Naming a Racehorse ‘A Dream Come True’

When you name a racehorse, something special happens. Maybe bond is too strong a word, but it’s a peculiar connection. He carries a bit of you with him every time he runs. You feel an extra bit of pride when he runs well, perhaps you’re a bit more forgiving when he runs poorly. His is a story you love to tell, because you were a part in making it.
I know the feeling well: I’ve personally named or been involved in naming more than 15 racehorses in the past three years.
Naming our horses is not a task we take lightly, nor is it a casual process. We might wade through a pool of hundreds of names before selecting the right one. We bounce them off our friends; we mull them over for weeks. Names that sounded great after a few glasses of wine don’t hold water when held up to the harsh light of day. One hungry afternoon, we nearly named our stable “Lunchtime Racing.” The stakes are high.
Sometimes, it’s nice to take the pressure off and offer that special experience to someone else. I’ll readily admit that owners are not the only wellspring of great names in the racing world. In order to tap into some of that undiscovered horse-naming talent, we recently co-sponsored a contest with America’s Best Racing. The carrot? Naming a Ninety North racehorse and winning a day with said racehorse in the company of yours truly.

Boy, did racing fans deliver. We received nearly 1,000 entries over the course of three weeks. I was floored by the response. People wanted to name a racehorse after their daughter, their grandchild and a lost loved one. They wanted to honor charities, racing legends and their favorite sports teams. Not only had they really thought about it, but they had been thinking about it for years.
I wish we’d had a hundred horses to name, but we only had the one, and she was a sweet 2-year-old filly who was in training and needed a name stat.
One name in particular stood out, both for its style and for the author’s reasoning: Citizen By Day.
Drawn from the names of both her sire (Proud Citizen) and her dam (Tiz Maie’s Day), it  was catchy, it evoked a strong image, it even referenced Superman! But it wasn’t a super man we were naming here, it was a super filly, and as the winner Kelly Gallivan explained: “the fact that she is a filly with a superhero-type name also addresses the lack of female superheroes, which has recently been a topic of interest with the release of the new Avengers movie.”

Right on! As a woman in racing who also happens to be a massive superhero/comic book/video game junkie, I was all for it. A lifelong female racing fan giving our filly a superhero name: this would play well in our stable. The rest of the naming committee agreed.
We chose a nice August morning for Kelly to come meet her superhero filly Citizen By Day. We met at Jimmy Toner’s peaceful barn in a shady corner of the Saratoga backstretch. As Citizen By Day went about her typical morning routine: a light jog at Clare Court, a bath and some hand grazing, we followed and watched Kelly with great interest and appreciation.
“This is amazing,” she told us, “a dream come true.”

The statement struck me. How many share this dream? For the millions of racing fans who loyally follow and cheer on their favorite horses, how much it must mean to be a part of a racehorse in this way. There’s something owners, trainers, exercise riders and veterinarians all know: a horse is more than a name that shows up in a program a few afternoons a year. A horse is a story — one that’s written over years with a large supporting cast of characters, and one of the characters is the person who names the horse.
In this instance, it sounds like Kelly won’t be alone in joining Citizen By Day’s narrative.

“This filly will have lots of people cheering her on for her first race,” Kelly said, telling us about her friends and colleagues, “and most of them will have never seen a race before.”
Having an enthusiastic, young racing fan like Kelly along for the ride is more than we could have hoped for when we formulated this contest. We look forward to watching Citizen By Day’s story unfold and, as with any young horse, we hope hers is a winning one. At least in one way, it already is.