A Parx horse racing family sends Kentucky Outlaw to the Haskell Stakes
Felissa and John Dunn own, train, and care for their horses at Parx. Their son also trains horses there. Preakness winner Journalism is the Haskell favorite.
Felissa Dunn was introduced to the world of horseback riding at a camp when she was 12. She immediately fell in love with it.
The next year, the Levittown native got a thoroughbred show horse off the track, but she says it was in her college years when she was able to explore her passion for training horses.
“I went off to college when I was 18, but liked the racetrack better,” Dunn said. “I came home for Christmas break, called one of my friends that I rode with, and she said, ‘Oh, I work at [Parx, formerly known as Philadelphia Park] racetrack. We get paid to walk and brush horses,’ and I said, ‘You’re kidding,’ so I went there, and I started working.”
She graduated from Temple with a teaching degree but said it took her “a long time” because she was spending a lot of time working at the racetrack, galloping other people’s horses until she bought one of her own.
Dunn met her husband, John, at Monmouth Park one summer after that, and he owned and trained horses, too. She said they’ve owned around five horses at a time for years, and the newest addition is Kentucky Outlaw, a 3-year-old thoroughbred who will race in Saturday’s Haskell Stakes at Monmouth Park.
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Journalism, who won the Preakness and finished second in the Kentucky Derby and Belmont Stakes, is the Haskell favorite.
John and Felissa purchased Kentucky Outlaw for around $12,000 last summer, she said, and have been training him since. Horses aren’t allowed to compete until they have a gate card, a certification that the horse has been taught and can perform gate procedures, and it took Kentucky Outlaw a while to earn that.
“He was having problems breaking from the gate,” Dunn said. “I actually had to send him out to a farm for somebody to try to work with him. He’s just a quiet horse, and he would just stand there while the other horses broke, and then he’d break.”
Saturday’s Haskell will be Kentucky Outlaw’s sixth race. He won a Maiden Special Weight in February and an Allowance Optional Claiming in March, both at Parx, and the Long Branch Stakes in May at Monmouth Park.
Felissa added that his past few races were easier than the Haskell, and she’s a little nervous.
“It’s my husband’s idea to go in this race,” she said. “I would have found an easier race because I’m more of a pessimist. He’s more of an optimist. The horse is fast, though, the breaking problem just sets him back a little.”
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A lot of horses are owned by prominent stables or syndicates and are trained by paid workers, but the Dunns own, train, and care for their horses. Their son, Ben, just earned his training license and started racing horses as well.
“He never was interested in the horses,” said Felissa, who added that her daughter is scared of them. “He went off to college for engineering, then decided it wasn’t really for him. And I said, ‘Well, then you’re going to come work for me at the racetrack.’ And he started doing it, and he really liked it. He’s doing real well.”
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Felissa wants to keep training horses as long as she can. She currently has a torn ACL and can’t ride but plans to get back to galloping her horses as soon as possible.
“My husband is sort of retired, and I’m going to do it as long as I can,” she said. “I’ll do it till I’m 70.”