By Emily Shields
Todd Sheehan and his grandfather Pat Peluso visit freshman stallion Boat Trip at Special T Thoroughbreds
Todd Sheehan grew up visiting Del Mar racetrack, first as a child with his parents and then as a high school student with friends. What stood out to him was a love not of gambling, but of the horses themselves.
“It was the racing, the people, the pageantry of it,” he said. “I fell in love with the whole thing.”
He knew then that he wanted to get involved with the business, but life had to fall in line first. Sheehan completed college and then law school before moving to Temecula in 1998. As soon as he could, he started dabbling in partnerships, then met Rick Taylor at Special T Thoroughbreds.
Taylor was in the process of getting two young horses ready for owner B. J. Wright. One was Ultimate Eagle, who earned $547,800 with wins in the Hollywood Derby (G1T) and Strub Stakes (G2). The other was Boat Trip.
“He was getting them ready at Galway Downs, and he would tell me he had two really good horses to watch,” Sheehan recalled. “They both went on and had good racing careers, and Rick was always saying how he wished for an opportunity to stand Boat Trip.”
A stakes winner himself, Boat Trip, a son of Harlan’s Holiday, has sired a multiple stakes winner in his frst crop
Boat Trip, by Harlan’s Holiday out of the group 3-winning Seeking the Gold mare Turning Wheel, was a graded stakes-placed stakes winner of $268,410. He broke his maiden as a sophomore at Santa Anita in 2012, then won three in a row, including the $74,330 Tsunami Slew Stakes on the turf at Hollywood Park.
He won the $99,998 Hollywood Turf Express Handicap as a 4-year-old, the same year he was second in the Eddie D Stakes (G3T), and retired with five wins, a second, and three thirds in 22 starts.
“Rick liked his pedigree, race record, and everything about him,” Sheehan said. “In the summer of 2017, he said, ‘You’ll never guess who called.’ It was Robert Harmon, the owner of Boat Trip.”