Page 155 - February 2021

“...the thing we’re focused on as a family and as a team is making sure we’re putting out the top babies for Quarter Horse racing, starting with Curls Happy Wagon.”
we’d stop. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t, but if it does then at least we’d have a little idea of what she is.”
Curls Happy Wagon daylighted the field in her first start at Prairie Meadows. She did it again a month later in her second out.
“From that day forward, this mare has never wanted for anything,” Charette-Hill says. “She’s had 20 outs and every time I ran her, we x-rayed her. We knew the deformity was there, but she has never had any surgery, she’s never chipped, never nothing.”
The trainer and her husband, Randy Hill, picked her races very carefully. Curls Happy Wagon ran only twice as a freshman in 2017. She won two of six races in 2018, capping her season with a second by a scant
Dacie and Jason Smith & Candace and Tony Brackens with Curls Happy Wagon after purchasing the mare for Michael Herd.
head to Champion Hotstepper in Texas Classic Derby-G1. Improving by age, the
mare won two of five in 2019, scoring in the Decketta Stakes-G3 at Remington Park and the Distaff Challenge at Canterbury Park, and lit the board in the AQHA Distaff Challenge Championship-G1 at Albuquerque.
2020 was the best season of her career.
“Was Curls going to be the Champion?” Charette-Hill asks. “Never a doubt in
my mind.”
Curls Happy Wagon retired from the track with nine wins and $360,674 in earn- ings from 20 starts. Now she steps up as the foundation broodmare for Herd Ranch’s racing team. The plan at press time was to breed her and pull embryos by Apollitical
Jess, Apollitical Blood, Favorite Cartel and One Famous Eagle.
“We also plan to do some off-season breeding to get embryos ready to hit the mark just right next year,” Smith says. “At some point, we might want to get some bar- rel racing babies out of her, hopefully by our own studs that we have proven in the barrel racing industry. But right now, the thing we’re focused on as a family and as a team is making sure we’re putting out the top babies for Quarter Horse racing, starting with Curls Happy Wagon.”
So, breed the best to the best and hope for the best. Welcome, Herd Ranch, to the art, science, business – and hope – of raising the fastest horses on earth.
“Was Curls going to be the Champion? Never a doubt in my mind.”
– Stacy Charette-Hill
Martin Stacy, Kendra Winkowitsch and Stacy Charette-Hill accepting Curls Happy Wagon’s Champion Aged Mare award.
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