Raging Torrent begins with a question nobody expected to matter.
A fourteen-year-old girl, whose father worked at a restaurant Mark Davis owned, asked him one day whether he wanted to get into horse racing. He was, by his own account, “clueless about racing.” His answer was: “I don’t know, why not?”
A great many adventures begin with exactly those words. Very few business plans do.
She knew racing, and she knew bloodlines. By the time she was studying at the University of Kentucky, she was the person he trusted with every horse he owned. “Nobody does anything with my horses unless they talk to her and get her advice,” he said.
There is one more thing to know about him. He is very allergic to horses. In the winner’s circle, he explained, “I just go in real quick, do my thing, and then I get out.”
He loves them anyway, he said. Which may be the truest definition of an owner there is.
A Bargain Among the Hopefuls
In the spring of 2023, at a sale of young horses in Ocala, Florida, his manager picked out a two-year-old colt, and he was bought for $75,000. In the world of racehorses that is a modest sum, the price of a hopeful rather than a prospect.
The colt came with a name to live up to. Not Gentle Stream. Not Passing Shower. Raging Torrent.
He won the very first time he raced, at Del Mar, the seaside track in Southern California. The next year he won three races in a row, one of them an important race at Del Mar, for the trainer Doug O’Neill, who has trained two Kentucky Derby winners.
Then came the Breeders’ Cup.
Seventh, From the Worst Seat in the House
The Breeders’ Cup Sprint is the championship for the fastest horses in America over three quarters of a mile. That November it was run at Del Mar, the same track where he had won his first race. It had the shape of a homecoming.
He drew the starting gate right against the inside rail, and finished seventh.
His owner did not dress it up. “With the Breeders’ Cup, we just got unlucky drawing the wrong slot,” he said. A rising star had been beaten by the best sprinters in the country. That is usually where a reputation settles.
His did not settle. It moved.
Give Him a Little More Room
Less than two months later, on the day after Christmas, Raging Torrent ran at Santa Anita in one of the most important races in America for horses his age, a little longer than the Sprint. Riding him was Frankie Dettori, perhaps the most famous jockey in the world.
He took the lead as they turned for home, and he held it. Somewhere behind him was that year’s Kentucky Derby winner.
If you watch the replay, his owner said, “you can literally hear our suite screaming.” It is hard to imagine a better Christmas present, even one you have to admire from a polite distance.
After that race he sold his remaining share in the colt, and Raging Torrent raced on for new owners.
Dubai, Then the Rain
More than three months later he turned up in Dubai, over a full mile. He went to the front and stayed there.
“He runs well fresh,” his jockey said. “That was the plan, to put him away for this race.”
Then New York, the following June, and the Met Mile, run that year at Saratoga. It had rained. The dirt had been rolled flat and hard so the water would run off. In the field was the heavy favorite.
A horse called Raging Torrent, you might think, should not mind a little water. He did not.
“I knew I’d get to the bend first,” his jockey said, “then it was to manage his speed as much as I could.” Raging Torrent led, the favorite came at him, and Raging Torrent drew away.
A wet, hard track does favor a front runner, but it does not explain Santa Anita or Dubai. His jockey’s own explanation was simpler: the horse was maturing, his trainer had learned to space out his races, and he had “this amazing will to win.”
His trainer called him “kind of a once-in-a-lifetime kind of horse.”
The Race He Never Ran
Within weeks, he hurt a ligament in his left foreleg, and he was retired.
His trainer had been hoping to take him back to the Breeders’ Cup, this time over a full mile: a second chance at the championship that had beaten him, at the distance he had made his own. “He’s got brilliant speed, always showed tons of talent from the word go,” his trainer said, “and it just took a little while for everything to kind of come together.”
From 2026 he stands as a stallion on a farm in Kentucky, where the main thing anyone asks of him now is to be admired.
He belonged to others by then. But he was still the $75,000 colt, in a sport his first owner entered because a teenager asked a question. His first owner loves horses, he said. He just has to love them quickly.
The Painting
Gabrielle Benot painted Raging Torrent on commission. Mark Davis has asked her to paint all of his horses.