Page 64 - June 2022

SPEEDLINES
“They are all completely different, if I were to put Powerful Favorite, Cyber Attack, and Bomb Cyclone on the walker you would never walk up and say those are three full brothers.” – Chris O’Dell
Cyber Monday that has gone to the track, and you know he has been successful. They are all completely different, if I were to
put Powerful Favorite, Cyber Attack, and Bomb Cyclone on the walker you would never walk up and say those are three
full brothers. They don’t have anything alike about them. Powerful Favorite is kind of small but very long. The next one was Runforyourlife, and he was actually pretty big but a little more Thoroughbred looking. Those first two were red and then came Cyber Monday and I didn’t like his conformation, so we skipped him. He was a little short brown horse that went on to do pretty good. That looks like we may have made a mistake there. Then we bought Bomb Cyclone. I don’t know if you’ve seen Bomb Cyclone, but he looked like a horse that could run a mile and a half - a big, tall, long-legged colt. I could see it but when I first bought him Mrs. Rosenthal was a little worried about whether he was going to run. She
is not worried now because he was just
so Thoroughbred looking, and I told her, ‘Don’t worry he will be fine.’ Then we bought Cyber Attack at the sale last year and he’s looks more like Cyber Monday but he’s going to be bigger than Cyber Monday. He’ll be like medium sized, but he is almost black. He’s dark bay so they’re all different colors.
“They train different,” he added. “Don’t get me wrong, they all want to run, but you have to get their head in the right spot, and they’ve got a little Thoroughbred, as you can see, so sometimes, they’ll get a little hot. I train every horse as an individual. I try
to treat him as an individual. I try to feed him as an individual and not just run them through a conveyor training type procedure. I’ve always done that no matter if I had 50 head or 15 head, so I’m pretty hands on. I’m not saying that I did everything because naturally the horse did probably 90% of it and Connie probably did 5% of it and I did 5% so there is 100% of it. So, you have the horse, then you have to manage them and pick the right spots and try to do the right things. Keep him out of trouble, but they
are stone cold runners once you find that.
I mean there’s been like five in a row that’s gone just bang bang bang bang, including Cyber Monday. If a dud comes along, I hope it’s not this year, and it doesn’t seem like it
is as I think Cyber Attack is pretty special, and we left him a stud by the way. All the other ones I castrated right off the bat partly because we were looking for racehorses, not trying to mess around with stallions.
“Let me give you a quick key that
I found for each one of them,” he continued. “With Powerful Favorite it took the flipping halter. He would never flip but he would rear up, and it cost me a couple $1,000,000 races because I didn’t want to put a flipping halter on him. He wasn’t bad in the gate in the mornings, and he never would flip, but he’d drop down, rare up and come down. I counted one time in the Golden State Million he reared up 11 or 12 times. He was in like the three or four hole, and he just got to rearing up. Finally, I put the flipping halter on the old boy and here he comes. Runforyourlife, I ran him two or three times and he ran like last or next to last. Mrs. Rosenthal asked, ‘When is he going to start running?’ and I said,
‘In November.’ I was just being a smart Alec because this is the first of the summer. I took the blinkers off, and he won the Golden State Million in November and
so the blinkers off of him was the big
key. Then Bomb Cyclone, we just had to figure out how to get him comfortable in the gate. He was so long that he wouldn’t fit in the gate. We would have to shove him in there and then he couldn’t get out of the gate because he’s all wadded up.
We worked on it when we got him to California. We started working on him getting him in the gate and raising his head up just a little bit to where he could fit. He started getting a little bit more comfortable and then he started breaking and running and then it was all history after that. But they’ve all had some little antics that we just had to figure out. I can’t believe that just pulling the blinkers off Runforyourlife changed it. He was scared of everyone, but you would think you would want to cover
his eyes up more. He was scared of his own shadow and so I pulled the blinkers completely off and, man alive, he just came a running, beating Circle City in the Golden State Million and beat a bunch
of those good horses. He was a really nice horse and then he rotated just a tiny bit and was retired, and they are making a rope horse out of him.
“I’ve had to figure out different ways to get them to run except for probably Bomb Cyclone and the only thing we had to figure out on him is just how to get him out of the gate because he was so big. They’ve all had a little something that we’ve had to figure, but once we figured it out, they are just natural born runners and fast ones.”
“I’ve said this before and it’s been repeated many, many times that the Burnses told me, and we are good friends, they told me, ‘Stick with us and we will make you famous.’ Well. I’ve stuck with them and we’re not afraid to go back to the well and keep buying that same family,” he concluded.
Here are the five stakes winners from this cross. Powerful Favorite earned his
first stakes win in 2018 in the Governor’s Cup Futurity-G2. He was a finalist that year in the Ed Burke Million Futurity-G1, Golden State Million Futurity G1 and the Los Alamitos Two Million Futurity-G1. He came back at three to secure wins in the Los Alamitos Winter Derby-G1, Governor’s Cup Derby-G3, and El Primero Del Ano Derby-G3. He won the 2020 Go Man Go Handicap, and in 2021 he won the Brad McKinzie Winter Championship-G1 and Robert L Boniface Los Alamitos Invitational G1. He has earned $1,095,097 winning 16 of his 29 starts.
Runforyourlife won the 2019 Golden State Million Futurity-G1, was a stakes finalist in the Los Alamitos Two Million Futurity-G1, and was second in the Governor’s Cup Futurity-G2. In 2020 he was a stakes finalist in the Governor’s Cup Derby-G2 and Southern California Derby-G2. His final race was the 2021 First Day of Spring Stakes where he placed second. He earned $620,822 with six wins in 18 starts.
62 SPEEDHORSE June 2022