As we head in to the final hunt meet of the shortened spring season, meet the man who was crucial to saving the Virginia Gold Cup Races.
Remember to watch the live stream of the races on Saturday, beginning at 12:15 on the
NSA Network
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Gorillas to Gold Cup, Nick Arundel thought outside the box (literally)
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Meet the newsmaker, innovator and ‘self-styled maverick’ that saved Virginia’s crown jewel by creating a custom course for the races, and so much more
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Everything changes, but nothing really does.
Those were the prescient words of Arthur W. “Nick” Arundel in Bill Myzk’s 1987 book, “Virginia Gold Cup: Official History.”
It’s still true today.
Arundel, who died at 83 in 2011, is widely remembered as a self-styled maverick who actively reviled conventional wisdom to build an ongoing steeplechase storyline.
(Douglas Lees photo, left) Arundel conceived and created the Great Meadow racecourse near The Plains, Virginia, carving it out of nothing in the early 1980s when the Gold Cup’s longtime home at Broadview in downtown Warrenton was sold for a housing development.
This weekend, what many call the crown jewel of his legacy hosts what promises to be an overflowing day of sport, the rescheduled Virginia Gold Cup meet slated June 27.
Nick Arundel will be there, figuratively – in spirit, literally – in bronze, and actually – in the many hands that helped him build the busy field events center still hard at work today.
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“In a century of accelerating particles of change, few sporting institutions have more perfectly retained their original character, values and strong traditions than the classic … Virginia Gold Cup,” Arundel wrote. “The course has moved four times. Wars have come and gone. The race has endured every imaginable sort of weather, and weathered every sort of problem on either side of the running rail.
“The Virginia Gold Cup heads into the future in stronger shape today than ever. Most of the challenges facing the Virginia Gold Cup have come up … since its beginning in 1922. Experience, love of the game and the will to win remain its greatest strength.”
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Nick Arundel in 2007.
©Douglas Lees
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“People thought it was a crazy idea to build a steeplechase course, in the first place, on a piece of bankrupt ground in Old Tavern,” maintains longtime course manager Bobby Hilton, who helped Arundel plan nearly every inch of the facility. “I think the Gold Cup people just threw up their hands and said to Mr. Arundel, ‘you want it? You can have it’.”
Gold Cup was already Arundel’s favorite. His father campaigned ’chasers and was a longtime race official. Myzk traces Nick Arundel’s direct involvement to 1949. “An innovation at the meet” that year, Myzk wrote, “was the appointment of Arthur Arundel and Paul Fout, both experienced riders, as junior judges. Both young men were to study the methods used by the older and more experienced officials.”
He was later involved when in 1978 NBC television aired the races the year his dad died; it was a first, something that Arundel retained. He sought his own TV contracts for Gold Cups in the '90s and 2000s.
“He wanted to share it,” says Ernie Oare, like Arundel a one-time Virginia Racing Commission member. “Nick loved to promote the sport.”
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The 1965 Middleburg Races. Nick Arundel on Acerado.
Photo courtesy of the Arundel family.
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It was a hell of a run, propelled by a sometimes campy but always infectious enthusiasm, adds Jack Fisher, who, along with Charlie Fenwick and Don Yovanovich (and, in the old days, A.P. Smithwick, Gerald Saunier and J.Arthur Reynolds) trained horses for Arundel. “Nick always wanted to do what was needed,” Fisher said in a Steeplechase Times story. “Look at the Virginia Gold Cup. He made that place when it could have just gone away.”
The man’s influence still unmistakably cloaks the place, from Great Meadow’s raucous July 4 festival (son Tom Arundel says his father was particularly entranced by pyrotechnics) to his habit of donning a top hat and egging on the winners to sip champagne from the invaluable golden Gold Cup goblet each May. These days, race co-chair Will Allison calls the Gold Cup toast, still an enormous honor, but it doesn't have quite the circus barker style of Nick Arundel.
The lifesized bronze statue of “racegoer” on Member’s Hill – poring over a racecard leaning on a bronze timber replica, is undeniably Arundel, quite literally. He modeled for the handsome piece, and as Hilton puts it, “its almost like he’s still here.”
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Arthur Windsor “Nick”Arundel – Jan. 12, 1928 – Feb. 8, 2011.
Survived by wife of 55 years, Peggy. Two daughters, three sons.
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• Marine Corps combat officer in the Korean war
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UPI White House correspondent
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• Founded Arundel Communications (later ArCom, later Times Community Newspapers; since sold and now called
Piedmont Media), a chain of Virginia county newspapers
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• Helped develop the concept of 24-hour news cycle at D.C. radio station
WAVA-FM in 1960
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• In 2017, a
book was published about Arundel's efforts in 1955 to bring two baby gorillas to the National Zoo
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• Board member Americans at War Foundation
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• Through his Meadow Outdoors Foundation published “The History and Origins of the Virginia Gold Cup”
coffee-table book in 1987
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Arthur Windsor Arundel was born in Washington in 1928. He was a 1947 graduate of Sidwell Friends School and a 1951 graduate of Harvard University.
