsiders who get Godsey’s attention. She’s raising her own racehorses, just like her mother and her grandfather before her.
Karen Godsey and Braxton, of Eagle Point Farm (Photo by Julianne Tripp Hillian)
But raising racehorses is fraught with all the big wins and losses, sharp turns, and dramatic finishes that mark the history of horse racing in Virginia. Keeping the farm alive has been a story in survival. “When they say blood, sweat and tears, I mean, it was buckets of them all,” Godsey says. “The farm was up and down, and the [racing] industry was up and down.”
Critical to Eagle Point Farm’s survival was a notable change in Virginia’s horse racing policy and a “really good horse. It all started with Toccoa in 2005,” Godsey says.
Toccoa was her first winner as a trainer. “She won at Colonial Downs, and she won 10 races, making over $100,000. She had four foals, all of them winners. Three made over $100,000. Her second foal, What the Beep, was my first stake winner.”
What makes Toccoa’s success even more inspiring is that there was nothing about her that racehorse owners would have found impressive. Owners are often willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for high-end breeding to get the horse they fervently believe will win big races, including using computer-generated scores to predict a pedigree mix, but Toccoa wasn’t that kind of horse. “She had what we call ‘backyard pedigree,’” Godsey explains. “She was locally bred, but she had a ton of heart.”
Being fast is essential for any racehorse, but having the heart to race is critical for success. “You can spend a million dollars at a sale, and you might not have a racehorse. You can’t buy it. I have had many [horses] that have pedigree out the wazoo and seem so talented, but if they don’t want to do it, they are not going to. I’ve had some horses that are the most backwoods-bred things in the world, but they can also be the most determined,” Godsey says, adding with a chuckle, “That’s kind of what keeps everybody in it.”
“You certainly appreciate the peaks because there can be many valleys,” says Christine Applegate, a retired airline pilot from the Eastern Shore who has had horses trained at Eagle Point Farm. “It’s an absolute labor of love. We brought our yearling to Karen, who trained her until her first race at Colonial Downs. She [placed] second in her first race. Since then, she has won numerous races.”
From Pasture to Starting Gate
Horses usually come to Godsey in the spring when they are a year and a half old. In September or October, she starts some initial training “to get a little foundation on them. I don’t push these horses, but I know it is very important to start with them early. It’s like a kid starting with T-ball before he goes to the major leagues.”
When the foals are old enough, Godsey breaks them, teaching them to take a bridle and a bit, then a saddle and finally a rider on their backs.
“Each horse is different, and you need to figure out what makes them comfortable and happy because a horse will perform better when they are happy. They all have their own personalities. What works on one horse may not work on another. You just have to be flexible. They will humble you,” Godsey says.
But that’s just the beginning. The young racers must learn to be loaded into a cramped starting gate, then leap out of the gate the second it opens and run in a jostling, chaotic pack as fast as they can with the singular focus of being first.
Godsey, who has trained many winners since getting her trainer’s license in 2005, has ridden the modern-day roller coaster of Virginia thoroughbred racing, from the opening of the state’s only racetrack in 1997 to its closing in 2013 — which almost led to the demise of the thoroughbred horse business in Virginia. But she was there for Colonial Downs’ reopening in 2019, and “it’s been off to the races” ever since, she says.
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Ed Gilman, in his foxhunting gear, won a race and a bet on Ginger against neighbor Dick Keeley on his racehorse. (Photo courtesy Eagle Point Farm)
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Ginger’s surprising victory in the last race of the 1952 Charles Town season launched Ed Gilman’s horse racing legacy.(Photo courtesy Eagle Point Farm)
Born to Run
It’s a calling Godsey was born to, just like her mother, and her grandfather T. Edward Gilman before her. In fact, Godsey and Dennehy are carrying on a family tradition that started in 1947 with a crazy bet.
