May Day Ready: Japan Holds No Mysteries For Joseph Lee

THERE WAS a lot of talking to do the morning after May Day Ready’s big race in California. Joseph Lee, Jimmy Doyle, and the rest of Lee’s small, family team, rose from their breakfast deliberations in Del Mar’s backstretch ‘kitchen’ cafeteria with Japan on their minds. Lee was wanted for an on-camera interview grandstand-side and hurried out of the door to a waiting car.

“I’ll be back at the barn in a half-hour, could you wait for me there?” he asked.

At barn row ‘BB’ that Saturday morning, Lee’s son Anthony was hotwalking May Day Ready around the stable block. They passed in front of the row of boxes that also lodged Lee’s fellow New York trainer Cherie Devaux’s More Than Looks, who later in the day would bring the joy of Breeders’ Cup Mile glory back to that quiet corner of the backstretch.

The Lee team’s joy was pretty much full with their own stable star’s second-place finish in the G1 Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Fillies Turf – behind Europe’s standout two-year-old, Lake Victoria – an effort that gave her valuable G1-placed black type, as well as a cheque for US$170,000. That’s a solid payday for a five-horse operation having its best season with seven wins. It followed the US$200,725 May Day Ready collected for her win in the G2 Jessamine Stakes at Keeneland a month earlier, the stable’s first Graded stakes success.

Anthony continued to loop the daughter of Tapit around and through the passage between the stalls and the stable offices, around and around the block. May Day Ready, confident and relaxed, was unconcerned even as the pawing Vahva stretched her neck from her stable and failed to nip her passing neighbour with her teeth.

May Day Ready was alert, her eyes sharp, her hearing attuned: she paused at the turn out of the block and stood quietly, ears pointed to the clear blue heavens, taking in her visitors for what felt like a minute or more: once she had them weighed and measured, she walked on, back to her quiet circuits. 

“She’s the most inquisitive horse I’ve ever seen,” said Lee when he returned from his media appearance. “I’ve never been around a horse like her. She’ll find things, whether off in the distance or wherever, she won’t move a muscle. She’s rare, no doubt: she’ll stop on the corner, watching, she’ll stand completely still, you gotta pry her to move. Then when she’s on the track she’s kicking up her heels.”

Lee has been around plenty of horses in his life: plenty of very talented ones at that. He took a good number of them to Japan during his time with Godolphin, back in the pioneering days of the mid-to-late 1990s: horses like Heart Lake – the first overseas raider to win the G1 Yasuda Kinen – Annus Mirabilis, Zieten and more, all trained at the time by Saeed bin Suroor, but cared for by Lee during their Japan assignments.

And here he was deliberating about whether to take one there to compete under his own name: to the G1 Hanshin Juvenile Fillies no less, a race that wouldn’t even register as an option for most non-Japanese trainers with a top-class filly of such precocity and talent.

“We’re not penny-pinching,” said Doyle as he outlined that his brother, Larry, and his KatieRich Farms operation had to weigh up the tight margins an owner must work with, measuring cost against potential benefits, as well as that difficult to quantify sporting element. Lee noted that it all would depend anyway on how the filly was shaping up physically after her exertions, and then factor in what the travel experience to Kyoto would look like.

“It’ll be interesting,” Lee said. “We’ll talk it through and make the decision we feel is right for the filly.”

That decision came through a few days later and May Day Ready left for Japan on November 19, with her ever-present jockey, the all-time-great Frankie Dettori, an old Godolphin-days ally of Lee’s, booked to ride in the December 8 feature. 

Lee, 62, talked to Idol Horse while standing among hay bales, coffee cups, and bags of  horse feed in a store annex a few feet in front of May Day Ready’s Del Mar lodging; his hands nestled inside the pockets of his Adidas jacket, a familiar shade of royal blue that nodded unmistakably to his past. Seated on feed sacks and bales were Doyle, work rider Yosuke (Yosh) Ito, and Lee’s other sons, Joey and Dominic.