Bobby Kennedy was a Harvard classmate.
Son of multimillionaire Pepsi-Cola bottling magnate Russell Arundel, Nick Arundel chaired his father's company, PepCom Industries, once the largest East Coast bottler of Pepsi, before the business was sold in 1980.
In addition to the natural business acumen, Arundel was a natural storyteller. His first
foray in journalism was at age 8 with “Nicky’s News,” a neighborhood print digest passed around Congress and credited with bringing giraffes to the Washington zoo. As an encore, in 1955, Arundel himself personally donated – and escorted – two baby gorillas to the facility.
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Arundel served as a Marine Corps paratroop officer in Korea, earning a Purple Heart as wounded in action. In 1954, Arundel parachuted behind the lines into Hanoi, leading a clandestine team to successfully destroy key power installations there before Ho Chi Minh took over the city after the French loss at Dien Bien Phu. The game of cat-and-mouse was covered in Pete McCloskey’s “The Taking of Hill 610.”
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"2nd Lt. Nick Arundel of The Plains, Virginia. He handled "line crossers" in Korea, and later blew up the electric power station in Hanoi in 1954."
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Arundel left the Marines in 1955 with the rank of captain, and was attached to the CIA in the Vietnam conflict. He was wounded there as well, earning a second Purple Heart.
After his military career, Arundel worked as defense department correspondent in the Washington bureau of CBS News. He later wrote for UPI.
After a stint as special assistant to the secretary of commerce, Arundel purchased WARL, a country music radio station. He changed the name to WAVA, and it became what Arundel believed to be the first all-news station in the world. “When I bought it, it was a bankrupt little hillybilly station,” Arundel told Editor and Publisher magazine in 1993.
Arundel sold the radio station in 1977 to focus solely on print. He had purchased his first newspaper, the Loudoun (Virginia) Times-Mirror in 1963. He told Editor and Publisher he found he preferred ink to airwaves. “That print story, that newspaper, that magazine, you can pick it up in your hands and you can crumple it. Whether you just wrap the fish in it or start the fire with it, it still is a hard, little piece of information you can tuck in your drawer for your children and generations to come.”
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He created northern Virginia’s Times Community newspapers – formerly Arcom Publishing, today operating under new ownership as Piedmont Media. Arundel owned as many as 17 county newspapers, something he felt critical to retaining a sense of community. He once said that it would be the local newspapers that withstood the building wave of changing news dissemination and social media.
Politically active, Arundel was on a first-name basis with virtually every prominent Virginia politician and many others who walk the national stage.
While still at Harvard, he served in an internship with then-U.S. Sen. Lyndon Johnson. He also ran the Virginia presidential campaign for classmate Kennedy and threw his own hat into the ring for election to the Virginia Senate in the early ’70s as a Democrat.
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Pragmatic and more concerned about leadership than party labels, Arundel endorsed a variety of candidates for public office on the editorial pages of his newspapers, including, most recently before his death, Republican John McCain for president in 2008.
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As an NSA board member, Nick Arundel helped create the National Steeplechase Foundation.
As a racehorse owner, Arundel won the nation’s most important timber races. His Sugar Bee, a Virginia-bred trained by Charlie Fenwick, won the Virginia Gold Cup, Maryland Hunt Cup and International Gold Cup. NSA timber champ in 1985, Sugar Bee holds the singular distinction of winning the International Gold Cup twice, once over hurdles before the Rolling Rock meet folded, and once over timber, when the trophy moved to Great Meadow. Sugar Bee was inducted into the Virginia Steeplechase Hall of Fame in 2007.
Nick Arundel married Margaret McElroy – Peggy – in 1957. They had five children.
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Nick and Peggy Arundel in 2009 at the
International Gold Cup Races.
©Douglas Lees
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In 1982, Arundel purchased 540 acres of overgrown, boggy former farmland halfway between Marshall and Warrenton in a bankruptcy auction on the steps of the Fauquier County courthouse. The parcel was destined to be split into 500 home plots, a thought Arundel detested.
He once said he hated the thought of a housing development in farm country, plus, this one cut too close to home – literally. His own beloved Merry Oak Farm and his family’s Wildcat Mountain is just a mile from what eventually became Great Meadow.
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Nick Arundel in April 1982 in what was known as "the old crayfish field" that became Great Meadow.
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The facility was developed first and foremost as a steeplechase course, Arundel once said, but soon after the first meet ran there in 1984, other horse sports naturally followed and, later, community events “designed to involve everybody,” he said.
Today,
Great Meadow hosts lively summer twilight polo matches, a Fourth of July fireworks spectacle, a summer jumper series, a three-star event and more.
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Twilight Polo at Great Meadow.
©John Nelson
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“It (was) a long, hard and pioneering job to get Great Meadow where it is today,” said Senator John Warner in 1984. “But the vision of those who saw the site as a home for Virginia’s greatest race never faltered.”
Counting Great Meadow and family farms, Arundel has protected nearly 5,000 acres through conservation easements, a legacy about which he was justly proud.
