Steve Asmussen was born to this. He and his brother Brian Keith Asmussen are children of horsemen who are children of horsemen. They virtually were raised in horse barns. The older one, Brian Keith, started galloping Thoroughbreds as a 9-year-old. At 12, Steve had a groom’s license. As teens in Laredo, Texas, by the time school began each day, they had been up for hours. “You can get a lot done before school if you start working at 5,” Steve Asmussen once said. Brian Keith became a professional rider, was the Eclipse Award-winning apprentice jockey of 1979. You know him as Cash Asmussen – he changed his name in 1977. Cash Asmussen became a household name in racing circles after he moved his tack from America to France and got famous. Asmussen was leading French rider five times, won the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe, to many the biggest race in the world, in 1991. Something rare and remarkable courses through this racing family, the Asmussens. There might be one American jockey, Steve Cauthen, who hit it big in England, comparable to Cash Asmussen. Steve Asmussen is headed to a place no trainer ever has gone. After a couple years as a jockey, a pursuit cut short by his size, Asmussen turned to training in 1986. The cash his runners have earned during his 35-year-career, just shy of $361 million, might make your head spin. Only Todd Pletcher has trained horses that made more money. It’s not cash Asmussen is chasing this summer of 2021 – it’s wins. In September 2009, Asmussen trained his 5,000th winner. In November 2011 he trained his 6,000th. In April 2015, Asmussen hit the 7,000-win mark, in May 2018 he won his 8,000th race, and in September 2020 he became just the second North American trainer to cross the 9,000-win threshold. And now, he’s here, poised to win his 9,446th race and pass the late Dale Baird to become the leading trainer by wins in the history of American racing. Talk about making your mark. This is a record, given the drift of the sport in the U.S. and Canada, that seems unlikely to be broken. “The 9,445 has been on my mind and it is the goal,” Asmussen said. “However many licensed trainers there’ve been in the history of this sport, I’d like to be the one to do it.” :: Baird family fine with Asmussen breaking the record He’ll be known for the number, however many thousand wins Steve Asmussen piles up when he decides to do something else, to ride off into the sunset. The man’s a mere 55. Say he trained until he was 70 and averaged 200 winners a year: That’d put him well over 12,000, likely thousands ahead of any active trainer. The active trainer nearest him in wins, Jerry Hollendorfer, is 76 and has won about 7,700 races. But the raw number, the mountainous total, only captures a tiny frame in a long movie. Asmussen has built an operation like no other, playing the claiming game at mid-tier tracks across the land, often claiming horses for himself, while at the same time winning races on the brightest stage. In the last five years, Asmussen has won 271 races with a claiming price of $10,000 or lower, and during the same period his horses have captured 84 graded stakes races. In 2009 he went win-crazy, 650 victories – not a bad career total – in a single season, while at the same time training Horse of the Year, Rachel Alexandra. Four times in the last 13 years – Curlin in 2007 and 2008, Rachel in 2009, and Gun Runner in 2017 – Asmussen has handled the American Horse of the Year. That’s a career-defining feat of its own accord, but Asmussen did it while running strings across North America all year long, claiming horses in Oklahoma and Texas. “The record shows that he’s the complete guy,” said Hall of Fame trainer Wayne Lukas. “He’s an outstanding horseman and a good organizer to run a stable like that. And he is all about winning. He just wants to win. He’ll fly or drive to Retama or Lone Star and back to Churchill, whatever it takes. With that work ethic, he just keeps plowing away at it. He’s inherited Keith and Marylin’s work ethic.” Keith and Marilyn “Sis” Asmussen are the father and mother of Steve and Cash, and Lukas knew the kids when they were babes in arms. Keith Asmussen rode Wayne Lukas’ Quarter Horses and the two combined racing stables at one point, leaving South Dakota, where they were racing, for Claremore, Oklahoma. “The weather was bad, and we went all the way down to Laredo,” Lukas said. “Keith stayed, I left.” Marilyn got her trainer’s license in 1974 while Keith still rode races. “I don’t think you can get much tighter than your mom training and your dad riding and you and your brother being the help,” Steve Asmussen told DRF’s Mary Rampellini earlier this year. “Seven days