06/16/2026
On July 28, 1985, a nine-year-old gelding ran his final race. Nearly a month later, on August 26, he walked off the track at Del Mar Racetrack in California for the last time.
No fanfare was planned. No ceremony had been announced. But the crowd that day understood what they were watching, and they did not let him leave quietly.
His name was John Henry. And by almost any measure, he had no business being there at all.
He was born on March 9, 1975, at Golden Chance Farm in Kentucky. His breeding was unremarkable. His temperament was worse. As a foal, he bit, kicked, and fought every person who came near him. He was gelded early, partly in the hope it would settle him down. It did not, particularly.
At the Keeneland yearling sale in January 1976, he sold for $1,100. Not $11,000. Not $110,000. Eleven hundred dollars. At a sale where promising Thoroughbreds regularly fetched six figures, John Henry was the horse that nobody wanted badly enough to pay more.
He changed hands several more times in those early years. One owner sold him for $2,200. Another let him go not long after. He was difficult to handle, difficult to train, and difficult to love. He had a habit of biting his grooms, weaving in his stall, and generally behaving as though the entire enterprise of horse racing was a personal insult.
He also had a way of running that nobody could quite explain.
His early career was spent in claiming races, the lowest tier of Thoroughbred competition, where any horse entered can be purchased by a competing owner for a preset price. The horses in these races are, broadly speaking, the ones that do not belong in better company. John Henry ran in them because that was the level he seemed to occupy.
And then, slowly, something shifted.
Trainer Ron McAnally took over John Henry's care in 1978, when the horse was three. McAnally was experienced, patient, and not easily rattled, which may have been the first prerequisite for working with a horse like this one. He found a routine that John Henry would tolerate. He built a relationship with groom José Mercado, who would stay with the horse through the peak of his career, and exercise rider Lewis Cenicola, who understood that the horse required a different kind of handling than most.
Under McAnally, the transformation was not dramatic or sudden. It was incremental, which in some ways made it more remarkable to watch.
Owner Sam Rubin had purchased the horse on the advice of connections in the sport, not because anyone thought they were acquiring a future champion. What they had acquired, as it turned out, was one of the most durable and competitive Thoroughbreds in the history of American racing.
John Henry won his first stakes race. Then another. Then another after that.
In 1981, he won the inaugural Arlington Million, a race newly created as the first $1 million purse in Thoroughbred history. He was six years old. Most horses at that age are beginning to slow down. John Henry was running the best races of his life, against younger, faster-looking rivals, in a field stacked with international competition.
He was named Horse of the Year in 1981.
He came back in 1984, at nine years old, and did it again. Horse of the Year, for the second time, nearly a decade after that $1,100 sale at Keeneland. He was ultimately named Racehorse of the Decade by a sport that had watched him climb from the bottom of the claiming ranks to the very top of the sport.
By the time he retired, his career earnings stood at $6,591,860, a record at the time.
The number itself is striking. What is more striking is how he earned it, race by race, year after year, past the age when Thoroughbreds are supposed to be competitive, with a disposition that never entirely softened and a will that never seemed to diminish.
José Mercado, who groomed him through those years, knew the horse better than almost anyone. He also knew, probably, that the retirement that summer at Del Mar was the right call. John Henry had given everything the sport could ask of him.
After his final race, he was retired to the Kentucky Horse Park in Lexington, where he lived for another twenty years and became one of the most visited animals in the facility's history. People came specifically to see him. Children who had not been born when he ran his first race at Del Mar stood at his stall and looked at a horse who had, at the absolute bottom of the market, been worth $1,100.
He died in 2007, at thirty-two years old, which is a considerable age for a horse.
He was buried at the Kentucky Horse Park.
The horse nobody wanted for more than eleven hundred dollars. The horse that bit and kicked and made himself as difficult as possible. The horse that ran at nine years old the way most Thoroughbreds run at four.
Racehorse of the Decade.
Career earnings: $6,591,860.
Two-time Horse of the Year.
Sometimes the horse at the bottom of the sale barn is the one who changes the record books.