“Growth over the years just ahead here will probably be greater than in all of the combined history of Fauquier County,” Arundel wrote on the front page of the Fauquier Democrat, now the Fauquier Times. He purchased the county flagship in 1974. “Growth must not and shall not happen at the price of destroying this county's beauty, natural heritage and its vital farm industry.”
Many times Arundel referenced the protection of open space and the nurture of horse and field sports as his living legacy. “In the first part of your life, you learn,” Arundel once said. “In the second, you earn, and in the third, you give it all back.”
“I know he’d be very proud of what he left behind,” says son Tom.
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The Smithsonian National Zoo in Washington, D.C. is world-reowned for natural animal exhibits, in part thanks to 8-year-old Nicky Arundel.
In 1936, then-director of of the zoo Dr. William Mann tapped the young budding journalist for help procuring animals to fill newly developed habitat.
Arundel and a friend had started their own neighborhood newsletter, Nicky’s News, from the Arundels’ home in northwest D.C. They tackled neighborhood news (“Millers Visiting New York and Coming Home Soon” read one headline) and current events (“Madrid Is Bombed” read another) as well as coming down with firm editorial slant (“Adolf Hitler of Germany Is Dumb”).
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Two editorials were included in the kickoff issue of Nicky’s News: the first argued that school recesses should be longer. The other made a case for the National Zoo adding giraffes to the lineup.
Arundel argued with adolescent fervor that giraffes would prevent schoolchildren from contracting tuberculosis. “Children get lots of fresh air at the zoo, and they would like to go there if the giraffes were there,” the editorial stated. “Not so many children would die of tooberkulowsis if there were giraffes to look at.”
The news venture gained traction swiftly, gaining 60 subscribers in eight weeks, and family friend Mann took notice.
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Like any legit beat reporter, news editor Arundel sent himself on assignment. Through his father Russell’s connections as a former secretary of a senator, Arundel attended historic Senate committee hearings in March 1937, wearing an editor-in-chief badge and a suit.
Young Arundel attracted attention, interviewed by the press and photographed with U.S. senators. Eight senators even bought subscriptions to Nicky’s News. At a press conference afterward, Arundel stressed that “the new building is ready but giraffes are still in Africa. The Japanese children have giraffes. So do German and French children. Are they better than we are?”
In early 1937, Dr. Mann left the U.S. with 26 American native wild animals to exchange for exotics from Asia, Africa and the East Indies – raccoons, black bears, alligators and more. The nine-month expedition returned with nearly 900 animals – birds, snakes, tiger and bear cubs and four Nubian giraffes.
Two males and two females were acquired from Sudan, arriving via cargo ship to New York harbor on Sept. 27, 1937.
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In a book about the adventure, Mann’s wife Lucile Mann wrote that there was considerable difficulty in getting the giraffes off the pier. “The Sudan government had shipped them to us in 11-foot crates, and they could not get through the doors from the wharf out to the street. All that could be done was to saw them down, then and there, and the giraffes rode through the streets of Staten Island and over to Athenia with no tops to their cages at all.
“Later we learned that when they got to the quarantine station, the crates would not go into the barns there. (A helper,) in desperation, said, ‘Well, I think the giraffes are pretty tame. Let’s lead them in.’”
Nicky the giraffe – named for Arundel – lived at the zoo until his death in December, 1945.
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Mann was still zoo director when in 1955 Arundel participated in a safari expedition in the Belgian Congo, returning to the States with a young gorilla under each arm. Moka and Nikumba would become the first gorillas since 1932 to reside at the National Zoo.
Sabena Airlines, a small Belgian airline agreed to fly the strange cargo only after Arundel promised that there would be reporters and photographers on the tarmac in New York City taking pictures of the plane.
True to his word, a
photo of Arundel with the two gorillas over his shoulders was on the front page of the New York Herald Tribune the next day.
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Arundel was a founding board member of the Friends of the National Zoo and former president.
Arundel’s daughter-in-law, Kara Arundel, highlighted his zoo connection in her
2017 book, “Raising America’s Zoo: How Two Wild Gorillas Helped Transform the National Zoo.”
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Bobby Hilton
Great Meadow course manager since 1984
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When Mr. Arundel took me on, I didn’t know nothing, not even what a steeplechase was. He knew it, and that’s what he wanted – someone figuring it out alongside him to grow the place from scratch.
We went everywhere in the world to see how it could be done – England, Czechoslovakia, France – when we were creating what he wanted to be the greatest racecourse in the world.
I know he wanted it to last forever, and I know he wanted to be the best.
Now, he did do things that would drive me crazy. He’d do s**t like come up to my shop on a Sunday with a marker and paint, and he’d mark all my tools because he wanted them (arranged) a certain way. He’d paint my friggin’ tools with a spray can. Could not believe it, but that was his way.
This whole thing, it was his vision, you remember, his passion. He came here in the morning on the way to work and on the way home in the evening, every single day.
I still feel like today I’m still working directly with him (since) I function pretty much the same as when he was here.
This was important to him.
