Glen Eden. She says it's every bit as picturesque as it sounds. Two hundred acres across a valley in Chester, New Jersey: hunters and jumpers, 50 stalls, an indoor ring, another two outdoors. And a bunch of kids wanting to ride ponies. Nice, rural, domestic scene, a world away from the blue-collar grit of Aqueduct.Now, to be fair, horses take a ton of work wherever you are and whatever you're doing. “I mean, the sport-horse trainers, just like the racehorse trainers, it's a 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week job,” Kathy Kunsman points out. “We just don't always have to start so early. But yes, they're long days.”Nonetheless, there's something particularly gratifying in picturing the day, just before Christmas, when two very different worlds were brought together by their common denominator: love of the horse.Which was just what Kunsman was busy spreading, it being a Saturday.“I was of course in the ring, teaching,” she recalls. “But I got the race up on my phone, all the kids were watching, from their horses' backs, and all the parents, from the viewing room. And here he comes down the stretch, and we're all screaming. And now all my clients are fans!”Still more so, after what the horse in question did next. But then the whole thing had started in pretty similar fashion, not quite two years previously. That day, again, Kunsman was training in the ring. But when Carrie Brogden of Machmer Hall rang from Keeneland, she ran to the office and live-streamed the January Sale.Kunsman had connected with Brogden through the latter's sister Kristy, who herself has a show barn down in Virginia. Orencia | Courtesy Kathy Kunsman “We're in a very different discipline, but my passion has always been the racehorses,” admits Kunsman. “I'm not from a horse family. My parents and siblings wonder where I came from! My dad was a dentist in upstate New York. But I was just born with the horse gene. When I was young I watched all Secretariat's races on TV, and I guess he got me hooked. And I'm happy my parents let me pursue my passion, because in the late '70s and early '80s, it wasn't easy for a girl to break through in this business.”Kunsman did dabble briefly in a couple of New Jersey-breds, back in the early 2000s, but essentially it was to requite a long craving that a couple of years ago she asked Brogden to look out for a Thoroughbred broodmare. And though they had been outbid on a couple, maybe around $40,000, Brogden had now come up with something interesting: she was crazy about a short yearling by Nyquist, and his dam Orencia (Blame) was going to follow him into the ring.Brogden knew all about this mare, having actually consigned her as a yearling for breeders Mike and Pat Freeny. When she fell short of her reserve, the Freenys entered a partnership with 2-year-old consignors De Meric Sales. Enthused by her breeze, the Freenys bought out their partners and raced Orencia in their own silks. She won a couple of small races, equally decisively on dirt and turf. And now she had come up with this knockout second foal.Brogden was evidently hoping to land him, maybe as a pinhook, but was blown sideways by frantic bidding, right up to $230,000. That didn't augur too well for their prospects of affording the mare. But Kunsman stayed on the line and, bafflingly, nothing was happening.“Carrie just keeps saying, 'Kathy, I can't even believe this: I have no idea why noone's bidding on this mare,'” Kunsman recalls. “Even the auctioneer was saying, 'Folks, did anyone just see this mare's colt go through the ring?' So we had the final bid, at $20,000, Carrie said, 'You know, this might be the best buy of my career.' An hour later she called and said that 10 of her peers, walking back through, had come up and congratulated her on getting Orencia at that price. No one could believe it.”And actually the purchasers of the Nyquist had a bargain, too, doubling his value to $475,000 back in the same ring that September. He was sent to Chad Brown by a powerful partnership and, with due allowance for the fact that he is a May foal, made as promising a debut as anyone could hope that day at Aqueduct in December.When he proceeded to the GIII Gotham Stakes, then, Kunsman was not going to settle for watching on the phone.“I was so psyched that he was going to run in New York, because it's probably an hour and a half from my farm,” Kunsman says. “So I was there for the race, and it was just so exciting.”Yes, it was. Because as you've doubtless figured out by this stage, the Nyquist colt is Iron Honor, who bids to seal his GI Kentucky Derby eligibility in the GII Wood Memorial Stakes this Saturday at Aqueduct.Later that month, meanwhile, Orencia is due to deliver a foal by Golden Pal on the Paris, Kentucky, farm where she boards with Tom and Michelle Mullikin. Unsurprisingly, she has already been booked back to Nyquist. Even less surprisingly, Kunsman has already had plenty of people offering her a profit on the mare.