A good start
Harry was a “jockey, trainer, the whole nine yards” at Scioto Downs, Mike Sr. said. Eldorado Gaming Scioto Downs is a casino in Columbus that features live harness horse racing.
“My dad used to take me down (from Springfield) to see him,” Mike Sr., said.
The barns, the horses and the excitement of being around racing grew through his school years, and at 19, Mike Sr. began to train with his uncles.
“That’s when my mom got sick,” he said, “and I had to come home.”
Soon, Mike Sr. signed on for the first of 35 laps around the calendar on the assembly line at International Harvester.
But even when marriage and family came along, he managed to keep a finger in racing.
On a recent sunbaked morning, Mike Sr. was seated in a barn on the north side of the Champaign County Fairgrounds, where he once trained horses, showing off a March 25, 1983, photo of him after a first- place finish at Lebanon Raceway driving the pacer, Jonna Way.
Also in the photo is “Little Mike,” as he was called in those days — the same not-so-little Mike who was working just a few steps away from him at the fairgrounds tending to the family horse, Aruba Kat, and 10 horses he trains for Daytonian Kenny Hurst.
Back on track
A year ago, Mike Jr. was also at Navistar, which is a manufacturer of commercial vehicles and engines that now does business under the name International Motors LLC.
“My stepmother thought it was a good idea for me to be out there,” he said, “(but) my back didn’t like it. (Then) my specialist told me, ‘You want to find something else to do.’”
Hurst’s need for a trainer and driver put Junior back in the sulky — which is a lightweight cart used for harness racing — a place Mike Jr. didn’t feel like he belonged during his first rides years ago.
“Once you get out there, it’s a different ballgame,” Mike Jr. said. “The adrenaline starts kicking in.”
In close quarters with other jockeys, sulkies and 1,000-pound animals that seemed to be breathing down his neck, “I got claustrophobic,” he said.
“I ain’t gonna lie to you. My very first time I was terrified. “
As Hurst put it, “They race these horses like a car.”
More seasoned
With 12 total years in horses behind him and now a full year of racing, “I don’t feel like a fish out of water anymore,” Junior said.
That has allowed him to top the competitive experiences he had in youth sports.
Highlights were playing on traveling baseball teams — including one that that won the Ohio Babe Ruth championship — and his years of varsity basketball with the South High School Wildcats.
The man who looks like he could still play both sports is pleased with the racing wins he’s had — including getting one first-place win, placing second twice, getting three third-place wins and getting a handful of fourth-place wins — in his rookie season competing against drivers that have been on it for 20 years.
On race days, Mike Jr. said, “I always go out (on the track) with a plan,” often based on what he knows about his horse and others from what’s on a racing program.
But, as in other sports, “You can’t control what other moves the guys (and gals) are making,” and Mike Jr. is often adapting on the fly.
Mike Jr. remembers in slow motion a 2017 race in Troy in which he planned to sprint to the outside and the lead only to have another driver beat him to the spot. The good news was that he was running in second, “catching the draft” from the leader.
And when the lead pulled a string and popped the earplugs off the lead horse, Junior took it as a sign that the animal was tiring.
After some patient drafting, Mike Jr. popped the earplugs of his own horse, which, stimulated by the sounds around it, accelerated and brought home a win for them both.
Training days
While wins from driving are always welcome, “I would rather train a horse and get the success that comes along with that.”
As a trainer, his day begins with a visual exam of every horse.
“I start with the foot and go up the legs.”
If anything is amiss, “you should catch it,” Mike Jr. said.
Time spent daily with the animals breeds familiarity.
And on days they don’t seem themselves, a closer look is required and sometimes a word to the veterinarian who makes rounds at the fairgrounds twice a week.
As racers, “some of them are naturals,” he said, while others need time to grow accustomed to a new barn, a track, pulling a sulky and their drivers — all the aspects of their new job.
“You start out with slow miles,” said Mike Jr., then “keep increasing speed.”
Leagues of their own
Although tracks in Ohio’s bigger cities are more widely known, a string of venues in Ottawa, Kenton, Findlay, Tiffin, Upper Sandusky and Wilmington host three lower-level racing circuits: Ohio Colt Racing Association, the Southern Valley Circuit and Home Talent, Ohio Fair Conference.
All are for horses that may or may not make it to the major tracks.
Owner Hurst considers the Ohio Fair Conference circuit the most challenging, though more for what happens off the track than on.
“You’re not guaranteed a stall, so you might have to work out of your horse trailer in (the track’s) infield.” If so, water must be hauled for horse or horses brought along.
The result can be four to six hours of race preparations, during which “you don’t (always) know if the driver’s going to make it there,” Hurst said.
If they don’t, it sets off a scramble to find another.
Numb thumbs
More predictable is the annual arrival of winter and the need for everyone involved at the track to weather the weather.
“There’s no days off in the horse business,” Mike Jr. said. “You still got to train; you got to feed them…In single digits, if they’re racing, we’re going out,” as he did last winter at Miami Valley Hollywood Gaming in Dayton.
When he returns this winter, Mike Jr. has reason to expect to enjoy the warmth of support from his father and of Vaughn Stephens, young Mike’s friend of 32 years.
“I was introduced to horses through Big Mike and Little Mike,” said Stephens, who soon launches into a story about his first visit to the Richardson home on a winter day when his mother’s car slid on the snow and ice and collided with the Richardsons’ vehicle.
It’s left for Mike Jr. to tack on a beloved detail: Moments after the collision, Stephens was ready to go back home because he thought Mike Sr., “looked so mean.”
A few years back, Stephens called on that once-mean old man to give Springfield children who had never been around horses a chance to have the experience he had.
It’s doubtful any enjoyed it more so than the mean old man, who smiles when he tells Stephens: “I (still) have kids coming up to me calling me ‘Uncle Mike with the Horses’.”
The long run
Back in the barn at the Champaign County Fairgrounds, Mike Jr. pauses from his work for a moment to pay tribute to the tenacity his father showed in keeping a hand in racing while working full time and raising a family.
“No way in hell I could do this stuff after a day at Navistar,” he said.
In a nearby chair, with his cane leaning against a wall, 74-year-old Big Mike describes the joy he gets from spending three or four days a week “bossing everybody (while) nobody’s listening” in a barn inhabited by his son, the smells and sounds of horses and memories of uncles Harry and Cecil Richardson.
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