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Bobby Hilton, clerk of the course and manager of the course with his wife at the 2010 Virginia Gold Cup Races.
©Douglas Lees
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Teresa Condon
Former executive director, Great Meadow Foundation
Former race director, Virginia Gold Cup
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About 20 years ago, I vividly remember galloping my event horse around the racecourse at Great Meadow. Suddenly, out of nowhere, I was being very, very closely followed by a Jeep.
Although I had permission, I thought that this person might be upset for some reason so I pulled up.
It was Mr. Arundel.
He stopped and jumped out, exclaiming, “I was clocking you! Why did you stop?”
He absolutely loved driving his Jeep around the racecourse about 30 or 35 miles an hour, he’d call it, “the speed of a steeplechaser.”
And his most favorite thing was to drive through Swan Lake, splashing water in huge waves over the car.
He enjoyed taking potential Gold Cup sponsors out there to “feel the course.” They got a thrill, even if it was only in his Jeep.
His immense enthusiasm for Great Meadow and the Virginia Gold Cup was contagious. He was an extraordinary visionary who was also very attentive to every single detail of an event.
I have so many wonderful memories. He and Peggy sincerely treated me like family, and I will always be grateful.
I miss him.
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Condon and past Foundation President
Rob Banner at Great Meadow.
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Ernie Oare
Former Gold Cup chair
Former Virginia Racing Commission member
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My Gold Cup involvement really began in the mid-’60s, when Chuck Church and I were co-chairs.
Nick Arundel was a huge part of the positive changes at Great Meadow and in steeplechasing.
I was president of the Virginia Thoroughbred Association when the pari-mutuel racing bill passed. I had lived through two losing efforts, so the passage was an amazing game-changer for the thoroughbred industry in Virginia. The bill called for a five-member commission, and Nick was appointed.
The early job of the commission was to develop the regulations, and the organization (and) detail of that effort was made for him.
Along with quality racing, Nick also worked toward a pari-mutuel presence at the Gold Cup to help pay the bills. His goal was accomplished in recent years under the leadership of Will Allison, and Nick would have been elated by the outcome.
Nick Arundel was the ultimate ‘organization man,’ and he stood with the real horsemen and sportsmen to greatly further Great Meadow and the entire sport.
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Ernie and Betty Oare with the National Sporting Library and Museum trophy following a win in October, 2010 with their He's a Conniver.
He's a Conniver was ridden in the race by Jody Petty, and trained by Oare. Interestingly, the horse was bred in Pennsylvania by Jonathan Sheppard.
©Douglas Lees
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Tommy Lee Jones
Longtime Gold Cup official
Casanova Hunt huntsman, recently retired after 50 years
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Here’s a story to illustrate how important (Gold Cup and Great Meadow) were to Nick.
This is like the first or second year after Gold Cup moved from Broadview to Great Meadow. The Fendleys and me and Diane (Jones, his wife, and longtime executive director of the Virginia Gold Cup Association) were on a double-date, a movie at the Manassas mall.
So we’re walking through the food court, talking about the movie, headed back out where we parked. Nick and Peggy and (longtime Gold Cup official) Monk Noland were sitting there having dinner. Monk waved and said ‘come over here. Come over.’
Virginia hunt country had been abuzz about then-vice president Dan Quayle’s wife, Marilyn, hunting with Casanova. Monk was saying to us ‘that’s really a coup getting her to ride with you. How’d that happen?’
Nick grabbed the conversation at that point. He said ‘you know Mrs. Quayle’s link to Casanova was through Dennis Ayers?’ Dennis was a U.S. Park Police mounted officer that Arundel tapped for help with a horse-mounted color guard and mounted patrol at Great Meadow, so that took the conversation down a different road. And suddenly, this was a conversation about Great Meadow. To hell with the Quayles.
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Casanova Hunt huntsman Tommy Lee Jones, who just retired after 50 years, with the hounds and field behind him.
The Casanova Hunt just recently announced that it will be shutting its doors for good.
©Douglas Lees
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Don Yovanovich
Longtime friend and trainer for Arundel
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Nick was one of those people on the NSA board that would come in with 10 wild ideas. Now, maybe nine of them would be dismissed as crazy, but one, there was always one that had complete merit.
He was one to think outside the box, totally devoted to the betterment, and expansion, of racing and horse sports.
When you’d counter his idea with a slightly different direction, he’d put his hand to his chin – he always did that – and say, “Hmmmm,” while he thought about it. He was one of the biggest thinkers, biggest innovators, we’ve seen in decades.
That 10th idea, that one would make the difference.
If there’s one word to describe Nick, it would be ‘visionary.’ His mission was always to make things ‘better, not bigger.’
My favorite expression of Nick's was when he met you and he would respond to you when you asked him how he was, ‘better for seeing you.’ It always made you feel good, that you were important to him.
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1978 Virginia Gold Cup presentation to Mrs. Edgar Scott and jockey Don Yovanovich. The race was dedicated to Russell Arundel who died earlier in the year. Nick Arundel is in the center with trophy and his mother Marjorie Arundel is on the left in the trophy presentation.
