By Shelly Whitehead
NKyTribune Contributor
It’s a gray, drizzly fall day on Turfway Park’s backside, with a few horses slopping around on the track for some chilly morning exercise. But inside the 55-foot gray trailer stationed in front of the barns, a wall filled with spools of every garish-colored thread readies to paint embroidered names and images across all manner of jockey silks, horse blankets and caps heaped in stacks along one wall.
There’s a whir of a computer-controlled embroidering apparatus as it fastidiously makes the many thousands of separate stitches needed to emblazon a thoroughbred-related logo on a neon orange ball cap. Nearby pieces of specially finished glitter-embellished paper are lined up and ready to imprint other wearables and track-related paraphernalia with a catchy phrase or the name of a particular stable where a racehorse spends his off-duty hours.
This is Elegante – one of the primary producers of some the colorfully embroidered garb and imagery behind a fleet of racehorses over the last 17 years around here.
And the woman behind all this horsey adornment – Connie Kordenbrock – is as connected to all things thoroughbred as are the threads in the many embroidered items she creates here.
This week, she’s been particularly busy, finishing off a number of orders for the horses, farms and owners involved in this weekend’s Breeders’ Cup World Championships at Keeneland in Lexington.
“I just had some pants I had to take down to one of the riders in the Breeders’ Cup who is being sponsored by one of the local feed companies,” she says. “They want their sponsorship (embroidered) down each leg of the pant for the riders so when they’re in the post parade you can see that on each side of the leg.
“Then I just did five dozen hats for a dear friend of ours … who owns a percentage in Dothraki Queen. … After all, this is something that just doesn’t happen every day to get a young horse to this point when there are so many things right up to the day of the race that you just don’t know can happen. … Things can turn upside down in about two seconds … so to get to this point is pretty special.”
Dothraki Queen is scheduled to run in the 14 Hands Winery Juvenile Fillies, the first of the Breeders’ Cup races on Saturday’s card.
Kordenbrock knows as well as anyone the amount of emotion and energy that goes into any horse at this level of racing. Not only has her husband, Matt, spent his career working in the industry as a trainer, but her now-grown daughter was an accomplished American Saddlebred show horse rider, who was racking in wins at the World Championships in Louisville when she was barely old enough to reach the stirrups.
In fact, the need to travel the country with her equestrian offspring is primarily why Kordenbrock started the embroidery business here in the late 1990s. But today, her daughter is a young mother who no longer rides, while Ms. Kordenbrock is as thoroughly ensconced in the world of those who do as ever. And though her work may manifest itself in many different hues and patterns, the objective with racehorse-related garb is largely always the same.
“My deal is that I like for them to be able to be where you can see them,” she explains. “You know, it’s hard to follow a horse on the racetrack, so my favorite colors are the neons — the brights, where you can pick up your horse easily on the racetrack.”
Sewing up a winning look on the track
Over the years, Ms. Kordenbrock has established quite a reputation among the horsey set. But the fact is that now some of her biggest clients are outside of the racing industry where she is creating everything from company business attire to personalized smartphone covers and robes. In fact, she once had a stint a few years back supplying freshly monogrammed towels for actor George Clooney’s Italian villa guests. But that was pre-marriage, so maybe he’s due for a reorder.
Still, even the glitz of Hollywood cannot detract from the sheer joy Ms. Kordenbrock gets in helping a new racehorse owner or group of owners create a look for their horses on the track.
“I love doing silks. They are a lot of fun,” she says of the multi-colored apparel that jockeys wear to designate their horse’s ownership. “A lot of people already have in mind what they want, but sometimes they don’t have a clue and so it’s fun to get out all the colors and swatches of material and then come up with a design. Then, we just sit and draw it and put it together and their idea becomes reality.”
Now lest you think this is all just frivolous icing on the cake of horse racing, you need only to ask a few of those involved in this business about how very seriously they take things like the color and pattern of their silks. After all, horse racing is steeped hock-deep in beliefs about superstition and lucky omens. And you had better believe that the garments the horses and jockeys wear are a big part of that, too.
“That’s absolutely true for everything, like the place that you stand and what you wear as an owner. …There is a lot of superstition and it’s not that the horse ever knows because he certainly can’t read a tote board or things like that, but there’s just a lot of pressure.”
Does Kordenbrock believe in all that stuff about lucky colors and such? Well, she never really answered that question completely, but she was quick to say which horse in history she would most have loved to help “dress.”
“John Henry – he’s always been one of my favorite horses” she said of the plainly bred horse that racked up 39 wins in the early 1980s and was named one of the greatest thoroughbreds of the 20th century.
“You could put him in anything and he would look good. He ended up being one of the greats. In fact, there’s a big poster of him that says ‘Some were born with greatness and some achieve greatness.’ And he’s just very special. Then, naturally, there’s Secretariat, and he always went in those blue-and-white checks. You really do start to associate silks with their owners.”
Hmmm, doesn’t Dothraki Queen race in blue and white, too?