Factorbella dead-heated for third, going off at almost 14-1.  Yo Yo Candy won, going off at 46-1, the first graded stakes win for the horse and his owner, the first graded stakes win in the U.S. for his jockey Angel Castillo, and the second graded stakes win for his trainer Danny Velazquez. 

“I jumped from the balcony over here,” said Velazquez. “I don’t even know how I got here. This is a dream come true. As a kid you dream of winning races here, and here I am.”

“I am annoyed,” said Lamont Sunday morning of his choice to stay in New Jersey. “I weighed a whole variety of things and decided we had a better chance at winning at Monmouth, and it was a shorter drive. The 6:18 post time wasn’t exactly an incentive to go. 

“I told Danny in the morning that if the horse in Saratoga runs out, I saved myself six hours of driving and aggravation. And if he ran well, there would be other stakes races. If we weren’t running at Monmouth, I would have made the trip, and obviously, if I had it to do over, I’d have gone.”

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Lamont runs in the name of Happy Tenth Racing, an acknowledgement of his first date with his wife Kathy.

“It was April 10, 1979, and on the 10th of every month, we’d say to each other ‘Happy 10th,’” he explained. 

He’s owned horses for more than 40 horses, first harness horses, then thoroughbreds. A passionate sports fan, he grew up going to Monmouth, and when he began his career as a business editor, he wanted to get involved in ownership.

“I thought about trying to buy a baseball team in 1971,” he said, “but that’s when prices started to go through the roof. Even minor league teams were way out of my budget. 

“Then I thought about getting involved with boxing, backing a boxer and covering their expenses for a piece of the action. I started to look into it and realized that those people were all criminals, so that was out.”

The third time was not the charm: after answering an ad looking for investors in harness horses, he bought two-thirds of a trotter that ran at Freehold, Roosevelt, and Yonkers. 

“It turned out that the people I was hooked up with were bad people, and they almost all ended up going to jail, so I got out of that,” he related. 

In thoroughbred racing, Lamont found the community that he was looking for, and for a reasonable investment. 

“I was very fortunate to have John Tammaro, III as my trainer. I was based in Monmouth and Maryland with him for many years, until he retired a few years ago,” said Lamont. “For the last 15 or 20 years, I have had horses with Tony Wilson, Danny Velazquez, and Danny’s father.”  

Yo Yo Candy is only the second horse Lamont has run at Saratoga; the first, a New York-bred named Twirling Charlie, finished 10th in a maiden special weight last summer. Happy Tenth Racing races mostly at Mid-Atlantic tracks during the warmer months, and at Tampa Bay Downs in the winter. The Sanford winner is based at Parx. 

Lamont paid $35,000 for him at this year’s OBS March sale; the California-bred sold as a yearling for $6,000. Yo Yo Candy’s sire, Danzing Candy, stands in California, but his damside goes right back to Maryland: his dam Yolanda B. Too is a Maryland-bred by Two Punch that won Laurel Park’s Squan Song Stakes in 2006. She fell a nose short in the 2005 Grade 2 Cotillion Stakes at what was then Philadelphia Park. 

“Danny is the one that looks at the catalogues,” said Lamont. “He decides which ones are worthwhile prospects and lets me know which ones he’s looking at. He knows what the budget is.”  

That budget may have gotten a little higher this week; the $96,000 winner’s share of the purse is the biggest a Happy Tenth horse has ever won. 

“That’ll feed our horses for a few months,” said the owner, who has about 16 horses in training. Though he’s pretty much a $2 bettor, he did manage to get down win-place-show, exacta, and trifecta tickets.

Yo Yo Candy ran to the outside up the backstretch of the six-furlong Sanford, sitting in third approaching the far turn.

“When he started his move, I thought, ‘This is decent, maybe we can get third or fourth,’” said Lamont. “He gradually picked up speed, and when he went by the leaders at the sixteenth pole, I thought, ‘We might be able to win this thing.”” 

Win that thing he did, by  2 1/4 lengths, paying $94.

The Hopeful Stakes on Labor Day is a reasonable next target, and no doubt Lamont will be on hand if Yo Yo Candy makes the race. But he’s been in the game long enough not to look too far ahead.

“We have high hopes,” he said. “But I know what this business is like, and you can’t count on anything.”