DEL MAR — The story of this year’s likely Kentucky Derby favorite began nearly 40 years ago, when an 8-year-old boy convinced an adult to sneak him into the barn area of the local racetrack.
The boy’s parents came from Los Angeles to Del Mar each summer for the races and rented a condo near the track. As it happened, Jude Feld, the adult in our story, was a horse trainer who was renting in the same complex.
That was all the boy needed to pursue his dream of working at the track.
He had pestered (his word) dozens of trainers looking for someone to help him. All, including Feld, said no. But the boy persisted, and after what he said was “probably 70 attempts” to get Feld to relent, he was told to be at the trainer’s door at 4:30 a.m. the next day.
“I don’t think he expected me to show up,” the boy recalled.
Aron Wellman showed up. They got in Feld’s car and drove to what was then an AM/PM market on Via de la Valle so the trainer could get some coffee. Feld came out of the store, told Wellman to get in the back, covered him up with some old Daily Racing Forms – what else would be in a trainer’s car? – and drove across the street and through the security gate.
“From that point on,” Wellman said, “I worked every day of every summer on the backside at Del Mar till the time I graduated law school.”
‘A little different’
Wellman now lives in Rancho Santa Fe and on Thursday he flew from San Diego to Louisville. Barring something no one wants to think about, he will be at Churchill Downs on Saturday, the first Saturday in May, for the most famous horse race in the world.
It won’t be his first Kentucky Derby; he’s been part of several. But it will be the first time that when the starting gate opens, a horse racing in the silks of Eclipse Thoroughbred Partners, the company Wellman founded nearly 14 years ago and runs to this day, will almost certainly be the favorite.
“I’d be lying to you if I didn’t say this was a little different,” Wellman said a few days ago during an interview in his Del Mar office, about a mile and a half south of where he first started working in horse racing, mucking stalls for $2 each.
“Nothing compares to the Kentucky Derby,” he said. “So to have a high-profile horse like Journalism, you try to find a balance between enjoying this very unique position that we’re in and having fun with it because we wouldn’t want to be anywhere else in the world or in any other position. But also, you know, acknowledging that there’s stress associated with it.
“You just want everything to go smooth for the horse, for all the connections, because there’s so much expected of him. You just want to get him into the gate, safe and healthy, and whatever happens from there happens.”
Wellman, 47, has been part of a Derby victory, back in 2011 when he served as vice president of Team Valor Racing and Animal Kingdom rallied to win. That job came a few years after Wellman had graduated from Beverly Hills High School (where he was sports editor of the school paper), UC Santa Barbara (where he played soccer) and Southwestern Law School – all while working every summer at Del Mar.
His mentors included Feld as well as Hall of Fame jockeys Bill Shoemaker and Eddie Delahoussaye (he has a picture on his desk of all three men with him at his bar mitzvah). Paddy Gallagher, who was Shoemaker’s top assistant after the jockey began training, also was “really instrumental” in teaching Wellman what he needed to know.
“I had a really fortunate upbringing in the industry,” said Wellman, whose parents, Mike and Cory, owned and bred horses for several decades in California. “A lot of the success that we’ve had, I attribute to that hands-on experience and having been able to be with the horses and really understand the inner workings of the backside and training operations and that whole perspective.”
Wellman’s success in racing began after he got his first job out of law school. From his days working at Del Mar for the likes of Feld and Gallagher, he knew he always wanted to own a racehorse. He got together with some friends and on Feb. 5, 2003, they claimed a gelding named Rhetoric Express for $32,000. He won two races in four starts before he was claimed for $50,000.
“My friends thought it was easy,” Wellman said.
Those friends told a few friends and they told a few friends and before long Wellman was buying higher-quality horses like Three Degrees and Valbenny, who won graded-stakes races (selling the latter mare provided the down payment on Wellman’s house here). He then went to work for Team Valor before founding Eclipse in the fall of 2011 with the idea of “making history.”
“I wanted to win the biggest races in the country, if not the world, and provide our partners who put their faith in our program with that experience,” Wellman said.
It’s worked pretty well: Eclipse horses have won 29 Grade I stakes, including two Breeders’ Cup races (Sharing and Aloha West), the 2017 Belmont Stakes (Tapwrit), Australian Oaks (Pinot) and Queen Mary Stakes at Royal Ascot (Quick Suzy).
Writing Derby story
None of those races, however, was the Kentucky Derby, the “Holy Grail,” as Wellman said. Which brings us to Journalism. Wellman bought the son of Curlin and Mopotism for $825,000 as a yearling in August 2023 at Saratoga. The name, Wellman said, came from trying to work off the “ism” in Mopotism combined with the owner’s high school journalism experience.
The colt lost his first start as a 2-year-old in October at Santa Anita but won his next race at Del Mar and since has captured three straight important stakes races – the Los Alamitos Futurity, San Felipe Stakes and Santa Anita Derby.
Like all Eclipse horses, Journalism is his own LLC, managed by Eclipse, which also owns the largest (but not majority) share. This particular partnership includes some of racing’s biggest names: Bridlewood Farm, longtime New York horse owner Robert Lapenta, Don Alberto Stable (the breeder, which bought back in) and most recently, Coolmore Farm, which purchased the breeding rights as well.
The trainer is another Los Angeles-area native, Michael McCarthy, who is one of 8-10 trainers for Eclipse’s 150 horses. Wellman and McCarthy have known each other since they were kids watching races at Del Mar, and they worked together for the first time when Wellman was with Team Valor and McCarthy was a top assistant for one of that group’s trainers, Todd Pletcher. When McCarthy went out on his own in 2014, Eclipse provided him with his first horses.
“Our businesses have grown on parallel paths, which has been fun,” Wellman said, “and our personal relationship has only blossomed. Our wives are very close, our children (the Wellmans have a 17-year-old daughter and 13-year-old son) are very close. You know, we consider them family, so to be going through this experience together just adds a special nature to it.”
McCarthy echoed those sentiments, saying his conversations with Wellman often are “more about life and about things other than horses” and that he’ll “forever be grateful to Aron and everybody at Eclipse for getting me started.”
“I’m glad I’ve been able to keep up my end of the bargain and have the kind of results that Eclipse is used to having,” McCarthy added. “Fortunate to be a part of the team and hopefully we can add to our résumé here next Saturday.”
Wellman, who began his company with the motto “Believe Big” and ends every social media post, email and newsletter with that hashtag, certainly would agree.
“It was right about this time when this ‘think big, dream big’ phenomenon was happening,” Wellman said. “But I didn’t love the notion of dreaming or thinking because that really doesn’t manifest anything. In order to accomplish those ambitious goals, I really thought that we were going to have to believe big – not just think it, not just dream it.”
In horse racing, it doesn’t get any bigger than the Kentucky Derby. And Wellman believes in Journalism.
“You know, 20 horses, it’s a cavalry charge, anything can happen out there,” he said. “But we have so much confidence in him. He’s just a different kind of horse.”
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