Barocio Rejoins Lovesick Blues in Dubai

By Alan Carasso, DWC Notes Team DUBAI, UAE (Mar. 14, 2026) —Strawberries and cream. Chocolate and peanut butter.   Horse racing and making movies? One of those is clearly not like the others, but Librado Barocio has managed to meld the two into a successful career, both behind the camera and, courtesy of the eight-year-old California-bred gelding Lovesick Blues, more recently in front of the camera. That’s because he’s been fielding numerous questions and granting frequent interviews about the horse that not only provided him with a maiden win at the Grade 1 level in the summer of 2025, but has also taken him and his team on the ride of a lifetime, first to Riyadh and now to Dubai, where Lovesick Blues will try to leave his mark on the Group 1 Dubai Golden Shaheen on 28 March. “For me, it’s a blessing from God above. And it’s a dream come true,” Barocio said. “The good Lord, he brought Lovesick into my life and he just opened the doors for me to see the world. I know in my life I would never have ventured to the Middle East for anything, but it’s beautiful. It’s eye opening, beautiful. I’m just very fortunate to be in the position I am in.” Having grown up in the Bay Area of Northern California, Barocio attended college at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), where he played American football. But football wasn’t likely to pay his way through life.  “In the evening, we were going to an acting class there,” Barocio explained. “So that was what my goal was and I did some acting stuff, but then I got into the UCLA film school, learned the art of film-making.” And, known as Lee Librado (‘an agent said it was much easier for people to pronounce’), he found some success.  “I just said to myself, “You know what? I’m not going to depend on anyone else to hire me,” Barocio explained. ‘I’m just going to make my own movies.’ So I was able to raise some financing and we made a string of movies that did well and then that’s kind of like what catapulted me there.”  It was more than a little fortuitous that he found his way into the horse racing business. His cousin’s fiance was an ex-jockey turned trainer, who talked Barocio into taking a piece of a horse. Owning and racing horses helped recreate some of the adrenaline he felt as a collegiate athlete.  “We ran the horse and when that horse was coming down the stretch, that was the first time I ever felt like that was me back on the football field,” he said. “And I just kind of hit me like, ‘Whoa!’ That excitement, that feeling of living vicariously through that horse.”  A licensed trainer since 1999, Barocio had never got his hand on that ‘big horse’ and when he acquired Lovesick Blues from breeder Nick Alexander after finishing down the field in a minor race in the summer of 2024, it seemed the roughest of rough chances that the gray gelding would scale those sorts of heights. But that he has. In eight starts for Barocio, Lovesick Blues has two wins, two seconds and a third, all in stakes competition and capped by an 18-1 boilover in the Bing Crosby Stakes at Del Mar, his first elite-level success. He was forced to come from a mile back, but ran with credit in the Grade 1 Breeders’ Cup Sprint (6th) and last time in the Group 2 Riyadh Dirt Sprint (5th).  If Barocio can work a little magic between now and then, it could, indeed, be an ending befitting a Hollywood screenplay.  “I’ve kind of played for nothing and won some major stakes in Southern California,” he said. “You got to make your future. You got to make it happen. Otherwise, no one’s going to hand it to you.”  So the stage is set. And Librado (or Lee, if you will) Barocio and Lovesick Blues are more than ready to be one of the star turns of Dubai World Cup night.