“It's something I've kind of debated in my head over the last few days,” Kunsman admits. “But I realize how lucky I am, to be in this situation, as the owner of one Thoroughbred. So I feel like I'm staying in for the ride. I love the racetrack, and I'm going to try to get to every race. He's got good owners, a great trainer, and they're going to give him his best shot. You hear all the time about Derby fever, and I'm just a small part of it. But I've waited a long time and I feel very lucky. I was probably prepared to go much higher for her, but it was our lucky day.”Luck is a constant requirement, of course, across disciplines. But there are always things we can learn from each other, too. If hardly the standard road towards the Derby, Kunsman's has been as long as most. She got her grounding, after Virginia Tech, with a couple of mentors in the training of sport horses. Then came an interval of years, to raise a family, but even then Kunsman “had a couple of families with little backyard barns where I would go after school and teach some lessons.”She wishes there were rather more crossover, between her own community and the Thoroughbred one.“When I was growing up, all show horses were Thoroughbreds,” she notes. “European warmbloods are now dominant in both the hunter and jumper rings. But actually this horse has gotten a lot of show people interested, they're all following him! So my hope, especially through all these new [second-career] incentives, is to get some of my peers more interested in supporting Thoroughbreds at the horse shows again.”Kunsman explains that European warmbloods are bred to be good, careful jumpers, whereas Thoroughbreds are obviously bred to run fast.“If you see both in a class, the Thoroughbred will tend to look lighter and more athletic, but sometimes also a little more frisky or playful, instead of slow and dull,” she says. “And the judges lately have been preferring a bigger, slower stride, a more laidback attitude, and oftentimes a bigger, more powerful jump.“But when I was young, they were all Thoroughbreds. So if a horse landed and shook its head and played a little through the turn, well, so did most of the others. So the good thing about these Thoroughbred-only classes is that they'll be judged with their own kind.”As for the lessons available from her own world, Kunsman suggests that Thoroughbreds might be given a little more time to mature.“Of course, they're ready to do something at 2 years old where in our world, we're barely even breaking horses,” she remarks. “It's a way longer road to the show ring than the racetrack. So I guess show horse trainers have a little more patience, if only because they have no choice.”But here's a woman for whom the magic transcends breeds or disciplines, who has brought up her family on fan excursions to Monmouth–to see Skip Away, or Rachel Alexandra in the Haskell–or Pharoah's Belmont. And, even before Iron Honor became Iron Honor, what fun it was to take her daughters to meet Orenica during the spring meet at Keeneland last year.“The racetrack, great dinners, Old Friends to see a lot of horses I had watched run, and of course a bourbon tour,” Kunsman enthuses. “And the mare's very, very sweet. As she was going into the ring, Carrie described her as a bit of a plain brown wrapper. But look what she produces. And that's all that matters. And because I do follow pedigrees, from way back, I always loved Blame. Carrie said, 'When I think of Blame, I think of soundness.' Which is huge in every discipline, but especially Thoroughbreds. Carrie's got a great eye, an amazing memory and she's so upbeat. Whenever we talk, I always feel like the glass is half full.”Mind you, it would take a major-league pessimist to find a half-empty glass anywhere round this mare right now.“I tell my clients, 'Do you know how many people breed multiple mares, like hundreds every year, to get one runner like Iron Honor?'” Kunsman says. “It's amazing, really. I've gotten calls since the Gotham from people I haven't heard from in years, and texts from people that I don't even know! But yes, right now every morning I wake up with a smile on my face.”The post The Mare Steal That Forged Iron appeared first on TDN | Thoroughbred Daily News | Horse Racing News, Results and Video | Thoroughbred Breeding and Auctions.