a week, you’re in it. I think that, and the love that we share for the horse and each other, makes us a close family.” The Asmussens opened a training center, which would be called El Primero, in 1979, switching their focus from Quarter Horses to Thoroughbreds. Keith Asmussen broke horses for owner Verne Winchell, including the great stallion Tapit. Winchell’s son Ron now is a major client of Steve’s, and a large portion of Asmussen and his owners’ young horses are broken and get their early training at El Primero. Cash Asmussen was riding Grade 1 winners on the East Coast when Steve began his professional jockey career in 1982. Steve rode that year, all of 1983, and for a short spell in 1984, winning 63 races from 721 mounts before he no longer could make weight. Asmussen got a New Mexico trainer’s license in 1986 and saddled his first winner that July at Ruidoso. He went back to Laredo to ride for his dad at El Primero and the following summer set up a small string at Birmingham Racecourse in Alabama training for a family friend, Ron Lance. And that was it – Asmussen never looked back. Was he immediately gifted high-level performers? Steve Asmussen was not. His first 10 years training he started a grand total of two runners in graded stakes. His first graded stakes win came in 1996 with Valid Expectations, and it wasn’t until 2004 that he won as many as 10 graded stakes in a year. Asmussen’s mother, biased for sure, once said Steve would’ve made a huge success in whatever career he decided to pursue. That seems right. Get Asmussen talking a bit about the nuts and bolts of training a racehorse and you are bound to learn something you’d never considered. The depth, breadth, and resonance of his knowledge of racehorses is awesome, yet Asmussen also has the capacity to manage an immense, widespread stable, year after grinding year. Nearly no one could take on what he does at all, and Asmussen has kept at it, starting more than 1,000 runners a year since 2000. “I strongly believe that training horses is an extremely humbling career,” Asmussen said. “It really is. To think you entered 80 percent of them in the wrong spot and lost. I’ve always been far more surprised by the winners than the losers. There’s just a tremendous amount of trial and error. It would be very comforting to look back 10 years from now and not feel as ignorant as I feel I was 10 years ago.” Asmussen has two Eclipse Awards, in 2008 and 2009, as North America’s leading trainer. His nomination to racing’s Hall of Fame was struck down in 2014 because of allegations of animal abuse, later dismissed, from the group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, but Asmussen a was voted into the Hall in 2016. He’s won three Triple Crown races – the Preakness with Rachel Alexandra and Curlin and the Belmont with Creator – though his starters are 0 for 23 in the Kentucky Derby. “He’s still chasing the Derby, but he’ll get that,” Lukas said. Super Stock, one of two 2021 Derby runners from Asmussen, is co-owned by Keith Asmussen. Steve and his wife, Julie Asmussen, have three sons, Keith, Darren, and Eric. Darren Scott is named for Darren Fleming and Scott Blasi, two assistants who have been with Asmussen for decades. Pablo Ocampo, a Texas assistant, has been with Asmussen since 1988. Toby Sheets, who stays in New York, and Mitch Dennison, who shifts circuits, also have long tenures as assistants. Asmussen’s son Keith rode six winners from 61 races during a 2020 stint as a professional jockey in Texas. He was aboard Super Stock for the colt’s maiden win at Lone Star. Through family and crew, Asmussen’s racing roots have grown deep and strong. “The volume of the work that Scott and Darren and everyone has done. There’s just so much that goes into getting this record, how much my family has to do with it and continue to be a part of it. Feeling like I’m an extension of what my parents started and for Julie and the boys to be such a big part of it. It’s a family accomplishment,” Asmussen said. You wouldn’t call Steve Asmussen a beloved figure in racing. He doesn’t suffer fools, has no time for contrived niceties. The Breeders’ Cup Classic or a $5,000 starter-allowance at Delta Downs, he is coming to beat you. “Either everything matters, or nothing matters,” he said. “It’s too late to pretend I’m not hard to be around. But we put this on ourselves, we asked for it.” Asmussen has wanted Baird’s record for a long time. It’s not enough for folks to wonder if he’s among the best trainers ever to play the game. He wants tangible evidence, a bold legacy. And after win No. 9,446 and all that comes with it? “We won’t know, but I assure you I don’t plan on sitting still,” he said.