©Douglas Lees
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Jack Fisher
Longtime friend and trainer for Arundel
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Nick Arundel was a wonderful person, but, the funny stories (that I have about him,) I can’t actually tell you.
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The 2008 National Sporting Library and Museum Cup at the Virginia Fall Races was won by Nick Arundel's Monte Bianco (Xavier Aizpuru, up). The President and CEO of the National Sporting Library and Museum presented the trophy to Arundel, Aizpuru, trainer Jack Fisher, and Fisher's wife Sheila.
©Douglas Lees
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Charlie Fenwick
Longtime friend and trainer for Arundel
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Nick absolutely loved Sugar Bee. That horse provided a wonderful story.
Sugar Bee was a Virginia-bred. He’d been with Felix Neusch and Reynolds Cowles, so of course he learned everything the correct way.
Notwithstanding that, I think God gave him beautiful manners to begin with. He always had top flight jockeys – Gregg Morris, Toinette Neilson, Richard Dunwoody, and he always made them look good.
After his racing career, he was an all-purpose (family) horse for Nick Arundel. That could mean cub hunting in the early morning, a trail ride at noon and swimming with some kids on ponies across Nick’s pond at twilight.
He was an absolutely wonderful animal."
(Fenwick trained and rode Sugar Bee to win the 1986 Virginia Gold Cup and the 1987 Maryland Hunt Cup, what Nick Arundel often called his “finest moments” in steeplechasing. Sugar Bee shipped to England to train for the 1988 Grand National. He finished second and fourth in prep races, but returned home when he developed a serious respiratory problem.)
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Nick Arundel riding his Sugar Bee, hunting with Mrs. Jackie O'Nassis with the Orange County Hunt in the 1990s.
©Douglas Lees
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On the international radar
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The Gold Cup gained international respect in 1993 when it was announced that the first three finishers each year qualified for the English Grand National, an honor previously enjoyed only by the Maryland Hunt Cup and Pardubice in the Czech Republic.
In 1997, Arundel collaborated with the Marlborough Cup in England, Britain’s only timber race, to create the World Timber Championship. A $100,000 bonus paid to the winner of Gold Cup and Marlborough Cup in the same calendar year. The feat was thought to be “impossible,” according to press reports, but
Saluter won both in 1997, and nearly repeated in 1999 but faded to third in the English race. The Championship folded the next year.
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Jack Fisher and Saluter winning the Virginia Gold Cup in 1995.
©Douglas Lees
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My dad loved the element of surprise and delight. He had a bit of mischief, like a 10-year-old boy, and the 'anything is possible' optimism of P.T. Barnum.
He was a real pyrotechnic and loved anything that boomed. When high-profile guests would visit the farm – vice-president’s wife Marilyn Quayle was one, he’d ask them if they had any hair spray. When they asked why, he would lead them to the back porch where he held up a 6-foot long potato cannon made out of PVC pipe, painted camouflage.
He’d cram a potato down the barrel and squirt hair spray into the other end. When he fired it, it made a huge ‘thwoomp!!’ as the potato launched 500 yards splashing into the lake below.
One of his absolute favorite traditions was hosting and organizing the Middleburg-Orange County (Pony Club) Mini-Olympics, an overnight trail ride and three-phase Olympics the next day – jousting plus cross-country jumping plus a pony swim across the lake.
At the campfire, he’d tell stories, spinning up tales of midnight raids by bandits. The kids would get worked up into tizzy.
One of his proudest moments in life, besides seeing his five kids grow up healthy and successful, was when Sugar Bee won the Virginia Gold Cup at Great Meadow, the ‘field of dreams’ he built.
I’ve never seen a bigger smile on his face when he held up the trophy and roared ‘How sweet it is!’ He loved that horse more than anything.
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1986 Virginia Gold Cup left to right: Ventarron (Jeff Teter, up), Our Climber (John B. Hannum, up), Arthur Arundel's Sugar Bee (Charles C. Fenwick, Jr. rider/trainer, up)--1st.
©Douglas Lees
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Thinking outside the box came naturally to Nick
(You can’t make this stuff up)
Meet Russell Arundel, the Prince of Princes
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Russell Arundel was born in Jacksonville, Illinois in 1902. He graduated from the University of Chicago, and moved to Washington, D.C. in 1927 as secretary for Sen. Jesse Metcalf (R-Rhode Island.)
Russ was named to the
Mount Rushmore Memorial Commission by President Franklin Roosevelt. He worked as a journalist, and wrote two books on the Roosevelt years, including “Roosevelt Doodles” in 1936. He worked as a lobbyist for the sugar industry, then the Pepsi-Cola Co.
In 1952, Russ was questioned by a Senate panel investigating the fitness for office of Sen. Joe McCarthy (R-Wisconsin.) The questioning was about a $20,000 note Russ Arundel had endorsed for the senator in 1947; Russ maintained the endorsement was a “minor financial transaction for a friend” he knew from his involvement in the sugar industry, according to a Washington Post report.
