St. Lewis Enjoying Time in the Spotlight

Uriah St. Lewis' eyes grew wide, and his already bright face hit megawatt levels. He had just enjoyed his first morning under the glaring lights that come with being on the biggest of stages, and he was openly, unapologetically gobsmacked.

He stood on the Churchill Downs backstretch after watching the horse he purchased for $10,000 train for the $6 million prize he will chase Nov. 3, ebulliently telling the surrounding media the tale of just how the heck he got there. He spoke of his early childhood in Trinidad and Tobago, of ducking out of track practice in high school to place bets at Aqueduct Racetrack, of doing things his own way and sticking to it despite the hardships.

With every nugget of insight he doled out, the smile creasing across his face would frame the joy bouncing in his eyes. There may be no one who fully appreciates being at the Breeders' Cup World Championships this week more than the 60-year-old St. Lewis, and no one more convinced their horse is going to end the weekend with more than a feel-good backstory as part of his narrative.

"It really hit me when I came in this morning and … I've never experienced this," St. Lewis said Oct. 30 after he and his Breeders' Cup Classic (G1) contender Discreet Lover both took in the Churchill Downs scene for the first time in their respective careers. "It was like 5:15 a.m. and all the lights were on, the horses were on the track, and where I come from at Parx, we don't go out in the dark. They won't let you. But I came out and it was like, 'Wow, this is nice.'"

New experiences of the high-profile variety have become a thing for St. Lewis of late thanks to Discreet Lover, who—like his owner and trainer—has worked his way up from modest roots to put himself in his current position of standing alongside some elite peers. In April, the son of Repent gave St. Lewis his first graded stakes triumph after 30 years in the game when he took the Excelsior Stakes (G3) at Aqueduct.

And when his bay neck ended up in front of multiple group 1 winner Thunder Snow at odds of 45-1 in the Sept. 29 Jockey Club Gold Cup Stakes (G1), the racing masses got a crash course on the effervescent man at the end of the shank holding a fistful of winning tickets.

Like the 5-year-old bay horse he campaigns, the role of longshot is one St. Lewis is comfortable holding down. His Parx Racing-based stable of about 25 head is filled exclusively, he says, with horses he owns himself. He doesn't train for outside clients because if he did, he figured he'd never stop hearing about how differently he should be doing things and how crazy he was for sticking his horses in some ambitious spots.

Instead of having to constantly explain his methodology, he has found it is much more enjoyable to detail how a career 6%-winning trainer, who relies on himself and his family to make his operation click, has turned a career also-ran into a top-level winner who may just have one more upset in him this weekend.

"If I had another owner, they would have taken him away," St. Lewis said of Discreet Lover. "They would have been like, 'This guy is crazy. What is he doing running in the Met Mile?' Ain't no owner going to let you, especially when he's 50- or 60-1. They'll say, 'This guy is nuts.' But when you're your own boss, you can do that."

St. Lewis may be awestruck by the enormity of his situation, but don't mistake his wide-eyed gratitude with naiveté of any sort. He got into racing because he was enamored with trying to consistently topple the odds, and, safe to say, he has never hit a bigger home run than this.

After moving to the United States in 1973 when he was 15, St. Lewis attended East New York Vocational and Technical High School, located just a few miles from Aqueduct. He ran track in those days, and, as part of his practice, he and his friends would jog to the Big A, bet the Daily Double, and then check the paper the next morning to see if they won enough to repeat the process.

He eventually took a job fixing computers for AmTote, and while he fancied himself quite the gambler, his wife urged him to actually educate himself on the sport he was so fond of trying to outsmart.

"One day my wife said to me, 'You don't know what you're doing. Why don't you figure out what to do?'" St. Lewis laughed. "And so, we had some real estate in Brooklyn, and we sold it, and I moved out to Oklahoma and met a guy named Robert Hayes. He was a trainer, and he taught me everything. And then we came back east around 1988 and been struggling up, down, up, down ever since. But this is the breakout year."