As the story goes, Gilman, a local real estate agent, was so taken with an ad he wrote about an old farm that his family had owned, he bought the property himself. But he wasn’t much of a farmer. “My father hated chickens and dairy cattle, but he liked horses,” Dennehy says.
What Gilman loved was a retired racehorse named Ginger. He used her for foxhunting, often bragging about her speed, although she had never won a race. One night, after a few drinks with Dick Keeley, a neighbor who owned a racehorse, Gilman made a wager: his Ginger against Keeley’s racehorse. Keeley accepted, and a match race was set up at a county fair, with the event garnering much attention in the local newspaper. “The race was the most talked of event of the Meet,” according to a 1952 story in the Ashland Herald-Progress.
Outfitted in foxhunting gear, Gilman faced off against Keeley, who was decked out in racing silks. Ginger won, and Gilman was stricken with racing fever.
Gilman was so convinced his horse was a winner that he loaded her in a trailer and set out to the Charles Town Race Track in West Virginia. When he arrived, he stopped at a local drugstore and asked if anyone knew a trainer. One happened to be sitting right there, enjoying lunch at the counter. No amount of dissuasion on the trainer’s part would deter Gilman, so the trainer took on Ginger for the last race of the season. She won, shocking the racing community and inspiring Gilman to breed racehorses.
With each race Ginger or her offspring won, Gilman added on to Eagle Point Farm and his growing stable of racehorses.
Legacy Loses Luster
The task of keeping Eagle Point Farm operational over the next 70 years is, at its core, the story of horse racing in Virginia.
Back in Colonial days, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson had plenty of chances to show off their best horses. According to research compiled by Charlie Grymes on Virginia Places, racing — and gambling on races — was a popular Virginia pastime starting in the early 17th century, well before the colony’s first track, a 1-mile oval, was built in Williamsburg. Nearly a dozen more tracks operated around Virginia in the 1700s, including five near Richmond. But in 1894, racing corruption and Victorian sensibilities led the General Assembly to ban gambling on horse races. Some exceptions were made for state fairs and agricultural associations, such as the Camptown Races in Ashland, which closed in 1977, and the Strawberry Hill Races steeplechase in Richmond, which is now run annually at Colonial Downs in New Kent County.
The ban meant that horse trainers, including Ed Gilman, took their horses to other states to race. Gilman’s reputation for success on the track brought him better horses to train and more affluent owners to pay for that training. That all changed one night in 1969. He was sitting on his porch when lightning struck, causing him to suffer a stroke.
Unable to run the farm, Gilman decided to sell. “My mom threw a fit,” Godsey says. “She went all Scarlett O’Hara because she wasn’t going to let him sell. She was 19 at the time, studying math at William & Mary. She was really smart, and my grandfather insisted she stay in school.”
“I promised to get a college degree,” Dennehy says. But the only courses she could fit into her busy schedule were history, so she got her degree from Virginia Commonwealth University in ancient Middle Eastern history. “I do remember I took the courses, but that’s about it.”
What she knew were horses, so when her father died, Dennehy took charge of the farm and the racehorses. “We were racing off the farm,” Dennehy says, which meant hauling horses to Pennsylvania, Delaware, West Virginia or Maryland three or more times a week.
“We lost a lot of our clients because I was a 19-year-old girl taking over a farm,” Dennehy says.
“Now all the sudden a 19-year-old woman is going to take care of their investment? [There were a] lot of people who probably thought she couldn’t do it,” Godsey says.
But do it she did, and at a time when Virginia’s racing stars were beginning to rise.
Brothers Benigno and Edwardo Aquilar work a couple of laps under Godsey and Dennehy’s watchful eyes. (Photo by Julianne Tripp Hillian)
Racing Returns
Virginia-bred horses gained national prominence after Riva Ridge, from Meadow Farm in Doswell, won the Kentucky Derby and the Belmont Stakes in 1972. A year later, history was made. Secretariat, another Meadow Farm horse, set records in the three Triple Crown races.