In 1949, Russ was attending the International Tuna Cup Match in Nova Scotia when he happened upon an unremarkable 4-acre rock called Outer Bald Tusket Island. Treeless, harsh and unpopulated, the dot on the map was located in what were then some of the world’s best tuna fishing waters.
Arundel purchased the island for $750 and built a 20- by 30-foot stone lodge at its crest, intending to use it as a fish camp and shelter. He took it a step further, Arundel and a couple dozen friends declaring Outer Bald Tusket an independent nation. They named it the Principality of Outer Baldonia, and Russ Arundel appointed himself “the Prince of Princes.”
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Outer Baldonia. The southernmost in the Tusket Island chain, it is located eight nautical miles off the Nova Scotia coast. Photo by
Sally Arundel DeWees
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He designed a flag (sea-green field with a tuna tail in a circle of white), talked Rand-McNally into putting Outer Baldonia on their maps and listed the nation’s consulate in the Washington, D.C. phone book, its location matching that of his own Washington office.
And then a funny thing happened: People started to take Outer Baldonia seriously. Invitations to official Washington functions began to arrive, and Arundel found himself called to attend various soirees. He donned official diplomatic garb, which reportedly included medals fashioned from beer bottle caps.
When in 1952 Outer Baldonia declared war on the USSR for calling into question their sovereignity, Halifax’s Armdale Yacht Club offered to commit its own fleet to the defense of the principality, and the Nova Scotia legislature voted to officially recognize Outer Baldonia’s independence.
In the end, Outer Baldonia’s downfall came not due to war but from overfishing in the vicinity of the Tusket Islands. As the tuna moved farther out to sea, Outer Baldonia’s prince and 69 admirals followed and left the utopian nation behind.
In 1973, Russ Arundel gave up both title and lands and sold Outer Baldonia for $1 (Canadian) to the Nova Society Bird Society. The island’s name has reverted to Outer Bald Tusket, but the refuge bears the family name: the Earle E. Arundel Breeding Bird Sanctuary.
Russ Arundel was Warrenton Hunt master 1950-1954, joint-master 1962-1968. He was longtime Virginia Gold Cup chair starting in 1950.
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He received the Ambrose Clark award in 1972
(above, far right, ©Douglas Lees), chiefly for his part to help increase hunt meet purses in the early 1970s when jump racing weathered cutbacks at major tracks. After his death in 1978, friends and admirers raised money and for the first time since its inception in 1922, placed a purse on the Gold Cup. At $7,500, the Virginia signature run that year in Russ Arundel’s memory became the richest timber race in the world.
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Unauthorized assistance
The 1964 New Jersey Hunt Cup attracted only two starters. Both refused the fourth fence, the water jump. Neither could get over until the outrider gave them a “lead.” Russ Arundel’s Acerado, Paddy Smithwick up, stayed the course, though he had issues with the water jump each time around.
He finally finished – alone, after 29 minutes for the three-mile course.
Stewards declared it a non-race, however, due to unauthorized assistance by the outrider.
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Tour de course
Buckle your helmet and take an armchair ride around singularly unique Steeplethon
By Betsy Burke Parker
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All steeplechasing is about racing over fences, but some tests ask more than others.
Hurdle racing is pure speed. Hurdlers jump little more than an elevated stride, lifting for the brush-topped four-foot simulated hedges meant to be jumped on the gallop.
Timber racing, on the other hand, demands more of a horse – longer races (three to four miles, compared to two to three for hurdles) demand stamina, and solid jumps require scope and balance.
Great Meadow's Steeplethon merges the two, an American original that marries elements of 'chasing – speed, stamina, jumping ability, bravery.
Saturday's three-mile test, worth $25,000, twists and turns around the expansive Meadow infield and outfield, crossing Gold Cup timber and regulation hurdles as well as unique, custom-designed obstacles that are pure Virginia. From a wall built of locally-quarried stones, to the Swan Lake splash – amusement park water flume for the steeplechase set, the Steeplethon innovates sport.
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Just Wait and See, Katnap (center) and Overwhelming (right) head thru water at the
2019 Steeplethon.
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The Steeplethon was conceived in the early 1990s by Great Meadow creator the late Nick Arundel. A horseman's horseman, Arundel trotted the globe – Auteuil in Paris, Cheltenham in the English Midlands, the great Pardubice in the former Czechoslovakia – gathering ideas from each.
“That's vision, don't you think,” said Great Meadow Foundation president Rob Banner, who rode the Steeplethon course in a special foxhunters' race in 1997. “To put yourself on a par with the famous Cheltenham in England. Mr. Arundel had a vision of what he wanted. And, by God, he made it happen.”
“We built every fence out there ourselves,” said course manager Bobby Hilton, who's run Great Meadow since its conception in 1984. “Totally to spec. Mr. Arundel came at us with stacks of drawings. Every fence was custom-built.”
“Mr. Arundel wanted the 'photo moment',” Banner said. “He wanted an exhilarating photo but safety for horse and rider. It is a great match. This course was designed to get horses to jump higher, bigger, better.”
