Trenton, NJ — Harvey Fried never realized what a new sink, bathtub and toilet could do for him. Now in his 40th year as a Standardbred owner, the 77-year-old is enjoying success he could never imagine just five years ago.
When the U.S. Harness Writers Association holds its 2024 Dan Patch Awards banquet, presented by Caesars Entertainment, on Feb. 23 at Rosen Centre in Orlando, Fla., Fried will be proud to see so many winners from his universe.
Being honored from his Patricia Stable in Massapequa, N.Y., are 3-year-old Male Pacer of the Year Captain Albano — a repeat winner — and 3-year-old Male Trotter of the Year Sig Sauer. Both horses were trained by Noel Daley, the Trainer of the Year, and their caretaker, Sonja Booth, is the Fair Island Farm Caretaker of the Year.
As for Fried, his Patricia Stable, named after his wife, finished one vote behind the partnership of Burke Racing Stable and Weaver Bruscemi LLC for Owner of the Year.
“I got a call from someone saying I was in the running, and I’m like ‘What? I only have this little stable with 14 horses,’” he said. “I didn’t even care about it until I lost by a vote.”
He then laughed and joked that “at the banquet I’m gonna get up there and say I’d like a recount. And then they’ll proceed to take me off the stage.
“But seriously, Noel won — and it’s all Noel, he does everything — Sonja won, and the two horses won. I was very happy.”
Perhaps none of this would have been possible if the Frieds did not need a new bathroom in 1985.
It all started with Harvey’s dad, who was a restaurant owner and a bookie — “the only bookie who lost money,” — and would take his son to the track. Growing up in Manhattan and Brooklyn, the lifelong New Yorker went to Yonkers, Roosevelt, Aqueduct and Belmont.
“I fell in love with Thoroughbreds, I made some bucks there,” he said.
After marrying Patricia 41 years ago, the two bought a house but the bathroom was in disarray. Harvey’s home was adorned with some horse photos just because he appreciated them.
“The contractor who was doing the bathroom said, ‘I see a couple horse pictures,’” Fried recalled. “I said ‘They’re not mine, I just like the horses.’ Unfortunately, or fortunately, he was involved in the horses and the claiming game at Roosevelt. He took me one Saturday to the barn and that was it. I was done. I fell in love with it.”
In 1985, Fried got a $10,000 claimer. That got things started, but he eventually determined there wasn’t big money to be made in claiming.
“I started to look at babies and started to study and understand that a little better,” he said.
As the sole owner of Patricia Stable, Fried enjoyed some moderate success and had a few nice horses in Aces N Sevens, the 2000 Hoosier Cup winner, and Crazy About Pat, a 2013 New York Sire Stakes champion also named after his wife.
“She’s the love of my life,” said Fried, who shares five children and eight grandchildren with Pat. “Everything I do is with her. I just wanted to show her how much I really cared about her, and it’s become important. Quite frankly, most people don’t have the foggiest idea that Harvey Fried is Patricia Stable.”
They’re starting to know it now. Despite never having a stable of stars, Fried always made enough to keep going. He never got frustrated and felt like giving up.
“If I ever got to that point I would have,” said Fried, who recently sold his successful high-end floor covering business in order to focus on harness racing. “I would never put any of my household money into this. As long as it was paying for itself in a mild way, I was OK with it. I lost a lot of money the last 25 years but some of it’s coming back now.”
It started in 2021 when Fried got his first big-time horse, pacer Pebble Beach. Up to that point he and his ownership group would pay between $20,000 to $40,000 for a horse. But after a decent 2020 season they had some extra money to play with.
Fried, who does the evaluations of pacing yearlings while another of the Daley team researches the trotters, fell in love with Pebble Beach. Daley warned there may not have been enough money, and they set an $80,000 cap.
“I’m watching it, and I see it go to 81 and I said, ‘Aw crap, we lost him,’” Fried said. “Then it was 82 and I said, ‘We’ve definitely lost him.’ Then I see it go to 83 and two seconds later my phone rings and it’s Noel saying ‘We got him.’ I said, ‘I thought we were at 80!’ and he goes, ‘Well, I just took another shot here and there.’”
Pebble Beach became the 2022 Dan Patch Award 3-year-old male pacer winner after banking $1.35 million and winning the North America Cup, Breeders Crown, Tattersalls Pace and Matron Stakes. The horse was a top-two finisher in 16 of his 18 starts.
“He was a special horse,” Fried said. “The whole thing started with Pebble Beach.”
It continued in the 2023 season, mainly with Captain Albano but with a little Sig Sauer thrown in.
