“When It’s Belmont Day, It’s Nobody but Woody.”

Equine artist Kenneth Daly captures a pose of Woody Stephens so familiar to many colleagues and fans.

By Jude T. Feld

Woody Stephens, son of a Kentucky sharecropper, started his career in racing with little education and even less in his pockets. A true “rags to riches” story, Stephens rose from his modest upbringing to become a legendary trainer of racehorses for seven decades.

Former chairman of the New York Racing Association, Kenny Noe, referred to Stephens as, “one of the most renowned trainers in the United States, and one of the most respected horsemen in thoroughbred racing,” adding, “If there ever was anyone who lived this game, it was Woody Stephens. He had no other interests. His accomplishments – especially his five Belmont Stakes wins – will never be exceeded.”

Stephens, a short, country boy, won his first race as a jockey at Hialeah Park in Florida in 1931, and saddled his first winner as a trainer at Keeneland, in Lexington Kentucky in 1936.

Later, Stephens would train nine national champions, five fillies who won the Kentucky Oaks, two colts who won the Kentucky Derby and two who ran the fastest Metropolitan Miles in history.

He was elected to the racing Hall of Fame in 1976; he won the Eclipse Award as America’s best trainer in 1983 and then gathered all those memories together in 1985 in his autobiography titled, ”Guess I’m Lucky.”

The most amazing of his accomplishments however, was winning the mile-and-a-half Belmont Stakes from 1982 through 1986.

“They were five different horses and five different races,” Stephens said. “They all won with authority. They tell me that it’s like Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak. Nobody’s likely to break it. Only one other trainer ever won two Belmonts in a row in modern times. That was Lucien Laurin, and he had Secretariat and Riva Ridge.”

Stephens’s run of success in the Belmont began with Conquistador Cielo, who won the coveted race by 14 lengths on Saturday after winning the Metropolitan Mile on Monday in the record time of 1:33.

The next year, Caveat ran third in the Kentucky Derby but won the Belmont. The year after that, Swale won the Florida Derby, the Kentucky Derby and the Belmont Stakes.

In 1985, he saddled Crème Fraiche for one owner and Stephan’s Odyssey for another and they finished 1-2 in that order.
Sports Illustrated’s Bill Nack described the scene at Woody’s historic fifth win thusly:

“Long Island had never witnessed a spectacle quite like it. Moments after an 8-1 shot named Danzig Connection swept to victory in the 1986 Belmont Stakes, the colt’s 72-year-old trainer, Woody Stephens, floated, on mounting waves of sound, toward the winner’s circle at Belmont Park. Stephens had just won an unprecedented fifth straight Belmont, and as he made his way past the blue bloods in the box seats, you could hear the tribute building among the blue collars in the grandstand below, a murmur and then a chant rising louder and louder: ‘Wood-dee! Wood-dee!’ Of all the cherished memories from more than 30 years at Belmont, my warmest is of that June afternoon, of the inimitable Woody moving with that swagger through the crowds. Woodford Cefis Stephens had earned the ultimate benediction — the unequivocal adulation of the New York player.”

Forever joined, the banner headline on the newspaper clipping that hung in Stephen’s stable office said it all: “When It’s Belmont Day, It’s Nobody but Woody.”

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