Odds On Racing - Harness Racing

Odds On Racing's

Personality
of the Month
for July 2005

Neal Shapiro

Trainer-driver Neal Shapiro is a multi-talented horsemen who made the successful transition from Olympic show jump rider to harness horsemen, and then back again into the jumping world once again. Shapiro has used techniques from both sports to enhance his overall horsemenship skills.

Neal Shapiro & Bon Vivant at the Red Mile in 1992

The 59-year-old Brooklyn, New York native represented the United States in show jumping in the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, West Germany and earned a pair of medals—a silver and a bronze—in show jumping.

At the time Neal was consider to be one of the U.S.’ leading show jumping riders, and is best remembered in those circles for his partnership with Sloopy, a son of the late thoroughbred racehorse Swaps. Together this pair tore up the European show jumping arenas, winning in Aachen in 1971, and then narrowly missing an individual gold medal a year later in Munich.

As a member of the United States Equestrian Team from 1964 through 1978, Neal also spent time training Standardbreds, and acquired his training license during those days. As well, he chose red, white and blue as his driving colors.

"During that time, when I was very active in riding jumpers and training Standardbreds at the same time, I found that there were a few things I was able to steal from the harness horses and take to the jumpers in terms of equipment," Neal recalled. "Likewise, I felt that my education in the riding, especially with the dressage, taught me a lot concerning the balancing of the horse, primarily with trotters."

Articulate and well groomed, Neal is as home in the sulky as he is in the saddle, and is quick to describe the many differences he discovered over the years between the harness horses he’s driven and the show jumpers he’s ridden.

"For instance, when you’re riding a jumper, you want the horse to be relaxed and as sensitive and as soft as you can get him, and you want his mouth to be soft as well. A lot of times you’ll get horses that are not well-broken; horses with mouths like brick walls, etc. I remember a jumper that I had once that was a team horse for the USET (United States Equestrian Team), and he had been a problem from the start and everyone on the team had ridden him, and they had all given up on him, including the Team leader, who was Bill Steinkraus. Finally he gave him to me as a last-ditch effort. So with this horse I utilized some harness horse ideas in terms of mouth rigging. I tied his tongue and used a mini-bit on him in conjunction with his normal bit, which was a double-twisted wire. I worked on this horse and it only took a couple of days of riding him with this rigging, and he suddenly became very competitive."

"As a matter of fact, we were at Hickstead, Ireland in 1968 at the time," Neal continued. "And at the time we only had a few days in between horse shows. This horse, whose name was Trick Track, had fallen with Steinkraus at Dublin and he refused to ride him after that. So I got Trick Track to ride at Hickstead, and Bert De Nemethy (Chef D’Equip of the USET) got up early with me in the morning to work this horse and as a result I was able to show him a lot easier. He was still hot in the show ring, but was much better overall and for some reason really respected that mini-bit. After that we traveled to Belgium where he was never out of the top four, and when we returned the U.S. he had two clear rounds in the Nation’s Cup at Harrisburg and won the Puissiance Class—jumping seven foot, two inches, at the Washington International Horse Show. He and I won a few more classes in Toronto and New York. With Trick Track it was one case where I definitely took what I had learned from the Standardbreds and applied it to my show jumpers."

Neal is shown here with his silver and bronze medals that he won
at the 1972 Olympics in showjumping in Munich, Germany.

Neal is probably best known in harness racing for his partnership with the trotter Bon Vivant, who earned $400,000, and with his pacer Bomb Rickles, a winner of over $500,000. Other Shapiro trainees include Pinocchio, Sandy Bowl, Sunbright, Dallas Lobell and Baltic Love. Since he began training in 1977 Neal has driven the winners of $3.8 million and trained the winners of $1 million.

"I would say that my experience with the jumpers helped me a lot in terms of working with a horse’s mind, especially with trotters, as they tend to get a bit hot and temperamental," Neal noted. "I believe that all of the time and effort that we as riders devote to dressage allows a person to be a lot more patient when training Standardbreds."

In the last few years, Neal has opted to devote more and more time to his jumping endeavors and less to the harness industry. However, he still maintains a deep love for the sport and a respect for the Standardbred racehorse. Neal now resides in upstate Syosset, New York where he focus on training and developing young riders for the show jumping circuit.

"When I was riding, things were a lot more free and natural, and first started working with Standardbreds, I noticed some differences," Neal remembered. "I rode mostly with a plain snaffle, and typically used a running martingale, and a pair of bell or splint boots. And on jumpers we use a different kind of boots for brushing their hind legs, which they do because their hind legs are crossing in front of one another or from side to side.

"What initially seemed odds to me is the way Standardbreds were rigged. You’d strap their legs together, tie their heads up, tie their heads down, put two burr head poles on them so they couldn’t turn their heads to the left or right and they you’d go out and train them a mile and stand them in cross-ties, where they’d blow their guts out for 45 minutes at a time, and then you’d go out and do it again! It was all very foreign to me and I remember thinking, ‘my God, these things are going to get stiff and tie-up or get sick.’"

Neal quit riding professionally in 1978, after retiring from the USET in 1976, and says that years on the show jumping circuit had taken their toll, and that he needed a break from the constant riggers of showing.

"I was burned out from showing, and I really wanted to become involved with my racehorses on a full-time basis. Mentally, it was a very easy thing for me to do, and from the time I retired, I never sat on the back of a horse for nine years. The harness horses were really new and challenging for me, and I moved from Long Island to the Saratoga area, and began training colts. Eventually we started winter-training in Florida, and then racing in New York in the summer months."

