“I Learned Everything From Horses”: Shogo Yasuda Steps Into The Limelight
Little over ten years ago, Shogo Yasuda was best known to international racing fans for partnering Lord Kanaloa in his electrifying track gallops at Sha Tin. Now a Derby-winning trainer, Yasuda’s career is very much on an upward trajectory.
“I Learned Everything From Horses”: Shogo Yasuda Steps Into The Limelight
Little over ten years ago, Shogo Yasuda was best known to international racing fans for partnering Lord Kanaloa in his electrifying track gallops at Sha Tin. Now a Derby-winning trainer, Yasuda’s career is very much on an upward trajectory.
10 October, 2024IN THE EUPHORIC moments after the 2024 Tokyo Yushun, Shogo Yasuda contemplated whether his victory with Danon Decile – and the famous training effort that helped make it happen – would change his career arc: “I haven’t really thought about what it will mean for my career,” he said at the time, amid the rush of media plunging microphones in front of him and back slaps from well-wishers.
Six weeks later, he has his answer. Yasuda is sitting under the magnificent white birch and oak trees at Northern Farm and some of the biggest names in Japanese racing are at tables nearby. His phone buzzes and in that moment he shows just how much his life has changed as a Derby-winning trainer. He lifts it to his ear, and without warning, he sprints like Lord Kanaloa towards the sales ring.
Ten minutes later he is back. The call was from a high profile owner urging him to buy a much sought after lot and to hurry – the bidding had already begun.
“I was just an underbidder,” he says with a broad smile and a shrug that suggests that there will be plenty more opportunities to buy foals and yearlings in the future. Yasuda – Derby winner – is now at ease and ready to chat.
“I could feel the way they congratulated me was different than usual,” he says in answer to the same question he was asked by those reporters post-Derby: if he would be treated differently. “It was the way to congratulate a Derby winner.”
Yasuda’s Derby win with Danon Decile will long be remembered for the great storylines it produced. The two obvious of which were a first Classic win for the 41-year-old Yasuda and at the opposite end of the career arc: 55 year-old jockey Norihiro Yokoyama, who became the oldest jockey to win a JRA Group 1.


Then there is the training feat itself. Danon Decile was a late scratching before his key lead-up run, the G1 Satsuki Sho – the Japanese 2,000 Guineas. Behind the gates, Yokoyama had alerted officials to what he felt was an uneven action and possible lameness. It meant Danon Decile was prepared for the Derby first-up after more than four months.
“Actually, I didn’t see it as a big deal, considering the horse would have a much longer career than that one race,” Yasuda recalls. “At that time, I could already imagine the horse would have a great future no matter if the horse ran that race or not, so I’m just grateful the jockey found something wrong and made the decision to withdraw.”
It isn’t unusual for Japanese horses to tackle a big race first-up off such a long break, and the foot issue that had caused the pre-race lameness was not serious, but the unplanned nature of the break created its own unique challenges.
“It was a little bit difficult for me to retarget the horse to the Derby only by regular training,” Yasuda explained. “It is not difficult to come up with a training menu, but it was very difficult to train the horse without messing him up mentally.
“Danon Decile has a quite childish mentality, and is usually relaxed. However, during training this horse sometimes could become agitated like all racehorses do. When the horse is not strong enough physically but becomes aggressive mentally, his movements could mess up.”

