Somewhere in Time (Flynn)
Julie Maddock has seen the footage. It’s March 8, 2014 at Hawthorne Race Course, and low-level claimers that never have won two races go a route of ground in race 4. A horse named Somewhere in Time breaks comes out of the gate and begins to race – kind of.
“I found his last race on video on the Hawthorne website,” Maddock said. “He broke from the gate and pretty much just trotted all the way around.”
Somewhere in Time finished last of six while beaten more than 32 lengths that day. That was the gelding’s third straight crushing defeat, and at that point Somewhere in Time had lost even the tenuous hold on a racing career to which he’d clung for months.
Trainer Rick Lindsay, a Chicago stalwart, pulled the plug. That’s when Maddock comes in. After six months of retraining through the Illinois Thoroughbred Horsemen’s Association’s Galloping Out program, Somewhere in Time was ready for something beyond racing. And Maddock, the horse she regularly rode having suffered a physical set-back, was ready for a new horse.
“I didn’t have a lot of money to invest,” she said. “Warmbloods are popular in the dressage world, but they come with five-figure price tags I couldn’t afford. I wanted to have something more athletic that could hop over a little jump if I wanted.”
Enter Somewhere in Time, whose name now is Flynn. The gelding, 10 years old, resides in Roscoe, Illinois, about seven miles from Maddock’s home in Loves Park.
“He’s absolutely the coolest horse. He has a great sense of humor, and he absolutely enjoys being a sport pony,” said Maddock. “My very first horse was a Thoroughbred, but he was 20, and this is my first experience with a horse right off the track. He had to learn things like standing still for mounting, and basically to use his body a little differently. But he’s extremely smart. He picks up on things really quick.”
Perhaps Somewhere in Time got too smart for his own good during his racing career. But starting gates and racing ovals are graying scraps of memory for a gelding that got a second chance.