Lee’s connection to Japan is much deeper than his work with Godolphin. His children – he also has a daughter, Stephanie, studying at the University of Kentucky – have a significant heritage in the sport in Japan: their grandfather is Takemi Kaga, a multiple champion jockey and then a trainer (retired) on the JRA (Japan Racing Association) circuit. Lee’s wife is Kaga’s daughter, Suzuyo (Susie).    

“We met when I took that first horse to Japan in 1994, she was actually working for the JRA in the racing office in Tokyo racecourse and she was assigned to interpret for me to the Japanese press,” he said. “In the years after that Godolphin had me go there with more horses and I’d stay maybe three months at a time, maybe go with two, send one back, they’d send another one, like Annus Mirabilis would come, for instance, and I’d maybe send Lend A Hand back.

“I probably lived a year and a half to two years at Tokyo Racecourse if you add up the amount of times I spent three months there over the years.”

Lee’s journey in horse racing started one famous day in 1973: June 9 to be exact. He was 11 years old and his grandfather took him by public transport from his Long Island home, two bus transfers to Belmont Park, to join 69,136 other folks in watching one of the greatest performances in the sport’s history. Secretariat’s iconic Belmont Stakes was Lee’s first time at the track.

“That was an experience I still remember to this day,” he said. “We put newspaper down on two seats to save them, but we went off to the bathroom or something and when we came back they were taken, so we paid a couple of dollars extra to go in the clubhouse.”

He recalled the whole crowd rising to their feet when the horses broke from the gates and his grandpa standing him up on the railings in front to see the action.

“They roared and continued to roar through the whole race,” he said.

The great filly Ruffian grabbed his attention not long after and it was during his high school years that he had his first ‘hands on’ experience with horses thanks to a girl in his class whose mother was a racehorse owner. The classmate’s brother taught him how to hotwalk.

“I started in 1980 on the race track and worked for such trainers as David Whiteley, LeRoy Jolley, Joe Cantey, John Veitch, and then I went back to school in 1987,” he said. “I went to the University of Kentucky. I’d done some community college as I was working on the racetrack, I’d take classes there and then I went back full-time, although I was still galloping horses and working in a restaurant while I was going to the University of Kentucky as well.”

After his graduation in 1989, Lee worked a year or two for the great D. Wayne Lukas who at that time had Kiaran McLaughlin as his assistant in an operation that also employed future training stars Todd Pletcher, Mark Hennig and Dallas Stewart.

“I trained a little bit on my own after that for about a year. Got on some stallions out at Juddmonte at the farm out there – Known Fact, Sanglamore – just to exercise them while I was doing two other jobs and training a couple of horses,” he recalled.

Then McLaughlin took a job training in Dubai and Lee joined him in October of 1993. That connection would open his route to Japan and also, eventually, bring May Day Ready his way. 

The winter of 1993-94 was a turning point in world racing: Sheikh Mohammed was setting out to prove European horses could winter in Dubai and ship all over the world to race.

But the embryonic operation was short on staff when the spring of 1994 came around and the Sheikh’s man Simon Crisford asked McLaughlin if they could use his man, Lee.

“They went back to England with Balanchine and I took Zieten to Japan and he was second in the Keio Hai, so Sheikh Mohammed was really pleased with that, he was over the moon that you could go from Dubai to Japan and run second; and Ski Paradise actually beat him, she was a top Andre Fabre miler, so we knew we got beat by a good horse. Then Balanchine did what she did: Oaks, Irish Derby,” he recalled.

“That fall I went back to work for Kiaran, and Sheikh Mohammed came to Kiaran’s office and I got out and they asked Kiaran if they could have me. They were starting something new, and so when I came back in, Kiaran said you can go or stay, and you can go and come back if you don’t like it.

“That ended up being Godolphin, and I went back to Japan in 1995 with the blue Godolphin colours, and the horse that I took, Heart Lake, won a Grade 1, the Yasuda Kinen.”

That year was “Just an amazing year,” as Lee put it. “I didn’t talk about it for years and years so it’s coming back to me now and the more I talk, the more I remember. That was a great time.

“I went back to Japan in 1995 with the blue Godolphin colours, and the horse I took won the Yasuda Kinen.”

