Page 42 - 16 March 2012

From left: Dan Fick, pictured with Heritage Place’s Jeff Tebow, jockey G.R. Carter, Oklahoma State Representative Sean Roberts, and Tommy Thomas.
its 2012 Quarter Horse meet, with a 44-race stakes schedule worth more than $5 million, on March 2. The richest race, the $1 million Heritage Park Futurity-G1, is slated for May 26. The meet’s daily purses will likely average $270,000, meaning Quarter Horses at every level have many lucrative opportunities.
Fick brings a wealth of experience to the job. Not only did he spend all those years at AQHA on a variety of projects, including the long, hard road to bring pari-mutuel racing to Texas, he was one of the first to go through the University of Arizona’s Race Track Industry Program. There he met a brash young man named Bob Baffert, who would succeed first as a Quarter Horse trainer and then as a Hall of Fame Thoroughbred conditioner with numer- ous Triple Crown and Breeders’ Cup races to his credit.
“It was a great group of students,” said Fick. “Bob was a lot of fun to go to school with.”
Fick grew up in Tucson, where he came to love Quarter Horse racing at Rillito. As many from the Race Track Industry Program gravi- tated to the Thoroughbred side, he went in the Quarter Horse direction.
Through the years, he has also served as a steward, executive director of the Oklahoma Horse Racing Commission, and chief executive officer of the Racing Medication & Testing Consortium. He has given back to the industry by devoting time as president of the Race Track Chaplaincy of America and has worked with the Winners Federation and with racehorse retirement groups.
“We have to take care of the people involved with the racing industry and the horses,” Fick said.
Then there was the time Fick left Quarter Horse racing for the Thoroughbred world. From 2003-09, he was the executive direc- tor and vice president of The Jockey Club, which serves him in good stead at Remington later in the year when it runs a major Thoroughbred meet.
He and his wife, Cynthia, have also raised two children, son Colton, now 23, and daugh- ter Danica, 21. The kids spent their teenage years in Kentucky, and now both attend the University of Kentucky in Lexington.
But Fick missed the racetrack, and he started at Remington in January of 2011.
“Part of the reason I left The Jockey Club is that I got into the business because I love the racetrack,” he said.
Remington’s rich purse structure is both a blessing and a curse because it attracts so many horses. As Fick was beginning to take the first entries of the 2012 meeting, he noted that the racing office had 3,300 sets of registration papers and only 1,400 stalls.
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SPEEDHORSE, March 16, 2012
One of the first graduates of theUniversity of Arizona’s Racetrack Industry Program, Dan Fick has devoted his life to the betterment of Quarter Horse and Thoroughbred racing.
INDUSTRY PRofIle
Dustin orona Photography
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