Early in his training, Double Crown impressed…pretty much nobody. Not his owner Jim Rhodes, not his early trainer Cary Frommer, not his racetrack trainer Lacey Gaudet. Nobody.

“Cary Frommer is one of my best friends,” said Jim Rhodes. “She’s good at pinhooking. And while he was with her, he showed absolutely no desire to be a racehorse.”

Obviously not destined for sales, Double Crown ended up running in the Aiken Trials early in March of his 2-year-old year, and to pretty much everyone’s surprise, he won. 

“The spark just flashed in him,” said Rhodes. “He looked like a race horse.” 

Rhodes had sent horses to Lacey Gaudet over the course of a couple of years, and Double Crown headed to her Laurel Park base after that Aiken race.

“I thought she’d fit him well,” he said. “She’s a good trainer, a hard trainer, but a compassionate trainer. The horses come first with her.” 

Even when they don’t exactly dazzle on the worktab.  

“He was really neat to be around,” said Gaudet. “We had him working with another horse that was really promising. Double Crown always stayed with his workmates. He never over-exerted. He definitely didn’t look like a superstar.” 

Some horses are morning glories, working impressively then failing to show up in the afternoon. Double Crown was the opposite of that: unimpressive in the morning, and then the flip would switch on in the afternoon. 

He broke his maiden on debut in September of 2019, hooking up with Ournationonparade – another horse who’s become a stakes winner – and the two of them opened up a 7-length lead on the field. Double Crown’s neck victory on paper belied an impressive effort that earned him an eye-popping speed figure.

And then the phone started ringing.

Rhodes had paid $30,000 for the horse, he said, and the winning purse from his debut was just shy of that amount; as a small owner in a tough business, breaking even is as much as he hoped for when he bought a horse.

The numbers being offered to both him and Gaudet far exceeded “breaking even”; among those in the running were Dean and Patty Reeves, who, after some negotiating, became Double Crown’s new owners, paying $300,000 for the Maryland-bred by Bourbon Courage.

“Leslie Huddleston told me about the horse,” said Dean Reeves. “She watches every race.”

He flew up to Maryland to look at the horse, and as he walked down Gaudet’s shedrow, one horse caught his eye. 

“I said to myself, ‘I hope that’s Double Crown,’” Reeves remembered. “He was a very muscular, strong, colt. I was thrilled.”

Rhodes had requested that the Reeveses keep the horse with Gaudet, a request that they honored, hoping to win a Maryland Million race with him. Unfortunately, Double Crown suffered an injury that kept him off the track until the following spring, when they moved him down to Florida and into the barn of Kathy Ritvo.

The horse that didn’t impress anyone finished in the top three in eight of his next 10 races, winning three of them, including the Roar Stakes and the Carry Back Stakes, both at Gulfstream Park. Returning to Maryland, he ran second in the 2020 Chick Lang Stakes (G3) and in the 2021 Maryland Million Sprint.

Gaudet continued to follow Double Crown during his time with the Reeveses; his exercise rider while with Gaudet is a cousin to jockey Cristian Torres, who won those Florida stakes races with him. 

“Dean was so great,” said Gaudet. “He always made sure that we got pictures from the stakes wins.”

The Reeveses owned him for 15 races before Double Crown got claimed from them in a 7-way shake at Churchill Downs in June 2022, a shake that Gaudet lost. The bay gelding would make the remainder of his 39 starts for owner Lynn Cash’s Built Wright Stables LLC. Cash also at times trained him, and Double Crown compiled a record of 5-7-5. Through a mutual friend, Gaudet made sure that Cash knew that she would take the horse back at any time. 

Five months after the claim, in October 2022, Double Crown earned the first graded stakes win for both the horse and for Cash. It came in the Kelso Handicap (G2) at the Belmont at the Big A fall meet. Sent off at odds of 42-1, the longest shot on the board, Double Crown stalked a slow space and ran down odds-on favorite Baby Yoda in the final strides to win by 1 3/4 lengths.

Over the course of 55-race career, Double Crown ran at 12 tracks in 9 states. In 2023, he was voted Maryland-bred champion older male, and he got two more stakes wins before his racing career ended, both in Maryland: the Polynesian Stakes at Pimlico and the Robert T. Manfuso Stakes at Laurel, both in 2023. Most of his races–43 of them–came in his last three years on the track; in 2023, he started 18 times. 

“I was trying to get him to be a millionaire,” said Cash. “Looking back over his last five or six months, he just didn’t have the tools, because of his age and a knee. It’s not like he was lame, just a tad off. It finally just got to the point that it was taking away from his performance, more than a horse like him should have done.” 

Double Crown went to Cash’s farm in Kentucky for a few months. He was in a paddock with a gelding that bullied him and he was losing weight, so he got in touch with Gaudet, who couldn’t wait to get him back. Cash himself drove the horse to her barn. 

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Working with Maryland’s Beyond the Wire organization to place off-track horses, Gaudet sent Double Crown back to South Carolina to Rhodes’s Thoroughbred Aftercare Alliance-accredited retirement farm, Equine Rescue of Aiken, where he’ll stay until he’s mentally and physically ready to be trained for a second career. 

“We’d been hoping to get him back,” said Rhodes. “He’s absolutely the best horse I’ve ever owned.” 

Now, Double Crown shares a paddock with Boston, an 18hh Belgian gelding.

“Boston hadn’t been eating well and he lost a bunch of weight,” said Rhodes. “Double Crown is a good eater, and he’s given his Belgian buddy a little competition. Boston’s eating well now, and they don’t go anywhere without each other. 

“His disposition is great, and the volunteers love him. He loves getting rubbed and scrubbed, and brushed.” 

When Reeves found out that Double Crown had been retired, he made donations to aftercare organizations on the horse’s behalf and he offered to pay the cost of shipping from Maryland to South Carolina. 

“Dean has also offered to do some fundraising for our new rehab barn,” said Rhodes. “This situation shows the good in racing. We’re not perfect, but the Thoroughbred industry does more for its retired horses than any other equine industry. I try to protect every horse I’ve ever owned.”

“A lot of people stepped up for him,” said Gaudet.