Leading Trainer Is Keeping Busy

The phone rings. Blane Schvaneveldt has time to talk, but he’s a busy man.

Reception on the portable phone he carries fades in and out as he darts from one corner of his barn to the other, receiver in one hand, horse tack in the other.

Schvaneveldt huffs and puffs. No time to stop. No time to waste. He has been at the barn since 4 a.m. He’ll go home, like most nights, at midnight.

Schvaneveldt, the national leader in earnings among quarter horse trainers, has been working at this breakneck pace for years.

He’s a businessman and apparently a good one.

In an industry that has been slow to embrace change, Schvaneveldt is a throwback to the days when hard work around the ranch was its own reward. He drives the people who work for him hard at times, other trainers say. But if that’s true, Schvaneveldt would have it no other way. He drives himself pretty hard too.

“It takes good horses, good owners and lots of hard work to do well,” he said.

There have been plenty of each for Schvaneveldt and the rewards have been many.

Schvaneveldt, 62, has never ventured too far from the top in his profession. He has won 35 meet titles at Los Alamitos since 1973 and he’s leading the pack at the track again this year. According to the August edition of The Quarter Racing Journal, his horses earned $280,000 in the first half of the year, tops in the nation. He ranked second in total wins across the country, posting 49 out of 293 starts.

“The key to his success is that he’s a good businessman,” trainer Bruce Hawkinson said. “He’s sharp. He takes care of business and he’s a good judge of horseflesh.”

It’s not unusual for owners to seek out Schvaneveldt to train horses that have not done well elsewhere. He counts about 60 in his stable at Los Alamitos, 125 at his ranch outside Antelope Valley. Additionally, he breeds about 300 mares a year. Each brings a sizable check from their owners.

Schvaneveldt is conditioning My Debut, a favorite in today’s $75,000 Go Man Go Handicap at Los Alamitos. Rare Bar, his second entry, will be making its season debut after earning nearly $150,000 last year.

My Debut has never lost at Los Alamitos. But Rare Bar defeated My Debut last year in the $200,000 American Quarter Horse Assn. Challenge Championship at Retama Park in Selma, Texas.

Both horses will be tested by Jose Flores’ IB Quick, which has two wins in three starts and has earned more than $67,000 this season.

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Saturday’s eight-state blackout hit hard at Los Alamitos, where the track was expecting to take in a record handle because of satellite wagering on Del Mar’s Pacific Classic featuring Cigar.

General Manager Dick Feinberg wouldn’t speculate on how much money the race course lost, but he said the take when the power went out just before 4 p.m. was nowhere near the average Saturday handle of $1.25 million.

Power was out for more than three hours at the track and the night’s events were canceled. No makeup date is planned.

Feinberg said many of the 5,000 on hand were placing bets at the time of the outage. Workers had to manually restart automated wagering machines Sunday morning to determine which refunds were in order.

“It was absolutely chaotic for patrons that were caught in the middle of the power failure,” Feinberg said. “What if a patron put a $3,000 voucher into one of the machines when the machine went off. If we restarted all of them at once when the power went back on that ticket could have popped out and anyone could have grabbed it and walked off.”

If there was a positive side, Feinberg said, it was that Sunday’s handle was the second-best of the season, just slightly less than the $1.161 million taken in by the track on the Sunday before Memorial Day.

Notes

Track owner Edward C. (Doc) Allred is the leading breeder in the nation, according to the Quarter Racing Journal, with more than $380,000 in earnings. That also ranks No. 1 among the nation’s horse owners. . . . Allred has applied to the California Horse Racing Board for a license to conduct the annual harness racing meet at Los Alamitos beginning in December, a track spokesman said. The meet would run from Dec. 26 to April 15. Previously, the meet has been conducted by Premier Group, which rented the track. Premier hired its own staff. Allred, who has spent more than $12 million in refurbishing the 46-year-old track, plans to use most of the same personnel he currently employs and says that taking charge of the harness meet would be in the best interests of the race course while renovations continue.