Dr Patrick Graham, the man who bought his first horse at the age of 18, is convinced that the Emancipation Race Day is the epiphany of horse racing. Fifty years hence and coinciding with the 21st staging of the race day, the unassuming veterinarian fervently asserts that the event is clearly of historical value.

Some 40 years a vet and in the business of horse racing for half a century with the purchase of his first horse Just Desert, an Irish mare imported by the late Lucien Chen — who by way of Tachyon produced two foals, Sure Hit and Spotted Wonder — Graham would have been around for many of the Emancipation Race Day cards and would importantly have an insightful word on the quality stock of horses best suited for racing.

Ideally, it’s the key factor in how the industry is sustained.

A passion for rearing and caring animals (growing up seeing his parents rearing goats and pigs in their back yard — with goats, cattle, German Shepherd dogs, peahens, pigeons for racing, eclectus, and yellow-naped Amazon parrots also in his backyard in his Bellevue home in St Catherine), Graham, champion goat farmer in 2017, is described as the Jamaican ‘Dr Dolittle’.

A graduate of St Jago High School (a Manning Cup schoolboy footballer), his first love at age 15 was to be a jockey. At age 20 (two years after buying his first horse, much to the dismay of his parents who wanted him to pursue business), he was focused on being a vet. Studying overseas (giving up a football scholarship), he gained a first degree in mathematics and science at the University of Windsor in Canada and a degree in veterinary medicine at the Tuskegee University in Alabama — returning to the track at Caymanas Park where he was taken as a child by his parents on race days.

“I really enjoy racing,” he says, “and being a vet is not really work for me — I am just enjoying myself.

“You have to get horses well grown on the farm and properly taken care of — well handled, so the horse is not crazy coming to Caymanas. It’s a properly behaving horse,” Graham says. “You need a horse with good conformation — good physique — with a proper build up to fitness. All this will minimise the chances of the horse getting hurt, and hurting others.”

Graham says grooms are therefore critical to the horse’s well-being, and invariably, these conditions, plus pedigree, affect the final sale of horses.

He acknowledges the practice of acquiring average stock, with some trainers and grooms doing remarkably well to produce what he describes as “world beaters”, but says more investment is needed in obtaining the ‘world beating type’, as purse increases are important to this operation and outcome.

The breeder of a Derby winner, Ransom Man, Graham muses about the outcome of the Emancipation Race Day, Friday, August 1 at Caymanas Park, where he would also like to see spouses and family members of the industry operators (owners, trainers, etcetera) playing a bigger part. This is much like the family atmosphere that it used to be when his parents took him along. Back then, his godfather Aubrey Wong, of the Spanish Grain Store, had a stud farm at Paul Mountain, St Catherine.

“The Emancipation Race Day is a premier event, and everybody wants to win,” he says.