Charles “Chuck” Stojan’s Free Thought proved once again he is a dark horse only in colour. Stojan walked away from Evergreen Park’s JDA Raceway a happy man and $6,400 richer on Saturday, as his horse won his heat and added the 18th notch to his world record win streak.
Stojan says the now nine-year-old horse is an old man to still be competing, but the long-standing juggernaut is still racing as well as ever.
“It appeared [like it was no contest.] I’m always a bit of a pessimist when it goes into these races. He’s going to get beat someday; is today the day? Is something bad going to happen, is he not going to run his race, is he going to get taken out? But today when he hit the [last] turn it was pretty much all over.”
Stojan describes Free Thought’s turning as if somebody “turned the jets on,” as the horse tends to accelerate as opposed to slowing to make the turn easier.
“When we first started running him around the turn, he’d go around the turn like they all go around the turn, but this bugger learned how to [really] run the turn,” says Stojan. “He’d go in maybe a [horse] length ahead and come out maybe two or three ahead.”
He jokes that once Free Thought is about four lengths ahead of the competition with 200 yards to go, the horse will simply loaf the rest of the way.
Stojan also recalls feeling like he took a risk, one that has now more than paid off when he claimed Free Thought.
“There was a nice little filly that was bread right, and then there was him, but he’d had eight or nine starts already as a two-year-old and I remember thinking he’s gotta be ready to come apart. What two-year-old can take that many starts and stay sound?”
“The filly came in and she had a big knot in her knee and no way I was claiming her, he came in prancing around looking like a million bucks and I still wasn’t sure with all these starts he’s had on him,” Stojan adds.
Free Thought is set to run two more races, both 870 yards long, in Edmonton this September before retiring to the pastures. Stojan hopes the horse will retire virtually undefeated and setting in stone a 20-win streak.
Regardless of the results in Edmonton, Stojan says Free Thought has nothing left to prove on the track.
Free Thought’s current record includes 50 races. In total boasting now 28 wins, 10 seconds and six third-place finishes.