“Heart Lake won that day, but Flagbird won in Italy and Vettori won the 2,000 Guineas in France, all on the same day. Heart Lake ended up being the first for Godolphin and from then on, that year was Lammtarra, Halling, So Factual, Red Bishop came to California and won the San Juan Capistrano, Moonshell won the Oaks, I saddled Frankie’s 1000th winner at Doncaster, with Classic Cliché in the St Leger, so it was a great year to say the least.”

He left Godolphin in 2000 and moved to Japan to help his father-in-law. When Kaga retired, Lee opened a private training centre and then moved to Fukushima, to Tenei Horse Park, which was a pre-training facility connected to Silk Racing and is now a training facility under the Northern Farm umbrella.

“That’s when Yosh came, way back then,” he said.

Ito responded to an advert Lee placed in Gallop magazine. May Day Ready’s trackwork rider could not work at the central training centres in Japan because he had not taken and passed the JRA written, physical and oral tests required to gain a licence to become a groom.   

“I was thinking to be a groom in Japan at the time, but at the same time I wanted to come to the United States, because the way he trains, it was such a different way to train, he taught me how to really take care of horses,” Ito said.

Lee returned home to New York in the terrible wake of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, not sure at that time if it would be a long-term move. He set up a horse feed company and another company importing and exporting equine products such as poultices and vitamins. In 2015 McLaughlin, by then back in New York, asked him to be his assistant: five-years later, when McLaughlin retired his trainer’s licence, Lee set out on his own with no more than a dozen horses.

It was the McLaughlin connection that brought the extraordinary May Day Ready into what by then was his modest five-horse barn. Lee’s first winner in this latest spell as a trainer came in June 2021 with Mazal Eighteen, owned by KatieRich Stables: he got to know Larry and Jimmy Doyle through the horses they sent to the McLaughlin stable when he was assistant there.

“Larry sent me Mazal Eighteen and I did ok with her; then he claimed a horse and I did ok with that one. So, I was fortunate enough to get a horse last year, probably the first two-year-old that I actually got was from Larry Doyle, KatieRich Farms, and two other partners, a horse called Works For Me; we won a stake, we won the Notebook, he was placed in open stakes, he’s New York-bred, and I’m actually hoping to run him in the Aqueduct Turf Sprint Championship on November 9.”

He did. Works For Me nailed a dead-heat win in that Listed race.

“Works For Me was the first and May Day Ready is the second two-year-old we actually got,” he continued, “so we’ve done alright. Knock on wood. We’re fortunate now to get some horses that are a little better quality. We’re just lucky, I’d say.

“George Barnes (farm manager at KatieRich) had picked May Day Ready out of the OBS Sale, so Larry purchased her for US$325,000. They sent her to me in April of this year, but I mean she came in light and skinny and you wouldn’t think they’re the same horse when you look at her now.”

But Lee soon saw that May Day Ready wasn’t any run of the mill raw two-year-old coming into his barn.

“I explained to Larry to let’s just go through the motions here because usually they’ll come a little buzzy, especially as she was by Tapit, I thought she might need a little time to settle into a programme of training, but it was nice that Larry sent her directly from there to me at Belmont so we got her shortly after the OBS sale and she settled in really well. I was surprised. She’s got a good mind, it didn’t take much: a little on her toes in the beginning, but different.

“Usually, back home at Belmont, she doesn’t like horses around her, she’ll kick out at them, she’s not keen about that, but for the most part she’s sensible. Here (at Del Mar) she’s really fresh, but she travelled well, temperature great, eating good, just feeling great. Yeah, so she’s a rare one with her attitude and her mental state: I’ve been around a lot but I haven’t seen one like this.”

It’s that ‘different’ that has taken May Day Ready to Kyoto. Lee’s different life path for one, and the filly’s different mind, and then there’s that athletic ability, too, that took her close to winning a Breeders’ Cup.

That ‘different’ has Lee and his small but accomplished team, so attuned to the little details, making history by taking the first foreign-trained horse to compete in Japan’s only Group 1 race exclusively for two-year-old fillies.

It would be something different if they could pull off that Group 1 win on Japanese turf. But, then again, in one sense maybe not so different: after all, Heart Lake’s name in the record books is proof that Lee has done it before ∎