In 1978, the General Assembly authorized a statewide referendum to allow pari-mutuel betting, in which bets of a particular type are pooled together, with taxes and house takes deducted. Payoff odds are calculated by sharing the pool among all the winning bets.
But voters didn’t back the referendum. A decade passed before a pari-mutuel betting referendum was approved in 1988, allowing Virginians to gamble on horse races.
Nearly 10 more years went by before a racetrack was built at Colonial Downs in New Kent County. In the meantime, four Virginia-born horses won the Kentucky Derby. Dennehy, the former president of the Virginia Thoroughbred Association and director of the Virginia Horsemen’s Benevolent and Protective Association, was also co-chair of the architectural review committee that helped design Colonial Downs, which opened in 1997.
More than 13,000 people were there for the track’s opening day. And for a while, horse racing was back in Virginia.
Then a dispute between Colonial Downs management and local horsemen’s groups closed the track in 2013. “A lot of farms went out of business because the track shut down,” Dennehy says.
When they say blood, sweat and tears, I mean, it was buckets of them all.
—Karen Godsey
Godsey, who had now taken over the farm, was an accomplished equestrian — she was the overall individual champion at the 2004 Affiliated National Riding Commission and placed third in the 2005 Intercollegiate Horse Show Association National Championships — and trained a successful stakes horse within a year of graduating with honors from Sweet Briar College and getting her license in 2005. But experience and expertise weren’t paying the bills.
“We didn’t have good horses and didn’t have many good clients,” she explains. “Getting paid was a huge issue.” After she took over the farm, Godsey says, “the first thing I did was to get rid of all the stallions. They were putting us in a hole. I decided that I was going to focus on training.”
It turned out to be the best decision she could have made.
“Donna hung in there during the lean times,” says Rob Bailes, a trainer for Maryland’s Laurel Race Track who has known the family at Eagle Point Farm since he was a boy and his father trained for Meadow Farm, home of Secretariat. “What Karen [has] done with Eagle Point has been spectacular. They do such a good job. It takes a great deal of work and dedication. It has to be something you really love.”
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Getting from the barn to the track is the easy part of training young horses. Getting them into a starting gate requires more coaxing. (Photo by Claire Fortier)
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Photo by Claire Fortier
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Photo by Claire Fortier
A Profitable Idea
All tracks and horsemen’s associations get income from online and off-site betting, which can be used for prize money. Without a track, that money sat in the bank until 2017, when the Virginia Thoroughbred Association created the Virginia-Certified Thoroughbred Program, which gives bonuses for winning horses trained in Virginia (see story below).
“The program was wonderful,” Dennehy says. “Before the program, we were hustling. You would take anybody you could get. But since, we have been able to raise our rates. All our employees have gotten raises. For us, we got a full barn. We are turning away people.
“You are going to send your horse somewhere to be trained, why not send them someplace you get an extra 25% bonus anywhere they race in the mid-Atlantic? It helped save a lot of people’s businesses. It certainly saved mine. Now Virginia is one of those spots that everybody wants to bring their horses.”
Supportive legislation passed by the General Assembly and substantial investment by new owners enabled Colonial Downs to reopen in 2019. There will be 27 days of racing this summer, but next year “that could be 45 to 50,” says Debbie Easter, executive director of the Virginia Thoroughbred Association. The economic impact of horse racing for the industry and the state has been significant, totaling $542.1 million and creating 5,297 jobs. With the recent purchase of the track by Churchill Downs and the success of the Virginia-Certified Thoroughbred Program, the future of horse racing — like that of Eagle Point Farm — seems to be back on track.
Bringing Home the Bonus
Creative thinking and historic horse races helped revive Virginia’s thoroughbred industry
Twenty-five years ago, horse racing, which has enjoyed a coveted place in Virginia history since Colonial times, was starting to wither. Horse farms were closing. Large animal veterinarians were moving. Even blacksmiths were finding other jobs.
