Page 32 - New Mexico Horse Breeder, Fall

out to the job site every now and then, but most of the time you’re in an office all day on the computer designing and making calculations. Paper, computer, paper, computer. That’s your day and I like to be outdoors. I found out I really enjoyed being out there with my dad.”
The three months came and went.
“I stayed another month, then another month and another. Until I decided, you know what, I’m getting paid way better than when I was over there. I’m enjoying it, so why leave.”
That was about three years ago. His new job required new lessons and this time his father was the teacher. Juan Carlos observed and absorbed everything he could. He tapped into his dad’s lifetime of training Quarter Horses.
“I’d ask him, how can you tell when to take a horse to the gates for training? Why are we galloping this horse way more than this one? Things you cannot read in a book. Things you can only get from experience.”
Juan Gonzales shared with his son everything he knows about training.
“He told me each horse has a different personality,” says Juan Carlos. “That you’ve got to adapt yourself to their personality. You don’t adapt the horse to you. Each horse is different. Each horse has it’s own diet and eating habits, it’s own training program.”
Juan Carlos listened, learned and then added some new ideas to the Gonzalez training program. “I’m a book person, so I like to read a lot,” he says.
“Every training program can always find something better or a more efficient way of doing things. That’s what I’m trying to do. My dad has been very receptive to changes that I’ve come up with.”
Some of those changes include the use of vibrating plates to help a horse with blood
circulation, to treat sore joints and feet and to build muscle. Massages are now also part of a horse’s training regiment.
“I try to look at this as my dad and I as a team because, obviously, what I’ve learned lately doesn’t compare with what he’s learned during his life” says Juan Carlos.
“He works hard, pays attention and learns things very quickly,” says his dad in Spanish. “Everything is good.”
“You don’t get bored because every horse is different,” says Juan Carlos.
And Suze Returns is certainly that different kind of horse that every trainer dreams of having in his or her barn.
Rios, who runs a large livestock auction company in El Paso, bought the filly as a yearling at the Heritage Sale in Oklahoma. He paid $13,000 for her and was prepared to go higher because he has always liked foals from the broodmare Brown Eye Suze, which he at one time owned.
Out of the nearly 900 horses sold at the Heritage Sale last year, Suze Returns was one of the last five or six horses to go on the auction block. Rios thinks that’s one of the reasons he got her for such a short price.
When he took her to the Gonzalez’s for breaking and training, it was hardly love at first sight.
“To be quite honest, she was another horse in the barn,” says Juan Carlos. “She was tough. She was the last to leave out of the gates. She’s always been a tough filly with a very strong personality and high energy. When we were breaking her, she unseated every single rider. Every rider or jockey ended up on the ground at one point or another.”
Suze Returns’ potential emerged the second time they worked her.
They worked her alongside another one of Rios’ horses that Gonzalez initially thought was the best of the three babies Rios had brought them.
“She beat him by three or four lengths,”
says Juan Carlos. “We couldn’t believe it. We thought maybe the other horse, it wasn’t his day. We went to the (West Texas Futurity) trials with that in mind and then she wins like she did and runs the fastest time. That’s when we knew she was very talented and had a hell of a future.”
The filly initially was nominated to the lucrative Triple Crown races at Ruidoso this summer, but Rios stopped making the series of payments.
“I quit making payments because I thought she was too small,” said Rios.
Once she won the West Texas, Juan and Juan Carlos convinced Rios to pay the supplemental fees totaling $110,000 to get Suze Returns into the trials for the Ruidoso, Rainbow and All American trials. In reality, she had earned her way in by winning the $269,527 West Texas Futurity and with her runner- up finish in the $1 million Ruidoso Futurity.
The owner-trainer relationship between Rios and the Gonzalez stable has been in place for several years.
“They are honest and reliable,” says Rios. “You go to their (barn) in the morning and you find Juan or Juan Carlos there. They run a pretty good ship. And they’ll tell you if your horse is not going to be a race horse.”
After the Sunland meet ended in April, Juan Carlos assumed a larger role. His mom and
dad wanted to travel and Juan felt the time was right to take a break. Juan and Patricia spent considerable time vacationing in Mexico.
“Now that I have a good hand, someone we can trust, we can go on a vacation with the confidence everything is going to be alright,” says Juan.
30 New Mexico Horse Breeder