Hall of Fame trainer King Leatherbury, 92, passes
Won fifth most races all-time
Frank Vespe
February 10, 2026
King T. Leatherbury, the legendary Maryland trainer who won more than 6,500 races, helped revolutionize the claiming game, and finally attained Hall of Fame status at age 82, has died. He was 92.
Leatherbury, who won his first race at Sunshine Park, now Tampa Bay Downs, in 1959, earned his 6,508th and final victory in his final start of 2022 when Castilleja, a homebred for owner Norman Lewis, scored a 17-1 upset in an allowance contest at Parx Racing.
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According to Equibase, Leatherbury won at least one race each year from 1962 through 2022, a remarkable streak of 61 consecutive seasons. He won at least 100 races each year from 1972 through 1997 and won over 300 in four of those seasons, topped by a 1976 campaign in which he was nearly as reliable as dawn, winning 365 races during that leap year.
Yet the numbers hardly do justice to Leatherbury’s impact on the game.
He was among the first trainers to use claiming as a way to build a stable. When he started out, Leatherbury said, claiming was “taboo, man.”
“If you claimed somebody’s horse 50 years ago, they’d get mad at you,” he recalled in 2015, recounting the story of a rival trainer angry at losing a horse via the claimbox and adding, “I made fun of somebody one time. He said, ‘You claimed my horse.’ I said, ‘You didn’t know that the money is laying there for you in the office? You got money there, man.’”
Leatherbury was an expert at putting horses where they belonged, and over his 60-plus year career, he won at an 18% clip.
“A horse trainer is like a manager of an athlete, only it’s an animal athlete,” Leatherbury explained. “It’s the exact same thing. If you get a prize fighter, what you’re going to work on is getting him in good shape, keeping him in good physical shape, trying to pick opponents that he can beat.”
But he also knew when to take a shot.
For example, he claimed Taking Risks for $20,000 in November 1993. He bumped the Two Punch gelding up into allowance company, then stakes company, and finally, nine months later, to a victory in the Grade1 Philip Iselin Handicap at Monmouth Park, which he won by nearly eight lengths.
That was one of two Grade 1 victories Leatherbury registered. The other came in the 1987 Hampstead Handicap with Catatonic.
Leatherbury was also among the first trainers to have separate strings of horses managed by trusted assistants. That freed him up to focus on managing owners, acquiring new horses, and placing them astutely.
Though that approach seems anything but novel now, at the time it represented a revolution in horsemanship and earned him, among other accolades, the John W. Galbreath Award for Outstanding Entrepreneurship in the Equine Industry from the University of Louisville.
“King Leatherbury’s long-term approach to the operation of his enterprise has been innovative in application of business school insights to his training profession and his racing stable management,” the program’s director, Rich Wilcke, said at the time.
During his heyday, Leatherbury butted heads against the other three members of Maryland’s legendary Big Four trainers, Grover “Bud” Delp, John Tammarro, and Dick Dutrow. While the others went (or tried to go) elsewhere in search of greener pastures, Leatherbury remained in Maryland throughout his career, delighting in the Daily Racing Form columnist who described him as being “as Maryland as crab cakes.”
That may have hurt his Hall of Fame candidacy, however.
“Unless you’re in New York or California, or you’re on the Derby trail every year, you don’t get that kind of recognition here in Maryland,” another successful Maryland trainer, Larry Murray, once pointed out. “You know, he just grinds out races.”
Delp earned Hall of Fame recognition in 2002 on the basis of a stellar career and “the greatest horse ever to look through a bridle,” the supreme Spectacular Bid.
It took another 13 years and, oddly enough, a pair of closely related homebred stars for Leatherbury to join his onetime rival in Saratoga Springs.
Ah Day, by Malibu Moon, out of the Thirty Eight Paces mare Endette, arrived in 2005 and went on to win 14 races, including a Grade 3, and earn more than $900,000.
Then in 2010, Ben’s Cat, by Malibu Moon’s half-brother Parker’s Storm Cat and out of Endette’s full sister Two Fox, arrived. He went on to become one of the most popular Maryland-bred and -based stars in generations, winning 32 races, four graded, and earning more than $2.6 million.
“Ah Day came first, then Ben,” said Avon Thorpe, who was Leatherbury’s top assistant during those years and worked in the Leatherbury operation for 3,600 or so wins, he estimated. “Ah Day came first, and we were on the scene, and he was just winning and winning and winning. And then when he started tailing off, Ben’s Cat showed up right at the perfect time. And then he started winning.”
“One of my problems is, I take too much for granted,” Leatherbury said of Ben’s Cat in 2014. “This horse is a super horse, and I hope I really appreciate him like I should. He’s so special.”
A renowned story teller with a sharp sense of humor, Leatherbury’s forte was providing both the spoonful of sugar and the medicine in one ready quip.
“My age holds me back now,” he said in 2015, “because if a young guy goes to get in the business, he’s going to go to some up-and-coming young trainer. He’ll think, ‘Leatherbury’ll drop dead on me.’”
Leatherbury is survived by his wife Linda and sons Todd and Taylor. Funeral arrangements are pending.
Also in Leatherbury’s Hall of Fame class was Xtra Heat, the fleet filly based at Laurel Park and trained by John Salzman, Sr. for himself and co-owner Kenny Taylor.
“I’m a kid in the 1970s, coming out here and watching his horses run,” Taylor said in wonderment at the time. “And you’re going in the Hall of Fame with him? That’s not possible. I’m in the Hall of Fame with King T. Leatherbury. You understand that? You know what that means?”
“He’s the best,” added longtime assistant Avon Thorpe. “His name ain’t King for nothing.”
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KING T. LEATHERBURY FILE
- BORN March 26, 1933, in Baltimore, MD
- DIED February 10, 2026, in Mitchellville, MD
- CAREER STATS (starts-1st-2nd-3rd-earnings) 36,256-6,508-5,289-4,645-$64,693,537
- CAREER HIGHLIGHTS 52 training titles at Laurel Park and Pimlico… 4 consecutive 300-win campaigns, 11 straight over 200, led the nation in wins in 1977 and 1978… Recorded a six-win day and four five-win days… Ranks fifth among trainers by all-time wins… Recorded his first win in 1959 at Sunshine Park (now Tampa Bay Downs)… Recorded final win in the second-to-last start of his career… Saddled four Preakness starters, including Thirty Eight Paces (1981) and I Am The Game (1985), both of whom finished fourth… Trained notable 1970s and 1980s runner Port Conway Lane intermittently through his career as that runner racked up 52 wins from 242 career starts… Registered grade 1 wins with Catatonic (1987 Hempstead) and Taking Risks (1994 Iselin)… Honored with a race named for him (King T. Leatherbury Stakes) and for his wildly popular homebred Ben’s Cat…
- TOP RUNNERS
- Taking Risks
- Catatonic
- I Am The Game
- Ben’s Cat
- Ah Day
- Indigo Star
- Thirty Eight Paces
- Malibu Moonshine
- Ameri Valay
- Learned Jake
- Dynamic Trick
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