St. Lewis took out his trainer's license in 1988. He said the first horse he ever saddled, a filly named Kept Fact, immediately convinced him he had what it took to be a success.

"The first horse I ran, she won," he grinned, before adding, "and then it took me six months after that to win another race."

The life of a journeyman trainer isn't filled with a lot of glamour, and tangible results can be equally hard to come by. While St. Lewis has had his share of lean moments, he has made a living by treating his stable, in part, like a business—buying horses for relatively cheap prices that others overlook and running them in spots that offer ample return for the risk.

Exhibits A, B, C, and D is Discreet Lover and his now $1,374,685 in earnings. Purchased by St. Lewis for $10,000 out of the 2015 Fasig-Tipton Midlantic 2-Year-Olds in Training sale, Discreet Lover wasn't a robust horse but impressed St. Lewis with his good mind. He only won one of his first 14 starts, but his owner, ever the optimist, saw enough to think his charge could ultimately deliver at a graded level if given enough opportunity.

"We him put in the (2016) Parx Derby at a mile and 70 yards, and he finished second and he came out of it real good," St. Lewis said. "I was like, 'Just keep running him two turns,' and he just kept getting better and better. Last year was a breakout year, but we ran up against (2017 Horse of the Year) Gun Runner  and couldn't none of them beat Gun Runner. He got beaten 14 lengths by Gun Runner twice, and it sounds like a lot, but Gun Runner was winning by seven or eight lengths, so the horses who were beating (Discreet Lover) were winning by three, four lengths.

"So I said, 'If you take Gun Runner out of the equation, he has a chance.'"

When Discreet Lover proved St. Lewis right by getting over that graded hump in the Excelsior Stakes, even bigger swings for the fences were justified. At 79-1, he was the longest shot in the 11-horse field for the June 9 Runhappy Metropolitan Handicap (G1) but finished a respectable fourth—ahead of such graded winners as Ransom the Moon , Good Samaritan , and Bolt d'Oro .

And despite running third in the Suburban Stakes (G2), he was still dismissed at odds of 38-1 when he took show honors again in the Whitney Stakes (G1), beaten just a half-length for second by multiple grade/group 1 winner and fellow Classic entrant Mind Your Biscuits.

That improving form was dismissed as a fluke after Discreet Lover finished 12th in the Sept. 1 Woodward Stakes Presented by NYRA Bets (G1). With the betting public shunning him in the Jockey Club Gold Cup—a "Win and You're In" Breeders' Cup qualifier—St. Lewis confidently put $100 across the board on his horse, told jockey Manny Franco to drop back and make one run, and then watched as a pace meltdown ensued as Diversify went the opening fractions in :22.72 and :45.64.

"We didn't expect them to go that fast, but they went suicidal, and down the backside we were like, 'Just keep going, you guys just keep going fast,'" St. Lewis said. "And they kept going faster and faster, and we knew we had a chance."

"Uriah does a great job. I'm so happy for him," said Chad Summers, trainer and co-owner of Mind Your Biscuits. "We were joking a couple months ago because he doesn't have $150,000 to put the horse in (the Classic). He owns the horse and trains the horse. I'm so happy he and his family can come down (to the Breeders' Cup). We thought that might happen."

The reason St. Lewis has spent the last three decades buying his own hay, getting his own shavings, and listening to himself above all others is because he thought—odds be darned—this moment had a fair chance of arriving. He takes pride in his designation as a small-time trainer, hoping that others tempted to write off operations like his will instead take inspiration from his recently rewarded diligence.

"For small people, it's great, and I want more people to get involved in it because people say it's a dying sport, and it's not a dying sport," he declared.

Just as he got to this point by carving his own unique path and being confident enough to stay the course, he has a warning for those who think he is just happy to be here.

"I tell you, he will give a good account of himself. I expect him to finish one, two, or three," St. Lewis said of Discreet Lover. "And that's not bragging or nothing. He's doing that good. And I think this race will end up the same as the race at Belmont, because somebody has to go.

"Some of them will go, and we're going to hopefully get the same trip."