Captain Albano, the son of 2012 and 2013 Dan Patch Pacer of the Year Captaintreacherous and Angelou, earned the Dan Patch 2-year-old Male Pacer of the Year Award after winning seven of nine starts (finishing second in the others) and earning $445,680.
Sig Sauer won four of five starts and $279,500, but he broke in a race at the Red Mile that he led by five lengths down the stretch.
“We found out after that he had some muscle soreness, so we turned him out just to let him grow up a little bit and get a little stronger,” Fried said.
Both horses came back strong this year.
Captain Albano became the sixth male pacer to be a Dan Patch winner at ages 2 and 3 this century after hitting the board in 16 of 18 races with driver Todd McCarthy. He earned $1.1 million and won 12, including the Little Brown Jug, Adios, Max C. Hempt Memorial, Progress Pace and Matron Stakes. Fried owns the horse along with LA Express & Sjoblom Inc., Sjoblom Racing and Michael Dolan.
“Genuinely we like a certain type of horse that’s a little more compact but very strong looking,” he said. “Albano was exactly that. Him and Pebble were very similar in terms of physicality. Their videos were very similar, and they were very similar right from the get-go. When Pebble and Albano first started out, they had ability, and you had to take it from there.
“His expectations from us were high, obviously,” the owner continued about Captain Albano. “Toward the end of the year he was very special. Hopefully he still will be as a 4-year-old.”
The original plan was to put Captain Albano out to stud, but, “his numbers were not good enough. We tested him three days after he came off the track, which is usually never a good thing. But we were running into time constraints.”
Sig Sauer came roaring back in 2024. Driven by Andy McCarthy, he was the season’s fastest 3-year-old trotter after winning the Kentucky Futurity in 1:49.3. The son of Muscle Hill-Sigilwig won five of 10 starts, including the Breeders Crown and Earl Beal Jr. Memorial, and earned $871,812. The horse’s ownership group was Fried, Joe Sbrocco & JAF Racing, Allister Stables and Caviart Farms.
“Noel made a comment that I agreed with 100 percent,” Fried said. “If Sig’s as good as he thinks he is, he’s special. He’s difficult. He was a handful, not in a nasty way but just a handful of a horse. A real stud.
“Noel was pretty patient. He probably would have won the Hambletonian with a little better luck (finishing fourth). He didn’t really catch a break there; he got buried on the rail then tried to come out. He showed at the end (of the season) how good he is.”
Sig Sauer was retired to stallion duty and now stands at Hanover Shoe Farms.
In looking ahead, Fried feels he has some good babies but “it’s real early, I don’t get too excited until April and May.”
Amazingly, after 37 years of relative anonymity, there has been nothing but excitement in Fried’s world lately. Is it something he ever imagined just five years ago?
“Absolutely not,” he said. “Some things you get lucky with and some you don’t. We were pretty lucky. We started with Pebble Beach, and we were like, one hammer down from losing him and we ended up getting him and that changed the whole scenario.”
The journey has been cautious but effective.
“I’m not your typical very wealthy owner,” Fried said. “I’m not crying the blues, don’t get me wrong. But a lot of these guys have (big-time) money; I don’t have that. So, I had to be very careful how I handled it.
“The last couple years have been just absurd with how good they’ve been. The group I’m involved with have been really great together. We’re almost like a family. We all make decisions together. Everybody’s got their own job to do and that’s where we are at this point.”
Daley is a key part of that group. The two have worked together for 20 years, with a slight interruption in 2018-19 when Noel went back to Australia for 11 months. A former Fried trainer, who was retiring, was the one to initially recommend Daley. The two talked and it has been a solid relationship ever since.
Harvey and Pat continue to live on Long Island, where they moved 26 years ago so their daughter Samantha — who attended North Carolina-Charlotte on a full soccer scholarship — could play with acclaimed soccer high school St. Anthony’s in South Huntington.
None of the Frieds’ children or grandchildren have shown interest in the harness racing business, which is fine with the patriarch. But at 77, he has no thoughts of slowing down, especially now that he can focus more on the horses after selling his business.
“As long as there’s money I can go for a long time,” Fried said. “Because of Sig Sauer and Pebble Beach and their stallion money, I probably can go on for a while.”
He feels his biggest lesson over 40 years is the importance of breeding and conformation as opposed to just buying a claimer.
“I’ve learned from a couple of good people, and it’s been successful,” he said.
Fried also admitted that, because of his sudden explosion of success, it feels in some ways like his career is just getting started.
“Yeah,” he said, “I swear to God me and my wife sit there and look at each other sometimes and go ‘What is going on here?’”
What is going on is that the Frieds picked the perfect guy to overhaul their bathroom four decades ago.