April Mayberry saw first glimpse of Flightline’s talent
Veteran trainer got goosebumps watching
By Sid Fernando
I’ve been watching races for more than 50 years now and came up through the era when Secretariat, Forego, Seattle Slew, Affirmed, and Spectacular Bid dominated the scene. Flightline, more than any horse since, stirred some of the same feelings I’d had watching those greats. I wanted to find out more about this son of Tapit, who retired undefeated after only six starts. What made Flightline particularly intriguing was the number of times he overcame injuries to race—something that was obviously responsible for his brief career. In fact, the day after he retired, he was shown to a group of us at the Farish family’s Lane’s End and was lame as he walked, which was startling, because the day before he’d won the Breeders’ Cup Classic in the most dominating manner possible.
He was that type of athlete who put out 150 percent each time he raced—in sports parlance, he left everything on the field, even if it appeared he was doing everything easily—but each time he did, he paid a price.
I needed to know more, so I went to the source—to the person who first saw this extraordinary colt gallop.
I drove the hour and a half north from Tampa to Ocala to meet trainer April Mayberry about a year ago, in early March 2023, because it was she who first schooled Flightline and realized his massive talent.
The remnants of a city vanish quickly on I-75 and land becomes more expansive, dotted with live oaks covered in Spanish moss. The sun is bright, as usual. It’s an uneventful trip, nothing really to note until you enter Marion County and start to see signage of horse farms and training centers. Ocala is the capital of the horseworld in Florida. It was a few days before the OBS sale, one that attracts buyers from across the country, but Mayberry, who specializes in the early training of Thoroughbreds, was accommodating. David Ingordo had put us in touch on a three-way text, and she and I had arranged when to meet.
Mayberry was born and raised in Miami and is easy to get along with, a laid-back Floridian who takes things as they come and is as dependable as an Ocala sunrise.
She and Ingordo have known each other since he was nine and she was 20, and she considers him the brother she never had. Her father, the late Brian Mayberry, was a third-generation trainer at the racetrack. Her mother, Jeanne Mayberry, now close to 80, also trained at the track, as did her sister Summer Mayberry, four years younger than April. Before April Mayberry became a specialist trainer of young stock, she, too, was a racetrack trainer, in Kentucky. Her claim to fame back then was running Bob Baffert’s Kentucky string. Those were the early days of Baffert’s burgeoning fame, when he’d won the Kentucky Derby in 1997 for the first time. Since then, Baffert has won the Kentucky classic another five times. It would be a record six, except his Medina Spirit was disqualified from first in 2021 after the colt tested positive for the therapeutic medication betamethasone.
Mayberry didn’t have a good ending with Baffert. “It’s not something I want to speak about,” she says, a Virginia Slims in one hand and a thoughtful frown on her weathered face that stresses the lines around her mouth. But she still spits out a few more words on the matter before we move on. She’s in her late 50s, and that was a long time ago, but etched lines on her forehead are the scars that tell a story. I suggested she took a bullet for Baffert—“A cannon shell is more like it,” her face signaled, before the actual words tumble out. She had to rebuild her career and her life after that. “Everyone I knew didn’t want to have anything to do with me after Baffert. He was that powerful. I was shellshocked.”
What she eventually did at the urging of a childhood friend was to come to Ocala to rehabilitate herself. Her mother, after the death of her father, relocated from a racetrack in California to Ocala to ready young horses as a new business venture. Business was growing, and April fit right in. Her sister, likewise, left California and later joined them, and together the three women now run one of the most successful breaking and training operations in the country. Business is so good that the Mayberrys don’t advertise their services and routinely turn away clients. The 90-acre training facility they lease doesn’t have a sign that indicates it’s their operation. “Some of these guys take on up to 300 yearlings, but I keep the numbers at around 100, 110.” She was referring to the many training facilities that dot the northern Marion County landscape around us. The grass is green and the sun is bright here, and it’s the perfect winter location for horses and their people. “You know, about 90 percent of all young racehorses are schooled and trained in Ocala, but in Ocala, Thoroughbreds are a smaller portion of the horse population, behind show horses and Quarter horses.” That about explains the horse business around here.
I meet Mayberry in the clocker’s stand, a small open-air verandah perched on high ground above her training track. It’s her office, and she’s there every day her horses train. The location gives her a view of every horse galloping or working on the track, except for the few seconds when they disappear on the backside behind some live oaks in the infield. Mayberry squints and studies the young colts and fillies as they pass beneath her, and she will sometimes yell out at a rider with some comment or another. Her attention to detail is impressive, honed from a lifetime of working with horses at the racetrack. “Most people who do what we do don’t have racetrack experience. They just get these young horses ready to race with fast works and send them to the track. We used to get 2-year-olds from Ocala, and I’d be dissatisfied so many times. Now, I can send horses to the track the way I want to, because I know what trainers want,” she says.
