Rich Fisher

Trenton, NJ – Harry Landy is 27, looks 21, and has the wisdom of a 50-year-old.

Need proof? Feel free to digest his thoughts on such matters as:

–What it means to be a trainer.

“I have five people currently working for me,” said Landy, who took over the operation and expansion of family-owned Congress Hill Farm and Training Center in Monroe, N.J. this past year. “They’re just a really responsible staff, who really care about the horses and know that I expect them to give their 100 percent and I’ll give my 100 percent.

Being a trainer, when you put your name down on a sheet, you’re responsible to take care of your staff and be there for them, you’re responsible for your horse, responsible for the integrity of the business and all these things. Just being a trainer comes with a lot of responsibilities.”

–Why it’s more important for him to develop a horse, than to enjoy the rush of driving full-time, which he did while winning 262 races from 2010-14.

Harry Landy has significantly cut back on driving to concentrate on training. Vicki Wright Photo.

“I envisioned that my career would hopefully be at a premiere level of training and driving, but it’s very hard to do both. Right now, I would say driving requires you to be available every single day to drive at Freehold, meet people, and drive at night.

“I think it’s so much more important for me to be working in the morning every day with the younger horses to try to make something great. I think by driving, I wouldn’t have the time to create such a successful horse. I would be kind of having my assistant or someone else sit behind the horses every day and I enjoy the fact of really watching them grow up and see them win races when they’re older.”

–On why he won’t totally give up driving (he has averaged 48 starts over the past four years after averaging 385 the previous six).

“I like to drive some of the horses I train to see where they’re at in the race and to try and get their confidence up. Repetition is everything and if a horse is on the lead and getting beat every week, it’s not doing the horse any good and the driver might be discouraged in the horse. As opposed to when I drive one of my horses, I want to really teach the horse to fly at the end, and that their last quarter is their strongest. I find that just confidence-building for the horse.

“I’m very into teaching the horses to win. If I can teach them to win and then put a driver on them like Dexter Dunn, or someone who has a lot of confidence and is winning a lot of races, I think that’s a really good combination.”

–And finally, his confidence in the ability to hopefully expand from a private trainer with 20 horses, to becoming a public trainer.

“I’d like to train public, but it would have to be with an elite group or horses who would either be yearlings or top stakes-ability horses. With the facility I have, I think I could do very well with managing a stakes horse and training a baby. Our routine every day and how we train horses is very different to someone who might just be at a farm track. We have three totally different training tracks that could really keep a horse happy. The usual work of going around the track, that doesn’t happen at my farm. The horses are on three different tracks. It’s a little different feel.

“We have a training facility. We’re building a brand new 20-stall farm right now. I would expand my stable to whatever number I need. I have 120 stalls, so I’m prepared. If the numbers got huge, I would be totally fine.”

Just as Landy is at a fine place in his life. He has won 167 races and $1.49 million in seven years as a trainer. More importantly, he knows where he’s at and where he wants to go. In fact, he’s known it all his life.

“In 2001, I was 9 years old,” Landy recalled. “In school they asked, ‘What is your dream for 2001?’ and I wrote ‘My dream is to have a world champion harness racehorse and to become a harness racing trainer and driver.’ It also said (my dream was) that we find Osama Bin Laden. That was almost 20 years ago, and we’ve accomplished both of those things. I always thought that was funny. I still have the paper hanging up in my room.”

While Landy wasn’t in on the Bin Laden raid, he certainly had the wherewithal to make the driver/trainer segment of that dream come true.

A third-generation horseman, Harry’s grandfather, Eugene Landy, began his harness racing “career” by parking cars at Freehold Raceway at age 17. He would sit and enjoy the Saturday races as a teen before going on to become a dynamic businessman. Eugene built United Manufactured Homes and Monmouth Real Estate Investment Corporation, with both companies having traded on the stock exchange for five decades.

“He’s like an icon to me,” Harry said. “One of the guys familiar with all that said most people don’t last five minutes on the stock exchange and my grandfather has lasted 50 years.”

Eugene’s love for harness racing never waned. He bought his first horse in 1977 and purchased Congress Hill in 1985, the same year he bought his best horse, The Porter Gray. Eugene’s son, Sam, eventually became a driver and drove The Porter Gray to victory a New Jersey Sire Stakes championship.

Sam had three sons but only Harry inherited the harness racing gene. At about the same age he wrote his paper on his dreams, Landy attended the Harness Horse Youth Foundation program. He soon bought and raced some ponies in Pennsylvania before moving to amateur driving.

Landy’s first full year in the sulky provided 48 wins and $252,868 in earnings at age 18. His most victories were 77 at age 20 in 2012 and his best earning season came a year later with $472,582.

He began training in earnest in 2013 and won 41 races and $335,303 that first year.

“Mostly I just wanted to drive when I was younger,” Landy said. “I think I got to a point where I was driving a lot of horses that weren’t that good, and I thought to myself ‘No one is going to give me a champion to drive right now. I have to go out and make my own champion.’”

By then he was living and training in Saratoga, where he moved in 2013. Harry’s drives dipped below 100 in 2016 and have decreased each year. While in New York, Landy claimed Bell On Wheels and she became Saratoga’s Pacing Mare of the Year.

Last year, he returned to Monroe and took over the full-time operation of Congress Hill.

“I realized with New Jersey racing getting better there was a need to amp up the farm, so I moved back home,” Landy said. “We put in two new tracks along with the five-eighths-mile track we had. Now we have a one-mile woods track that I think is probably one of the nicest harness tracks in the world. It’s going through the woods on a riverbank, you see hundreds of goats, you see huge bucks, maybe a foot from you. It’s like an unbelievable track.

“I also put in a straight sand strip that’s half-mile long. All those things are just important for the foundation of the younger horses. Building an elite stable you need a facility that has all those things as well as a swimming pool, which we’ve always had. All that adds up to a foundation that creates a good year.”

Landy’s top horse in 2019 was HL Revadon, a 3-year-old trotter who finished second in the Dexter Cup at Freehold and won three straight times at The Meadowlands. The horse will be staked in the 4-year-old Graduate and Hambletonian Maturity this coming year.

“A few others that were exciting were some overnight horses I kind of liked,” Landy said. “But the best thing about this year is that I’m a New Jersey guy and the New Jersey program is getting better and better. My father was on top of that before it happened. We have maybe four or five New Jersey eligibles for this upcoming year. They’re Lis Mara (sired) pacers. I don’t think a lot of people were on top of that so we’re really excited about next year.

“And I have a lot of really nice babies I bought at the sales this year. Hopefully they end up doing well. I’m also getting into the breeding. We’re buying very well-bred trotters this past year with the hopes that they’ll be nice racehorses and stakes horses and turn out to be top broodmare prospects.”

Aside from being on top of the breeding, Sam also runs United Manufactured Homes. He and his father have been invaluable role models for Harry.

“My dad has been very supportive, and he has always really enjoyed my passion for racing,” Landy said. “We work hand in hand on building the farm and making it a premiere training center and also a breeding facility. He was breeding mares to Lis Mara prior to anyone doing this. Now hopefully he’ll reap the benefits next year.

“And with my grandfather, I look at his success on the stock exchange and I base that on his integrity and his hard work for his investors. I kind of take that to my stable as well, with having the most integrity for the sport. I think with good integrity, good owners come, so that’s what I’m focused on.”

It’s a very mature focus, to say the least.