A full 50 minutes had passed since Forever Young’s historic win in the Breeders’ Cup Classic and Yoshito Yahagi was round the back of the grandstand, sitting on the flat, paved edge of a raised flower bed outside of the Del Mar club house.
Around him the crowd milled towards the gates, the early leavers making a getaway to beat the traffic before the last two races had been run.
“There’s the trainer,” “He’s the guy that won the Classic,” “That’s the Japanese trainer,” more than one awed American voice was heard to say as they passed by.
Some even stopped and sat beside him: one man, in blue jeans, sneakers and sloppy checked shirt, gave a fist bump with his free hand while the other held a beer and his friend took a picture. Yahagi, in a tidy grey suit, black cowboy-style hat and red and white ‘Yahagi stable’ tie, took it all with humour, grace and class.
He had been sitting for some time, but he was not idle: it’s hard to imagine Yahagi ever is. Before that, the 64-year-old had been standing for a good while, always speaking to camera, to voice recorders, to listening ears, answering questions with patience, thoughtful clarity, and dry humour.
Before him were journalists, some crouched at his feet. He had already ticked the box of the official press conference after winning North America’s greatest weight-for-age race with its US$7 million purse, yet there he was, giving more of his time, sharing his thoughts about a victory years in the making. This was no hit and run win.
“I have been travelling horses for 15 years and in the first five years I experienced a lot of failures, but I think those failures on failures led to the successes and to this moment,” Yahagi told Idol Horse.
It was a moment made of Yahagi’s own trial and error experiences added on to a shared knowledge passed between Japan’s horsemen going back to the days of Hideyuki Mori and Kazuo Fujisawa – two legends who masterminded Japan’s first and second offshore Group 1 wins within a fortnight in France in the summer of 1998 – and all that has followed since in victory and defeat.
Yahagi’s own failures included Grand Prix Boss’s tough lesson behind the great Frankel in the G1 St James’s Palace Stakes of 2011. But the master trainer has been a pioneer himself, forging his own route, picking up on what others did while doing things his way, and establishing his own storied legacy with wins in Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Hong Kong, the United States and Australia.
Before Forever Young’s historic win, Yahagi was already, after all, the only Japanese trainer to have cracked the Breeders’ Cup code with the wins of Loves Only You and Marche Lorraine at Del Mar in 2021.
His experiences have added hefty doses of know-how to the shared knowledge pool that has helped his peers at Ritto and Miho, the Japan Racing Association (JRA)’s two training centres, as well as one or two brave travellers from the localised National Association of Racing (NAR).
Two of his fellow trainers having their first Breeders’ Cup experiences this weekend, Daishi Ito and Kazuya Nakatake, both told Idol Horse how that combined learning has benefited them.
“There are so many experienced people around team Japan, so I received a lot of help from others who have done this before,” said Ito, who would congratulate Yahagi with a hearty embrace after the interviews were finally done.
Nakatake added, “Japanese trainers exchange information a lot, so we’re all challenging together and that enables us to learn from each other and try again and again and that gives us a better chance of winning as we keep trying.”
Yahagi has tried more than most. But to him the value of trying is manifest in the eventual fruits, the victories. Anything less is failure. Even in the aftermath of arguably his greatest single win, he was not satisfied.
“I will never be satisfied until I’m retired from training,” he said, and later he added, “I came here to win. But I couldn’t imagine what it would be like when we actually did win this race. In the moment, I was speechless.”
That moment came after Sakai rode a race of unexpected confidence from gate five. The rider settled Forever Young one off the fence outside Fierceness, tracking the pace-setting Contrary Thinking.
“The horse was in the best condition so I only thought about winning,” Sakai told Idol Horse. “Whatever the situation, I just thought about winning, that was it.”
When the leader began to falter towards the end of the backstretch, Sakai was happy for his mount to take over: Forever Young was a length to the good turning in and forged on to hold the fast-closing Sierra Leone by half a length with Fierceness back in third.
“I was watching the race next to Mr. (Susumu) Fujita, and I felt a lot of pressure,” Yahagi said with a laugh, recalling the raw reaction to victory as both men screamed and embraced and Yahagi’s hat went tumbling to the ground amid the mayhem of elation.
“The owner is a successful businessman, has been through a lot, but his facial expression after the race was priceless, like this was a once in his lifetime experience.”
And perhaps it was. After all, Forever Young is only the third non-American horse to win the Breeders’ Cup Classic in its 41-year history, as well as Japan’s first.
But in this win was the added sweetness of revenge for Forever Young’s defeats behind Sierra Leone in last year’s Classic and Kentucky Derby.
Yahagi spoke about that desire for revenge at Del Mar on this day 12 months ago, immediately after Forever Young’s third-place behind Sierra Leone and Fierceness.
“I want revenge on the horses that were first and second,” he told Idol Horse then.
This time it was Fujita who expressed a feeling of ‘now or never’ when he said, “Fierceness and Sierra Leone will retire after this race so this was the last chance against these two together, so it was my dream to beat these two horses and the dream came true.”
It might just as easily have been Yahagi speaking those words. That the trainer and the enigmatic innovator Fujita – the man behind Cygames and the Umamusume: Pretty Derby phenomenon – yearned to avenge those defeats says much about their inner drive, and especially Yahagi’s unwavering and unapologetic desire to win and so prove his horse and himself to the world
That proving is something that despite his incredible achievements at home – multiple leading trainer titles and Contrail’s Triple Crown among them – and abroad, he seems to be acutely conscious of.
“I don’t think I am a world-class trainer yet,” he said. “I still have a long way to go. I couldn’t do anything without the support of those around me, I got the support not only from the owners, but also all the fans.
“I just hope I can live up to their expectations,” he added.
Few would doubt that he has in fact already exceeded expectations, but for Yahagi there is always the next plan to execute and that means a return to Riyadh for the Saudi Cup, which Forever Young won last year in an epic battle against Hong Kong’s champion Romantic Warrior.
That will be on February 14, 2026, a date that falls nine days before Forever Young’s actual birthday on February 23, which is one day short of the fifth anniversary of when Fujita’s Cygames first launched its hugely popular Umamusume game on February 24, 2021. The game and media franchise has been responsible for taking horseracing to a whole new, young demographic in Japan.
Within moments of Forever Young passing the winning post at Del Mar, Cygames issued a silhouette of Forever Young’s anticipated Umamusume character on social media with no words, only the date 2026.02.24, which within a few hours had more than seven million impressions.
After all Yahagi has achieved as a racehorse trainer, his greatest gift to the sport might yet be felt through Forever Young’s rebirth as a world-conquering Breeders’ Cup Classic winner within Fujita’s Umamusume world of gamers and anime consumers, perhaps the most vibrant crossover fanbase horse racing has ever seen. ∎