Her track is a five-eighths of a mile oval, typical of training tracks. Her landlord, one of the biggest property owners in Ocala, keeps it in pristine shape. A turf course runs on the outside perimeter of the main dirt surface on which the horses exercise. Near a gap in the rail that separates the grass from the dirt, a starting gate is positioned, mostly to familiarize the youngsters with racetrack conditions. The starting gate will be a familiar sight for them when they get to a racetrack, and Mayberry mostly wants them to take it in as part of the scenery, although she does school a few in the gate now and then, moving them in and out of the starting stalls so they won’t spook.
Mayberry’s three dogs—two large black rescue mutts and a white Jack Russell—are keeping her company on a bed on the floor when I arrive and take a seat on a stool near her. Her Jack Russell is oversized and notably calm for the breed, and he’s also related by blood to Ingordo’s constant companion Rupert. This makes perfect sense, because of their owners’s sibling-like relationship. There are years of history between Mayberry and Ingordo, their families, and, yes, even their dogs. Ingordo’s mother, Dottie Ingordo-Shirreffs, is a tough and smart woman, Mayberry says. Dottie managed the stable of the Hall of Fame trainer Bobby Frankel, and after he died, she’s had a similar role with her trainer husband John Shirreffs’s barn. John Shirreffs trained the great Zenyatta, who won 19 of 20 starts and is much revered in the sport. The Mayberrys gave Zenyatta her early lessons, after Ingordo had purchased her as a yearling at auction for the paltry sum of $60,000 for Mr. and Mrs. Jerry Moss, whose horses Dottie manages. Jerry Moss co-founded A&M Records with Herb Alpert, and the Mosses, before they divorced, were prominent owners who won the Kentucky Derby in 2005 with Giacomo, a colt trained by John Shirreffs.
Mayberry sits on a stool, and on the ledge beside her are her notes, cigarettes, phone, and a radio transmitter that allows her to communicate with riders. One of her two assistants, Isidro Perez, wanders in and out as we speak. “He’s been with me since he was 17, and he’s 32 now,” she says of Perez. “He works his ass off.” She means that, because Mayberry, you can tell, doesn’t dole out praise easily. She has about 40 riders working for her during the peak season of September to the end of April, most of them from south of the border and many of them related to or longtime friends of each other—some from the same town in Mexico. Latinos dominate most racetracks as riders, grooms, and hotwalkers, and here in Ocala they are just as well represented on breeding farms and training centers.
Mayberry’s other assistant, Kim Harrison, is at the sales grounds a few miles away overseeing a draft of 2-year-olds Mayberry had consigned for clients.
Kim, however, was on the premises at about this time four years ago when Flightline was scheduled to get on the track. So, too, was David Ingordo. “You’re sitting about where David was that day,” Mayberry says, “when Isidro’s voice comes on the radio.” She raises her eyebrows and points to her transmitter and takes a drag from her smoke. “Isidro goes, ‘Kim, Kim, get to the barn quick. Oh my God, Kim, get here quick.’” She pronounces Kim as “Keem,” as Isidro does, for effect. She’s a storyteller with a penchant for detail.
Mayberry says she looked at Ingordo when they heard Isidro’s high-pitched call for help, and Ingordo stared back at her, expressionless. Ingordo, a cool customer, doesn’t spook easily. She says they knew without saying a word that something had happened to Flightline. Ingordo was only there that day because Mayberry had asked him to come and see the colt gallop.
“Well, I raced out of here before David could get going and beat him to the barn,” says Mayberry. “We just knew it had to be Flightline. Most of the horses had worked. We were waiting for Flightline to come out.”
When she got there, Flightline was in his stall—a prime corner space that was bigger than most of the others in the barn. He was a big colt, but as a $1,000,000 yearling, he was also an expensive one, and he got the best lodgings. Mayberry peeked in, and the colt was calm but now had a nasty gash on the right side of his butt. Isidro, Kim, and some others were gnashing teeth around the stall. Mayberry stared at Flightline’s rear end for a while and pulled her head back. “It will be okay,” she said to Ingordo as he pulled up. He pushed her aside and looked inside at the colt’s split butt cheek. “That’s not okay,” he bellowed, before turning to face her, finally flustered.