"In the beginning, most of the horses were ours," Neal said. "Then over the years other folks got involved and eventually I acquired owners. My first really good horse was a youngster named Dallas Lobell. He was a trotting colt that I had bought at the Liberty Bell Fall Yearling Sale in 1980, along with a Speedy Rodney colt. I ended up selling both of them for quite a bit of money and that kind of got the ball rolling for me."

Besides using the techniques he had learned through working with show jumpers, Neal was also at the forefront of technology, and was one of the first horsemen to experiment with high-speed cameras as a training aide. The camera attached to the underside of the jog cart and recorded the horse’s gait.

"I met a blacksmith from Quebec who introduced me to these high-speed camera," Neal said. "For some time he had been working on developing a camera which analyzed a horse’s gait. This was in the mid-1980’s, and I started using it mostly on trotters and on some other horses here and there. It had some merit, but the blacksmith who had developed the cameras had a lot of money tied up in the research of the thing, and he wanted to get all of his money back quickly. I used the cameras for three years until his demands became unreasonable—he began asking ridiculous fees and since he had a patent on it, there was no way to copy it. Originally, I thought it would be a great aid for trainers, but I found out that most of them didn’t want to use it unless as a last resort. I had hope that it would be used as an on-going analysis of a horse’s gait in terms of soundness. I think if we could have gotten that idea into people’s minds that the camera would have been a lot more successful."

Neal says he is very interested in watching the show jumping competition at the Olympics, and that at the International level, the riders—and the Americans in particular—have progressed, as have the horses.

"In this country we’ve come a long, long way from when I was riding at the International level," Neal said. "We have a much better depth to our riders and the horses are better trained. One of the big differences is that we utilize a totally different kind of horse now. When I was riding Internationally we used mainly thoroughbreds, or quarter-thoroughbred crosses and an occasional Warmblood. Now, it’s overwhelming Warmbloods.

The Warmblood is a much, much easier horse to ride and deal with than a thoroughbred, but they don’t have that extra zip that it takes to jump the big jumps," Neal noted. "They can jump those big ones, but they’re a little hard-headed, clunky, and really easy to ride. The Warmbloods have drawn-reins and German martingales on them from the get-go, and the horses are forced into submission right off the bat. As a result, more of the show jumping riders seem to be of a better quality today, but the courses and the levels of competition have gotten tougher. Are the riders actually better, or is it because the horses are bigger, stronger and easier to ride? I do know that the courses the junior riders are jumping today are as big as what the open jumpers competed over many years ago. Also, today people are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for horses, whereas years ago they gave tens of thousands for comparable animals."

Neal has competed on nearly all avenues of the globe. Ireland, England, Germany, France, Switzerland, Belgium, Holland, Chile, Mexico and South Africa were all spots that Neal visited representing the United States in competition.

"I really enjoyed competing all over, but I especially liked the horsemanship in Germany, more than anywhere else. To me it seemed that the Germans always had an inexhaustible supply of horses and riders. Also, in Europe especially, riding is a very, very popular sport. I would correlate riding with football here or baseball or basketball. Riders in Germany and England are heroes, very respected people. If you walk down the street in this country in your boots and breeches you’re an oddball, but everybody knows who you are in Europe. They have a similar attitude toward the drivers and trainers of harness horses as well."

Neal also raced at one of Germany’s premiere racetracks, Gelsenkirchen, in the northwestern part of the country.

"It was very different there," Neal said. "First of all, they really checked my credentials—I had to have all kind of proof that I wasn’t under any kind of suspension and that I wasn’t this or that or the other thing. And it ended up that the only race they would let me drive in was an amateur race. We raced counter clockwise behind a gate in 1971 and it was a real free for all. The horses were a lot heavier built. At the time I was competing in Aachen, and when I met the people whose horse I was driving, I asked them if they wanted me to go a last trip with their horse, and that was totally foreign to them. They let me go out and jog this horse and I knew I was in trouble when I saw how he was rigged. What didn’t help is that I had the eight-hole in a nine-horse field, and the nine horse scored ahead of the gate and nobody said a thing. Guys went up on the inside of the pylons like it was nothing. Quite often, they were three-deep and if a guy was on the rail and he wanted to improve his position, he just went inside the pylons, or if he wanted out, he’d just come out and didn’t care who was in front or to the side of him, he just came out."

Neal says he feels the quality of horsemanship in both harness racing and with show jumpers has become diluted in recent years.

"Horse sports have become more popular in the U.S. and there’s more people involved who really don’t have a solid foundation with horses," Neal said. "I would say that in the 1980’s a lot of people got into harness racing thinking that the money was going to bring them success. You saw many instances where people who were grooms one day became trainers the next day with a large stable. Because they were good, conciencious people, they could have success. When those people were put on the spot and asked to actually develop a horse, they had no idea what needed to be done. Some of them survived and learned and others did not. In the long run, those people started to fall by the wayside. Now that the business has downsized, and racetracks are closing, and people aren’t investing in the business like they did and the tax laws have changed, the trainers who were not as capable are dropping out of sight."

Neal says he believes that harness racing needs to be more stringent in policing and prosecuting wrong-doers for the sport to thrive again.

"I think everyone has pet peeves and ideas of what we could do to make harness racing better and more popular with the public," Neal said. "I would be more strict with the regulations and running of the business. The governing and actually running of Standardbred racing is what I’m talking about. Although I don’t really like a government take-over situation, I think that many problems in our industry today are caused by poor regulating, and I blame the racetracks and the officials.

"I think the officials have not done their job in governing the business and I don’t think the racetracks have done a good job in maintaining quality control," Neal added. "They let too many people participate with the knowledge that they aren’t good people.

"Everybody deserves a second chance, but a third, fourth and fifth chance? That’s ridiculous. Why should the public have any confidence in a sport where the people in charge just keep letting undesirables in? In the long run it hurts everyone in the sport."