“In the late 1980s, early ’90s, 750 thoroughbred foals were born [annually] in Virginia,” says Debbie Easter, executive director of the Virginia Thoroughbred Association. “When I took over 12 years ago, we were down to 100 foals a year. Our infrastructure was going away. Our farms, our vets, our blacksmiths, our feed sources — everything was starting to go away.”
What changed all that was a simple but effective plan that shifted the industry’s focus from breeding horses to raising them. In the mid-Atlantic region, competition among horse breeders has always been intense, particularly in places such as New York that have year-round racing. While Virginia-bred horses, including Secretariat, have won many a Kentucky Derby, lack of support for racing in the state was slowly killing the breeding industry, despite an incentive program for Virginia-bred horses, according to Easter.
But when the Virginia General Assembly, at the urging of the Virginia Equine Alliance, passed a bill on historic horse racing machines in 2018 to reopen Colonial Downs, the thoroughbred horse industry started to make a comeback. “The legislators recognized that the horse industry going away was not a good thing,” Easter says. “What people forget is that agriculture is still the biggest industry here in Virginia, and we can’t let that die.”
The machines, which look like slot machines, are based on an amalgamation of thousands of past horse races. While the winner may see 777 if they hit the jackpot, the real cha-ching comes to the horse industry. “That has been an economic driver because we get a percentage of the income from those machines,” Easter says.
In addition to allowing for larger purses at the racetrack, revenue from the machines has funded the Virginia-Certified Thoroughbred Program. The initiative, launched in 2017, offers a 25% bonus to the owners of registered thoroughbreds under the age of 2 that reside in Virginia for six consecutive months for any race they win in the mid-Atlantic region. The horse is eligible for the bonus for the entire time it races.
The VACTP was designed to bring about 400 horses per year to Virginia for training, Easter says. “Well, it’s brought 800 or 900 horses a year into Virginia as it has grown. In five or six years, we are going to put 5,000 horses on our farms.”
“[The program] has helped farms in Virginia that were really struggling,” says Donna Dennehy, co-owner of Eagle Point Farm in Ashland. “Now they can attract horses here to be broken, trained and boarded for six months [so the horses] are eligible for the bonus.”
And the VACTP is a clear win for the commonwealth as well: “We give out about $4 million a year in benefits for that program,” Easter says. “Over the course of time, the state has gotten back $86.5 million in benefits.”
Photo courtesy Colonial Downs
Cranking It Up at Colonial Downs
Put on your seersucker suit or don your most colorful hat: Horse racing returns to Colonial Downs in New Kent on July 11. This year brings more races, higher purses and more family fun.
“We are making a bigger step forward this year to achieve the goal of becoming one of the top summertime tracks,” says Frank Hopf, senior director of racing with Colonial Downs.
The track is hosting 27 race days with $5.7 million in prize money over its season, which stretches from Thursday, July 11, to Saturday, Sept. 7. The highlight will be the Festival of Racing on Saturday, Aug. 10, which will include the track’s three big races — the Grade 1 Arlington Million and two Grade 2 races, the Beverly D and the Secretariat Stakes — as well as four additional races.
Promotions include Thirsty Thursdays, which kick off on opening day; offers include $4 for 12-ounce domestic beers and $2 hot dogs, and $3 domestic beers every Thursday through the season with purchase of a $12 souvenir cup. Fridays host Party at the Downs, with happy hour specials and music.
Each Saturday will feature a different event, including Richmond Flying Squirrels Day on July 20 and NASCAR Day on July 27. For those who want to get into racing but don’t have a horse, there are Wiener Dog Races on Aug. 24.
General admission is free; grandstand and box-seat tickets start at $5. Colonial Downs is open to all ages, and every Saturday is Family Day, with pony rides, petting zoos and face painting. —Claire Fortier with Matthew Sporn