Mayberry says she wasn’t saying Flightline would be okay for the sake of it or to make Ingordo feel better; she knew he’d be fine despite the bloody mess in front of them. Through her years at the track, she’d seen about four or five similar injuries—and they’d looked equally nasty—but each had healed with no long-term harm. Of course, there’d be a scar, and Flightline’s is particularly pronounced, a long zig-zag tattooed on his rump that mars an otherwise handsome and well-sculpted body.
While Mayberry and Ingordo were waiting for Flightline to appear on the track, here’s what occurred: the colt’s rider, Jorge, had saddled him in his stall as usual and hopped aboard. He’d unlatched the stall door beforehand and walked the colt outside the stall. Flightline, knowing he was going to the track, was on the muscle, and as soon as he’d walked out with Jorge in the saddle, he reared on his hind legs, taking a few steps back as Jorge tried to gather and calm him. As Flightline came back down on his front legs, his lowered butt caught the latch going up, ripping through skin and muscle. That’s when all hell broke loose at the barn and Isidro got on the horn to Kim.
“Look, it wasn’t anyone’s fault,” Mayberry says. “It was a freak accident, and it just so happened on the day that David came to see the colt.” Ingordo’s timing wasn’t good.
This occurred in March 2020. Recuperation meant some stall rest and hand walking until the colt was well enough to have a rider on his back again, and it put Flightline behind schedule. Thoroughbreds race at age two because it gives them the foundation that helps to prepare the best of them for the glamour events the next year, like the Triple Crown races—the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs in Louisville, the Preakness in Baltimore, and the Belmont Stakes in New York. Winning a Classic adds millions to the breeding value of a colt. Because these races are only for 3-year-olds, owners get only one shot at them. The Classics also get the lion’s share of general media attention, especially the Derby, which every casual sports fan knows about, even if he or she knows nothing about the sport. The Classics are the goal of major owners and syndicates, especially for those that buy high-priced colts like Flightline at yearling auctions. The way Flightline had trained before the injury had put him squarely on the Classics path.
After the injury, there was doubt Flightline would make the races until later that fall, instead of the summer. That wasn’t too bad, Mayberry and Ingordo thought. Plenty of Derby winners, especially in recent times, had debuted in the fall and winter before they’d turned three. As it was, however, Flightline didn’t race at all as a 2-year-old.
The Bob Baffert-trained Justify never raced at two, but he won the Triple Crown in 2018 and sold for $75 million to go to the breeding shed, undefeated in six starts. Justify, however, had been the first since Apollo in 1882 to win the Derby without having raced at two. Since then, Mage did it, too, winning the 2023 Derby, the 149th renewal, but it’s not something that happens too often.
The 2022 Derby winner, Rich Strike, received his early training with the Mayberrys, but he wasn’t in the same class as Flightline. Mayberry has described Rich Strike as a talented colt, but one who lacked mental maturity in those early days. She has compared him to a teenage boy with a wandering mind who did what he was asked when put through his paces but showed no initiative to take his lessons a step farther.
In contrast, Flightline was a different creature, she says. Most of her charges arrive at the farm shortly after the fall yearling sales, but Flightline, despite being purchased at a select auction in Saratoga in August, didn’t arrive until December. Because he was such big horse, he’d had some growth issues, and Ingordo and the ownership group gave him time at Lane’s End until he was ready to go to Mayberry in Ocala. He was already behind his peers in terms of tutelage by the time he arrived, but he caught on fast.
Shortly after Flightline officially turned two on Jan. 1, he was already broken to the saddle and jogging on the track.
Breaking a horse is a process that can take weeks, especially for the way Mayberry treats her young stock with extraordinary patience. “He hardly took any time to break,” Mayberry says, smacking her lips and waving her hand. “It’s almost as if he’d already been broken—but, of course, he hadn’t been. But that’s how easy he was from the beginning. He had that kind of mind.”
Mayberry took me from the clocker’s stand to the barn area and paddocks behind it to show me the round pens where young horses are first lunged before a saddle is put on their backs. She showed me the paddocks next to the barn where her pupils get some relaxation time every day, and then gestured to one with her left hand, a Virginia Slims between her fingers. “One day, I got a call from West Point that one of its members wanted to see Flightline and was bringing his grandson. Now, that’s okay with me. They’d arrived, and I went to get come cookies for the little boy to feed the horse. Well, by the time I returned to the paddock, someone had found the cookies, and the boy was right there at the horse’s knee feeding him cookies. I got worried—you don’t know what a young colt might do—and jogged over quick, but by the time I got there, Flightline was taking them gently from the boy. No problem. Boy, that was some relief, but I realized then that this big colt had a more unique mind than the others. He was extremely intelligent and kind. If he talked, I wouldn’t have been surprised.” She smiles, her eyes twinkle, and she means it.