Before his Derby heroics, Yasuda was best known overseas as the son of trainer Takayuki Yasuda, Lord Kanaloa’s trainer. Not only was Shogo assistant to his father, but also the trackwork rider that accompanied the sprinter in some of the most famous track gallops of all time.
Trackwork for the Hong Kong International races is a unique spectacle. Horses from around the world in clearly identifiable saddlecloths, working in broad daylight each morning.
Lord Kanaloa’s trackwork on the Sha Tin course proper before his Hong Kong Sprint wins in 2012 and 2013 have become folklore, seemingly witnessed by far more than were actually present. It was the early days of ‘racing Twitter’ and each workout before the two wins seems to have blended into one another as if there were one defining gallop.
Vision from the 2013 Wednesday workout shows Yasuda wearing an iconic blue camouflage-print Lord Kanaloa jacket, crouching aerodynamically as the muscle-bound sprinter stretched out. Lord Kanaloa tore up the straight in perhaps the most impressive of his gallops at Sha Tin, scorching the turf in of 20.4 seconds for his final 400m and 10.3s for the final 200m. The noise from a passing passenger plane provided appropriate ambience for a gallop that seemed jet-propelled.
Perhaps the most defining of the workouts was the race-eve gallop in 2012, though. Lord Kanaloa had already stunned the clockers during the week, but here he was again, galloping on the course proper, solo, little more than 24-hours out from the race and ‘breaking the clock’ yet again. Observers were impressed, but also convinced the work was too hard and that Lord Kanaloa had surely ‘left it on the training track.’
“Actually, at that time Lord Kanaloa wasn’t in the battle mode, or he wasn’t ready for racing,” Yasuda said of his motivation for the rigorous race-eve workout. “The workout wasn’t originally planned like that. I just thought the horse wasn’t ready for the big race the next day. When I got up on the horse, I felt the horse was almost sleepy. So I just worked him as if I was shouting ‘Wake up!’”
Some say that it is important for a trainer to have ridden or had an association with a champion like Lord Kanaloa, so that when they one day get an elite talent in their stable they know what to do with it. Yasuda said there might be some truth to that, but it’s also true that most horses couldn’t cope with what Lord Kanaloa – a horse he described as “like a Ferrari” – was able to do.
“By riding great horses such as Lord Kanaloa, I could experience the feeling of riding a great horse and how a great horse gallops, but when training towards a race, each individual horse has its own process,” he says.
“Different horses have different mentality and physical ability, so I won’t try to copy what they did with Lord Kanaloa. I just look at that individual horse. By riding Lord Kanaloa, now I could know ‘this horse will have a great future.’ However, I won’t apply the same process to every horse when training towards a race.”


Anybody that follows Yasuda on social media will know that he adopts a highly hands-on and somewhat unconventional approach to how he treats his horses. He is also famous among Japanese fans for the affection he shows his horses before and immediately after a race.
“I would like people to know that trainers not only check with horses and train them, but they also cherish their time having fun with horses,” he says of his entertaining posts on social media.
Asked who has influenced him as a trainer, Yasuda’s answer can be taken two ways: one is that he has truly stepped out of his father’s shadow, and secondly, he still values one-on-one time with his horses: “I never learned anything from humans,” he says. “I learned everything from horses.
“Actually, I can still allocate the same amount of time with each horse as before. Not only riding, touching and checking with the horse, but it is also important to play with the horse. I won’t mind if they bite me. I check with their mental state and try to communicate with them, and see how angry they are. If a horse that does not usually get angry suddenly bites me, I would know the horse is not in a great condition.”
“I just love horses. Regardless of my job as a trainer, I just loved touching horses since I was a kid.”
朝イチミーティング。#キングオブコージ #ぜーんぜん聴く気無し pic.twitter.com/WQtl9f69Vw
— 安田翔伍/SHOGO YASUDA (@shogo_y_stable) July 27, 2021
Yasuda grew up wanting to be a jockey but grew too tall. He still rides his own trackwork, but only at times: another way his life has changed as a Derby-winning trainer.
“Of course,” he says when asked if he still enjoys riding. “Although I still enjoyed riding, when I was an assistant trainer, I had to ride those horses which were a little bit dangerous for riding to make them a better racehorse. Now I can only ride horses that are safe to me.
“Just the Ferrari!” he laughs.
The way Yasuda’s career is trending, there should be plenty of equine ‘Ferraris’ to test drive in the future ∎