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Eventual winner Andi'Amu (2) and Boogie Biz over a jump early in the Steeplethon course, 2018.
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In terms of runners, Arundel had in mind creating a new division for older, experienced veterans. “I think it's an amazingly good time, for horses, for riders, and for certain the crowd,” Banner said. “People love it – they just roar when the horses race through Swan Lake.”
“Which jump is your 'favorite' definitely depends on the horse. I remember a couple I rode there just flew the (Aintree and) Cheltenham Banks,” said retired pro Sean Clancy, winner of the first Steeplethon, in 1995, and champion rider in 1998. “They're the greatest jumps when your horse figures it out that you can measure and skip through the top.
“But poor old Hay Gormay just couldn't read it,” he said. “He left off of all four feet. Just clobbered the first one. Then I had this sinking feeling that there's another one just 20 strides away.”
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Likewise the Swan Lake Splash, Clancy noted, can be best, or worst, depending on the horse. “It's fun to gallop through there, with all the splashing,” he said. “Most horses do it very well. But I remember (1995 winner) Chirkpar – about five strides away I could feel him taking a look at that huge, wide water and gathering himself like he was going to jump the whole thing!
“I was telling him 'no, no no!' from way out. But he jumped in so aggressively he landed halfway in. It was funny, afterwards.
“It's a cool race. It's the 'different' that's fun.”
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A similar idea, the Alfred Hunt course at Glenwood Park was developed in 1995, too, about the same time as the Steeplethon. Glenwood trustee the late Paul Fout always hoped, like his good friend Nick Arundel, that the concept of cross-country racing would take hold at other courses around the nation, creating a real “circuit” for which horses could be developed, rather than boutique, one-off races that are more luck and grit than practiced skill.
“The whole idea was that it'd become a circuit,” Banner said. “That didn't happen, I know, but that was the hope.” As it is, Banner said, entries are strong in the races; Banner feels that enough trainers are willing to try the unusual courses, and enough sponsor money is available. Both the Steeplethon and Alfred Hunt are always well-filled and competitive races.
“It breaks up the day,” Hilton said. “You have hurdles, you've got timber, and, mid-card, you've got this cool race, the Steeplethon.”
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“You want a horse that'll stand back and measure the bigger fences,” Clancy said, adding that 'chasers that train in the hunt field, over varied obstacles and varied terrain, have a distinct advantage. “Some horses just fall apart with different questions coming up fast, jump after jump, in this race,” he said. “It's the ones that are smart, and keep their confidence, that excel here.
“You have to be careful you're not tricking the horse,” Clancy explained, saying false ground lines, turf-colored hedges, and tricky tests such as the visual of “jumping into the crowd” effect, like at the open ditch at Great Meadow's south end, can break a horse's confidence. “It's a fine line.”
Few design changes have been made to the Steeplethon since '95, Hilton said. The water splash was initially lined with concrete to keep water “in,” but when horses first galloped across the lake en masse, Hilton said the resultant wave nearly knocked the trailers down. “We changed that out, fast,” Hilton said, going to a gently sloped stone-dust base with a system of drains to let water in, and out, as needed.
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Clancy won the 1995 Steeplethon aboard Irv Naylor's Chirkpar, a highly-rated 'chaser imported from Britain and trained in Maryland by Jack Fisher. “Chirkpar was fun,” said Clancy, 1998 leading rider. “He was game and smart,” figuring out the varied obstacles as they came at him.
Johnston's Express the following year, Clancy said was as bad as Chirkpar was good. “It was a nightmare. He went left all the time, lugged out bad.”
So severely did Johnston's Express lean on the right rein that he leaped the second fence – a brush-backed coop in the far corner of the course – so much to the left that he ended up in a grove of pine trees on the outside rail. “It was awful,” Clancy said. “That course can be a blast on a horse that likes it, but it's terrible on one that doesn't.”
Because the Steeplethon jigs right and left, unlike a traditional oval circuit, riders sometimes get in trouble for going off course. Clancy said that no matter how many times riders walk a course, no matter how carefully they pay attention to flags and beacons, “everything changes at speed. People don't understand you can walk a course a thousand times, but when you're on a horse,” six feet up in the air, at 30 miles an hour, with 30,000 screaming fans lining the outer rail, “it just looks different.
“It's a different kind of course, all the way around,” Clancy added.
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Stride-by-stride analysis
(Betsy Burke Parker photos)
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1. From the starting point near North Rail, horses gallop some 50 yards to fence 1, a red-painted plank. The 3'7” jump is inviting, sloped away from the takeoff, set into an open field with plenty of visual “space” around, and behind.
It's wide, too, so as many as a dozen can safely jump upsides. It gets you off to a good start.
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2. About a dozen strides from 1, you begin a pretty steep descent downhill to a hardened culvert crossing, a pinch-point if too many get there together.
From there, you head uphill to 2, an imposing red-painted coop with brush behind. The coop is a visual challenge, too, because the “open space” after the jump disappears from view as you approach, replaced with a row of dark pine trees outside the perimeter fence.