That mind of his allowed Flightline to catch up to his peers. With Jorge on his back, Flightline went from jogging to cantering to galloping effortlessly. Finally, it was time to breeze him. Mayberry usually breezes colts in pairs, so that two can run together in company and compete.
“I didn’t want to do that with Flightline,” she says. “Jorge puzzled over it. I said, ‘Jorge, let’s just try it this way, and if it doesn’t work, we’ll call it a day and bring him back another time with a workmate.’”
Mayberry felt Flightline didn’t need another horse next to him for inspiration. She was right.
“I don’t use a clock on these works; I just want to watch the way they go,” she says. After years on the track around high-class horses, she can tell the quality of an athlete without looking at the time on a stopwatch.
A typical, sunny Ocala morning, no different from any other day, set the stage. Jorge was excited to be on Flightline’s back. Mayberry watched as her rider galloped the colt in front of her and then to the point on the backside of the track where he’d ask him to pick up speed. Jorge would cut him loose at the top of the stretch. Mayberry watched in anticipation. Flightline was explosive. He went fast, yes, but in the easiest manner possible, and by the time the colt had gone past her and taken the bend and was being pulled up by Jorge, she was on her phone to Ingordo.
“Something made me reach for the phone— well, it was Flightline. I don’t call owners after works, but Flightline’s breeze took my breath away. It was spine-tingling. In fact, the last time we’d called an owner after a breeze was years ago, after Zenyatta breezed. My mom made that call. That call was to David as well.”
By the time she’d gotten off the phone with Ingordo, Jorge had jogged Flightline back and was in front of her, beaming from ear to ear.
What did she tell Ingordo? “David, you’ve got to come down and see this colt,” says Mayberry. “I had goosebumps, to tell you the truth. I’d never seen one work like that, except for Zenyatta. We had Zenyatta alone, too, but behind a pair, and she just galloped past them with strides twice as long as theirs. Flightline, he just went so easy, and you could tell he was moving fast.”
Before Ingordo made it down to see Flightline, Mayberry worked him again, with a workmate. “It was really for the other horse’s benefit,” she says. “This colt came down in December, too, like Flightline, so the two were buddies. He was about half the size of Flightline, and I had Jorge work him with that colt because I knew Flightline wouldn’t just take off on him. He had that mind that he’d do exactly what Jorge wanted him to do, and Jorge kept him in second gear to keep that other colt company. Now, some young colts wouldn’t do that; you chirp and they’d want to tear away, but it all gets back to Flightline’s mind. You always dream of getting a colt like that. Well, we are lucky. We got him, and we got Zenyatta.”
Mayberry knew that when Flightline left her, he’d go to trainer John Sadler in California. Sadler trained other horses for clients of Ingordo, so Mayberry had sent Sadler plenty of runners before, including champion Accelerate, a colt who’d been purchased on Ingordo’s recommendation for $380,000 as a yearling and earned almost $6.7 million.
When Ingordo arrived to watch Flightline, he’d already lined up a California flight for the colt.
Sadler had asked Mayberry if she’d liked Flightline, and her response was succinct: “I don’t like Flightline; I love him.” Oh yeah, he’d said, taking her comments as hyperbole. “You never want to talk up a horse to a trainer, because so much can happen between when we send the colt over and when he runs,” Mayberry says. “I like to have a trainer make up his own mind, but in this case, I had to let him know this was a special colt. John finally took me seriously on that.”
Sadler, however, didn’t get Flightline until November, because the colt got hurt again. By the time Flightline was back under saddle after recovering from his injury, most of Mayberry’s 2-year-olds had left for the racetrack. “The weather is getting hotter now, the track’s a little deeper with less activity on it, we’re into the summer, and I don’t like training horses down here at that time. Anyway, he pulls a ligament in a hind leg—again, nothing serious, but the deeper track didn’t help,” Mayberry says.
Ingordo had the colt shipped to Lane’s End to recuperate, and from there Flightline was put under light training at a nearby Kentucky training center. After the Keeneland November breeding stock sale, he was sent to John Sadler, who’d come to Kentucky for the sale and to see Flightline.
Flightline wouldn’t make his first start until April 24, 2021. A week later, the Bob Baffert-trained Medina Spirit won the Derby, and shortly afterwards, was disqualified from first for failing his post-race drug test.
Ironically, the Mayberry graduate Rich Strike, who wasn’t half the horse Flightline was, won the Derby the following year, and there are probably more people outside of the sport who’ve heard of him than they have Flightline.
In racing, timing is everything.
Great yarn.
Such a great story. Thanks for taking us behind the scenes, Sid. 👍🏇