Mairzy Doates

Early life

Mairzy Doates was born April 1, 1976, bred by Preston and Patrick Madden, a pair of horse-training brothers who operated out of Hamburg Place in Kentucky. Her sire was Nodouble, a multiple graded stakes winner who had retired to stud in 1970, and later became the leading sire in North America in 1981. In contrast, her dam, Avalanche Lily, had only raced lightly and never won, but she was a foal of leading sire and 1960 Grass Horse of the Year T. V. Lark, and a descendant of Man o' War. Mairzy Doates's mare line traces directly to Cinq a Sept, winner of the 1927 Irish Oaks, making Mairzy Doates a distant relative of Secretariat.

Two years later in 1978, Arno D. Schefler, a New York art dealer and investment banker who had dealt in Thoroughbred horses since 1967, purchased Mairzy Doates as a filly from the Maddens. Schefler was the one to name her, referencing the novelty song "Mairzy Doats" made popular in a 1943 recording by bandleader Al Trace. She was briefly trained by Angel Penna and then Mickey Preger, but by winter, Schefler had handed Mairzy Doates over to Horatio Luro, a veteran horse-trainer with whom Schefler had become acquainted with in the early 1970s. Mairzy Doates was brought to Luro's stable in Miami, where she had to closely monitored while training due to the weakness of her ankles.

Racing history

Mairzy Doates raced once as a two-year-old, finishing sixth out of ten at the Aqueduct Racetrack on December 22, 1978. Over two months, Mairzy Doates vied several times for a maiden race victory, eventually winning on her fourth attempt on February 4, 1979. Her first graded race, the Grade 3 Ruthless Stakes on February 18, went poorly; Mairzy Doates remained thoroughly distanced from the other horses for the entirety of the race until her jockey eased her before the finish line. Nevertheless, Mairzy Doates continued to race throughout the rest of the year, winning several allowance races and placing third in the Grade 1 Alabama Stakes. By December, and at her final race of the year at the Busher Handicap, commentators had noted Mairzy Doates's improved performance.

The next year, Schefler wished to race Mairzy Doates on the West Coast due to more racing opportunities being available in the area. Luro suggested that Mike Whittingham, the son of the U.S. Racing Hall of Fame trainer Charlie Whittingham, take over as trainer during their Western campaign. Mairzy Doates did not manage to place higher than fifth in both of her next two graded races: the Grade 1 Santa Barbara Handicap on March 23 and the Grade 2 Gamely Handicap on May 4. However, on May 26, 1980, she achieved her first graded victory at the Golden Gate's Grade 3 Yerba Buena Handicap in dominant fashion, beating her opponents "about as easily as a horse can" in the 1+3⁄8 mi race by six lengths and with a winning time of 2:15.

In July, Mairzy Doates was announced as an entrant in the Grade 2 Matchmaker Stakes, a race so-called as the top three placers' owners were given the choice of several high-end stallions for stud services, but had to withdraw after suffering a high fever. Around this time, Mairzy Doates was injured and returned to train under Luro; she was not able to race again until December 22, where she won an allowance race by three lengths over Quick As Lightning.

In her final year of racing in 1981, Mairzy Doates again failed to win a Grade 1 race in her three attempts, her best performance being a narrow defeat by a nose in the Santa Barbara Handicap. In her following races, she subsequently achieved a triple run of graded victories. She repeated her previous win in the Yerba Buena Handicap with a similar large margin of victory, then edged out Love Sign in the Grade 3 New York Handicap. Finally, at the Matchmaker Stakes, she made up for her withdrawal from the previous year's race with a 1+1⁄4 length victory over Honey Fox. Schefler considered using his awarded choice of stallion to pair leading stallion Raja Baba with Mairzy Doates, although this plan ultimately fell through and Raja Baba was instead paired with another of Schefler's mares. By July, Mairzy Doates was considered a leading contender for turf-racing fillies in North America, and placed in her final two Grade 2 races in the year.

