HOT SPRINGS, Ark. – Tom Durant has been in racing since the 1980s, but he will be charting some new territory Friday when his homebred D’code chases after Kentucky Derby points in the Grade 3, $1 million Southwest Stakes at Oaklawn Park.
“I’ve had some good horses, had some horses that have won a lot of money, but I haven’t ever been in the Derby,” he said. “He will be my first, if he makes it.”
Durant, 76, is the current leading owner at Oaklawn.
D’code won his career debut at the track Dec. 14, romping by 8 1/4 lengths in a maiden special weight sprint. He led throughout for trainer Ray Ashford Jr. and earned a Beyer Speed Figure of 99 for covering six furlongs in 1:09.45. It ranked as the second-highest Beyer put up by a 2-year-old in 2025.
“We think the horse can go two turns,” Durant said. “He gallops out well. We didn’t even hardly use the horse in his first out. He ran such an unbelievable Beyer. The jockey just sat on him. He didn’t move. He didn’t do anything. We’re excited about the horse. I’m just glad I still got him.”
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Durant entered D’code in a 2-year-olds in training sale last year in Maryland. The workout show was canceled, he said, and the horse failed to reach his reserve.
“Nobody got to see what that horse really was, and that’s probably the reason I was able to buy him back,” Durant said.
D’code is a son of Speightstown. He’s out of the Twirling Candy mare Dos Vinos. The mare’s first foal, Rossiniana, was bred by Durant and races for other connections in Japan. He’s won at distances of a mile and 1 1/8 miles. Dos Vinos, who died last March, has a 2-year-old filly by Audible and a yearling filly by Not This Time.
D’code’s female family traces to Voladora, a multiple stakes winner around two turns who earned more than $500,000. She was listed as gray/roan, like D’code, and she also appears in the female family of Stiglets, who earned a Beyer of 107 for a recent allowance win at Oaklawn.
Durant and Ashford said their biggest concern heading into the Southwest is lost training as a winter storm forced the cancellation of training for more than a week at Oaklawn.
“Until that, we’d not had a setback, were doing everything that we wanted to do,” Ashford said.
Ashford has otherwise been pleased with how D’code has been doing up to the Southwest. He’s logged four works since his debut win, including a bullet five furlongs in 59.80 seconds Jan. 7.
Durant, who owns car dealerships in Florida, Oklahoma, and Texas, got into racing through a Thoroughbred mare he bought from a customer for $100,000. He sold her four months later for $125,000, in foal to a Quarter Horse. Durant raced Quarter Horses before transitioning full-time to Thoroughbreds.
“In 1997, I changed to Thoroughbreds because they’d just opened up Lone Star Park and they ran four months in a row, right over here close to me,” Durant said. “I wanted to run Thoroughbreds simply because of the longer meet at Lone Star.”
Durant became the track’s all-time leading owner, and at his height, had about 50 horses in training at Lone Star. These days, he said he keeps about 12 to 15 horses in training, with most at Oaklawn and some at Fair Grounds. He has two broodmares in Kentucky, raises their offspring and sale purchases at his farm in Texas, and has the young horses developed in Florida.
Durant’s top runners through the years have included Touch Tone, who was a close second to Point Given in the Haskell in 2001, and Silver Dust, a four-time graded stakes winner who earned more than $1 million.
His stable now includes the stakes winner Run Classic and the promising Warnock, who is a 3-year-old half-brother to Breeders’ Cup Dirt Mile winner Nysos. Super Cruise runs Friday at Oaklawn for Durant in an overnight stakes, the General MacArthur.
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