MARK CASSE, an 11-time winner of the Sovereign Award for Canada’s Outstanding Trainer, has made it into the National Museum of Racing’s Hall of Fame at Saratoga. The son of top horseman Norman Casse was inducted into the Canadian Horse Racing Hall of Fame four years ago and now has a set of such honours.
Casse will be inducted alongside Woodbine Mile (G1) winner WISE DAN, one of horse racing’s most accomplished and popular racehorses in the last several decades.
The Indianapolis-born Casse took out his trainer’s license when he was 17 and won with his first starter. Joe’s Coming, at Keeneland in 1979.
He has gone on to win training titles at Woodbine 11 times, Turfway four times, Keeneland three times, and Churchill Downs twice. He has trained 18 horses that have earned $1 million or more. Last year, Casse sent out the winners of two legs of the American Triple Crown: War of Will in the Preakness (G1) and Sir Winston in the Belmont Stakes (G1). He has won the Queen’s Plate twice for one of his longtime owners, Gary Barber.
Casse holds Woodbine close to his heart as he brought strings of horses to the Canadian track in the mid-1990s for Harry Mangurian, who had some 900 horses of all ages at his Mockingbird Farm in Florida. Casse soon made Woodbine his main base, praising the track’s training facilities and racing surfaces. In recent years, Casse has built up successful stables in other parts of North America. He oversees the training of his horses at his own Casse Training Centre in Ocala, Florida.
The Associated Press had a chance to get a reaction from Casse on Wednesday, “It’s unbelievable. It’s very emotional for me,” Casse said via telephone Wednesday from his farm in Ocala, Fla. “It just brings back a lot of memories, especially of my dad. I used to go to it with him all the time when I was like 10, 11, 12. I told him, ‘Some day, dad, I’m going to be in it.’ It’s just something that if you had told me in my training career to list five goals, it would have been one of them.”
Mark at his Casse Training Centre in Ocala; photo courtesy MarkCasse.com
Also part of the class of 2020 announced Wednesday were:
—Eclipse Award-winning jockey Darrel McHargue, who won 2,553 races, including 79 graded stakes, and had purse earnings of $39,609,526 from 1972-88.
—Wise Dan, a chestnut gelding who compiled a record of 23-2-0 with 11 Grade 1 wins from 31 starts and earnings of $7,552,920 while competing from 2010-14, also earning Horse of the Year honours in 2012-13 and Champion Older Male and Champion Male Turf Horse in both of those years. He won the Woodbine Mile in 2012 and 2013.
—Racehorse Tom Bowling, who was foaled in 1870, lost his first two starts as a juvenile, then won 14 of his next 15 races.
—The late George D. Widener, Jr., who bred 102 stakes winners.
—J. Keene Daingerfield, Jr., a trainer who went on to become one of the most respected stewards in the sport.
—And 94-year-old owner Alice Headley Chandler, whose Mill Ridge Farm, founded in 1962 in Lexington, Kentucky, has raised or sold 34 Grade 1 winners, including six in the Breeders’ Cup series.
The induction ceremony is tentatively scheduled for Aug. 7 at the Fasig-Tipton sales pavilion in Saratoga Springs. The museum is monitoring state and health regulations in regard to the COVID-19 pandemic and will act in accordance with those policies and best practices. A decision on the status of the ceremony will be made at a later date.
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