Japan Cup

In November 1981, Mairzy Doates was one of several American horses invited to Tokyo to take part in the first running of the Japan Cup, an international race over 2,400 m designed by the Japan Racing Association (JRA) to assess the performance of their horses against the rest of the world on home turf. While the JRA had attempted to invite several prominent horses such as John Henry, the final line-up of international horses was ultimately deemed unremarkable, while Japan fielded an "all star cast", including the year's autumn Tennō Shō's top three finishers. The most favored entrant of the international group was The Very One, the same horse to whom Mairzy Doates had lost that year's Santa Barbara Handicap by a nose. The Very One had previously run against Mairzy Doates on three other occasions, each time either winning or placing higher than her. While Mairzy Doates's team accepted the invitation, Luro, now 80 years old and recovering from pneumonia, sent John Fulton to cover as trainer.

On the morning of the race, November 22, Schefler and Fulton nearly pulled Mairzy Doates, stating to the race's officials that the ground was too firm for her to run on safely and demanding the entire track be watered. Since this was not possible at such short notice and may have provoked objections from the Japanese jockeys, the race's organizers pretended to agree, placating Schefler and Fulton by saying that the track would be watered throughout the day. In reality, the active sprinklers they pointed out as proof were only for the track's flowerbeds, and the track itself was never touched.

In the race, Mairzy Doates stayed in the mid-pack until the final turn before surging forward in the home straight, overtaking her rivals to win by one length over the Canadian horse Frost King. The Very One finished third, while the leading Japanese runner, Gold Spencer, placed fifth. Her time was 2:25.3, taking a full second off the previous course record set by Green Grass, and came with a purse prize of $295,455 (equivalent to $1,046,000 in 2025).

Retirement

Following her victory in Japan, Mairzy Doates's team decided against running her in the 1982 Santa Barbara Handicap, and her retirement was announced by the end of January 1982. At the time of her career's end, she was the sixteenth-highest money earner in the world for female horses, as well as the highest-earning mare globally for 1981. When discussing his horse's achievements to The Press of Atlantic City, Schefler praised her tenacity and determination:

Mairzy Doates was an all-time wonderful mare. There may have been better fillies in history, but the great thing about her was her enormous courage. She would give you everything she ever had. It is one thing to get a filly, any horse, to give you that courage every once in a while. But Mairzy Doates gave it all of the time.

After her retirement, Mairzy Doates was transferred to Hurstland Farm in Midway, Kentucky, to stand as a breeding mare, and was quickly paired with the popular French sire Lyphard. Schefler had hoped for a filly to name her 'Dozy Doates'. Instead, Mairzy Doates's first foal was a colt called Mairzy Dancer, born May 5, 1983. She gave birth to seven more foals in America, before transferring to stand in France in 1994. There she had two more foals, Foam and Nachtigall. Two days after giving birth to Nachtigall, Mairzy Doates died on May 25, 1998, at the age of 22.

Mairzy Doates was not considered a successful broodmare. Many of her offspring did not race, and those who did rarely won. However, her final foal, Nachtigall, sired Etoile Nocturne in 2004, a graded winner through the 2009 Grade 3 Hamburg Trophy ran in Hamburg. Divina Preciosa, one of Mairzy Doates' great-granddaughters through Hanging Valley, won several Grade 1 races in Chile in 2013, and retired as a broodmare in Japan.

Legacy

There are no excuses left. Japan's top-class horses were easily defeated by second-rate American horses in a race where all the conditions were advantageous to Japanese horses. The idea of "raising strong horses" will have to be started all over again.

While described by Japanese racing journalists in retrospective accounts as a "second-rate mare," Mairzy Doates won at the Japan Cup in a course-record time. Her victory, alongside the performance of the other foreign horses, greatly shocked the Japanese horse racing industry. Expectations in Japan before the race had been mixed; some in the JRA had anticipated that their horses would not be on par with the rest of the world, while others had felt the Japanese horses would hold the advantage. Regardless, the lopsided end-result was still viewed as a complete defeat. The realization that the nation's best horses had been defeated by a mare considered an unexceptional stakes winner in North America was seen as a profound humiliation. As such, the event has frequently been credited as a turning point in the JRA's efforts to improve the quality of their racing stock, both in breeding and racing ability.

Honors

Since Mairzy Doates's retirement, several one-off races at different racecourses in the United States have been named after her.