You'd do well to edge your horse a little left here, jumping the coop on a slight right-handed angle, to give your horse the feeling he's got “more room” to jump.
The coop is 3'9”, no wings – an easy place to run-out. It's a “gallop” fence, but it's a little tricky.
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3. Horses bend slightly right to 3, a big black oak log harvested from the mature hardwood forest south of the course.
Approach and landing are easy here. This jump is something of a gimme on an otherwise relentlessly challenging course – about 3'3”, very inviting.
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4. After the log, you bend right, then left, “through the woods,” the only known track in the world that courses through trees. There aren't many trees – just a dozen or so, but it's still an interesting departure from typical, aseptic racing.
After the woods, be on the lookout for a marker flag that sets you up for the 90-degree right-turn to 5, the Meadowbrook. A squatty set of rails stacked in front of a row of big bushes pretty well hides the actual brook and ditch behind the hedge. The 7-foot deep chasm doesn't come into view until your final takeoff stride.
Still, the course opens up behind the Meadowbrook, a wide, inviting turf expanse so you can drive forward into this one to overcome any balking.
The living hedge is trimmed about 3'6”; the ditch is about 6' wide, sloped on landing. You'd do well to try this jump off an expanding stride. It's big.
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5. From the Meadowbrook, swing right, 90 degrees onto the racecourse proper headed south to north, midfield.
You're headed for a pair of real galloping jumps. The Aintree Bank at 5, and Cheltenham Bank at 6 are named for two of the world's most famous 'chase courses, both in England. Living evergreen hedges are planted atop earthen berms, trimmed to about 2' in height, the top foot or so soft new growth that horses learn to “skip” through. The jumps, about 4' 8” high in total, are about 20 strides apart, an in-and-out effect.
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7. From the banks, you tug right to get straight to your first of four Gold Cup timber jumps. It is a 3'7” stacked rail, sloped but imposing enough to make your horse stand back and take a look after getting “down” into the hedges at Aintree and Cheltenham.
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8. You better look left for the next – it comes up quick. More often seen on a three-day event course, the Bank is a multi-element question: you hop over a small stacked rail, “up” onto an tall, wide earthen mound.
Atop the bank, there's room for a short stride (ask for a 10' “collected canter” stride for best result) and then you either hop down the far side (there's a 5' drop) or slide down, Irish-bank style.
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9. Quickly gather your reins after the drop, staying straight a half-dozen strides then a sharp left around a beacon to line up for the 3'7” Gold Cup timber on the North Rail turn.
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10. Turn left again to another 3'7” Gold Cup timber, this one set at the head of the long homestretch, in front of the Broadview Boxes.
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11. Stay straight to the Water Brush, a 3'6” stuffed double hedge in front of a 12' water hazard.
Horses don't seem to see the water element until halfway over – photographers love it for the “double-pump” knee action they often get midair as horses catch sight of the dark water below.
It looks hard, but this is actually one of the easier fences on the course.
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12. Straight to 12, one of the biggest jumps on the course – a proper 4' Gold Cup timber, this one set in front of Paddock Parking.
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13. Pay strict attention to beacons at the South turn as you head to what's widely considered one of the most challenging on the course – the Open Ditch. The Open Ditch is a mirror image of the friendly brush-faced Meadowbrook beside it. A 6' gaping ditch, rimmed with a short ground-line, yaws in front of an enormous hedge growing on a small earth berm behind it.
To add dimension to this question, not only are you jumping “into” the vociferous South Rail fans, a Jumbotron rears almost directly in your line of sight. Work like crazy to keep your horse's attention on the giant ditch, much as you may not want to.
You may have good effect by swinging “wide” right before the Ditch, jumping at a slight left angle to disappear the crowd and Jumbotron from view.
Be careful, though, not to angle too much left or you risk missing the next beacon, a directional flag that sets up for 14.
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14. The first of four National Steeplechase Association national fences, 14 is a welcome relief after the big effort at 13. It's off a sharp, short, left turn, though, and lining up is crucial.
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15. Now for the most fun part of the course, the Swan Lake Splash is next. Off a slight left bend, you head to what's possibly the most photographed steeplechase fence in America. The 170' long, 10” deep pond has a hardened, stone-dust “floor” that rides like a park path, and while the water splashes up and drenches come-from-behinders, you got a chance to warm up in the Splash on the way to the start.
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16. Bend slightly right out of the water for a long run to the Stone Wall. Constructed of local stones and topped with earth and sod, the Wall is about 3'6”, eminently jumpable.
Photographers love this one, too – a jumping shot with the scenic Steward's Stand, and Member's Hill crowd, in the background.
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17. You're almost home at 17, another Gold Cup timber on the North Rail turn, the only fence jumped twice on the course.
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18. There's a long, left-handed gallop to the final two. Thoughtfully, they're simple, straightforward NSA national fences, both set in the home straight. Eighteen is in front of Finish Line rail parking.
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19. Nineteen is the final hurdle to cross, set in line with the Oakwood Boxes, with about a furlong to run to the wire.
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