Issue: Summer 2003

A Thoroughbred Understanding

When Robert Keck ’90 began hanging around racetracks as a teenager, his parents weren’t worried. After all, they knew their young tenderfoot was not a grifter-in-training but rather an aspiring thoroughbred aficionado.

Those early equine interests channeled themselves into an unusual career path: Today he works as a consultant at Crestwood Farms, a thoroughbred breeding stable near Lexington, Ky.

While studying business at USC, Keck continued to indulge his passion. “I was obviously a little bit isolated from the horse breeding industry, so I was always watching racing, going to San Anita,” he says. “In the summers I would work on horse farms in California.”

After graduating, he headed off to Ireland for a year, to the Irish National Farm, a grad school of sorts for aspiring equine experts. “They take on 23 students a year, and you just live and breathe horses. Of course,” he laughs, “you clean a lot of stalls.”

Keck then went for a second business degree in equine administration at the University of Louisville, where he met classmate Pope McLean Jr. Pope McLean Sr., Keck knew, was the owner of Crestwood Farm, and a highly respected thoroughbred breeder. The connection eventually led to Keck becoming a blood stock consultant at Crestwood.

His work includes inspecting horses at sales, studying horse pedigrees, matching stallions with mares and looking into the history of certain horses, all to hypothetically mate and create a championship racer. The process can be surprisingly high-tech. On a computer, Keck may go back 20 generations of a thoroughbred and track a horse’s family tree through several centuries. “The genealogy of these horses is one of the [best] documented of animals,” says Keck.

The fruit of his labor took shape several years ago in the silky frame of a filly sprinter named Xtra Heat. “She’s basically a one-in-a-million proposition,” says Keck, adding that McLean Sr., who has been in the breeding business for 40 years, considers the filly the best horse he’s ever seen. Xtra Heat placed second in the 2001 Breeders Cup, racing as the lone filly in a field of 3-year-old colts. “It would be like a teenage girl running in the Boston Marathon against all these male professional athletes,” Keck explains. She also won the 2001 Eclipse Award for “Champion 3-Year-Old Filly,” an award that usually goes to routers (horses that perform better at long-distance racing), and she was the overwhelming Fan’s Choice winner in the same category. In February of this year, Xtra Heat won a major $200,000 stakes at Laurel Racetrack in Maryland. The win made Xtra Heat the all-time stakes winning filly in thoroughbred racing history. Over 35 starts, she has 26 wins and earnings of $2,389,635.

Keck can’t help but beam with professional pride. “I look at her and think, ‘Hey, if it wasn’t for me, she wouldn’t have been born,’” he says.

– Meaghan Agnew