After surviving a scare, trotter Ponda Jet continues to soar
There’s no doubting that Ponda Jet has trotted his way to superstardom on the Indiana harness racing scene. When trainer Jay Hochstetler enters the 6-year-old Dover Dan gelding to race, Ponda Jet consistently delivers on his reputation of finishing on the board — or at the least giving his all when falling short. He’s tenacious. And … he’s a survivor.
What most in the sport don’t know is that in the midst of his sophomore season, Ponda Jet’s racing career — and life — could have ended. The mere fact that he is still racing, let alone competing at such a high level, is in itself a miracle.
Leading into the 2023 season, Ponda Jet was not the trotter that fans know today. As a freshman, he managed two wins in 11 starts, picking up a win in Indiana Sires Stakes preliminary action and finishing fourth in the $270,000 Super Final.
“He was kind of a head case,” Hochstetler said. “My dad (Homer) drove him. He was really strong in the mouth and he wanted to go a million miles an hour, but he wasn’t quite balanced enough where he could do it and also wasn’t strong enough to set those types of fractions yet. He was one that took some time.”
Time, coupled with a bit change, helped to unlock the trotter’s potential. When he returned to the track as a sophomore, he possessed the strength and balance to back up the speed. The victories soon followed.
Ponda Jet quickly rattled off five straight wins to open his 3-year-old campaign with driver Kyle Wilfong, the last two coming in Sires Stakes action. He remained competitive all season, collecting runner-up finishes in the $110,000 Phil Langley (now a Grade 3 event), $30,000 Circle City and $60,000 Pegasus. Ponda Jet matched those with third-place efforts in the $250,000 Indiana Sires Stakes Super Final and the $205,000 Grade 2 Carl Erskine. Then, the season came to a screeching halt — both literally and figuratively.
“He had raced on Friday night at Hoosier, and I brought him home just to turn him out for the weekend,” explained the trainer. “I was loading him to bring him back to the track, and he had swung his head. His lead rope got stuck on the side of the trailer, and the chain just snapped right in half. It was five o’clock in the morning, pitch black and foggy. He was gone — he took off through the cornfield.”
Hochstetler still considers the events that followed as the worst of his life. Although the season was winding down, Ponda Jet had turned in a 7-6-2 record in 17 starts, banking $328,812 for a partnership that included his mother, Connie, as well as Robert Buddig and Allen Schwartz. There were still a handful of open stakes on the calendar, but none of that mattered as the trainer desperately sought to find his star pupil.
“He thought he was just turned out. You know, you release a horse off a lead rope, and they think it’s time,” Hochstetler said. “He didn’t run away. He just kind of took off trotting away.”
The dark and foggy conditions made it difficult to find Ponda Jet. Eventually, Hochstetler discovered signs of where the gelding had been, but the scene only escalated his fears.
“I saw a truck at the next intersection that had its hazard lights on. I found the truck. I didn’t find him,” he noted. “The driver said he never saw him. He said, ‘I hit the brakes as hard as I could.’ He felt terrible.”
A totaled truck and no signs of Ponda Jet. Now Hochstetler feared the worst for his trainee.
“When I saw the truck, I assumed I would find him dead for sure.”
The search continued for another 25 minutes before Hochstetler finally found Ponda Jet. Stunningly, the trotter appeared relatively unharmed despite the carnage left behind.
“He had some scratches and stuff, but he was just trotting down the road. We loaded him up, brought him to Purdue University, and expected the worst. I was completely panicked,” said Hochstetler. “They called us a little later and said, ‘We’ve x-rayed, we’ve ultrasounded, we’ve stitched him up. You can take him home if you want.’ He was fine.”
Ponda Jet suffered no ill effects. The only reminder of the incident is a small indentation on his pectoral muscle. For Hochstetler, however, the memories of that morning have slowly faded over time, although not without difficulty.
“It took me a while even afterwards just to drive by where I knew he got hit without my blood pressure going up,” he admitted. “It was just a tough mental block. It was a horrible event, and I got incredibly lucky for it not to end worse.”
The silver lining in this story is that Ponda Jet shook off the incident and has gone on to become one of the top open-class trotters at Harrah’s Hoosier Park. He’s the type of horse anyone would want in their barn: In 90 career starts through early September, he has finished on the board 74 times — an outstanding 82% clip.
Since returning as a 4-year-old, Ponda Jet has turned in impressive numbers. $479,750 of his $875,512 has been earned over the last three seasons, nearly all accumulated at his home track. In that span, he has collected 30 of his 39 career wins.
During his ‘transitional’ 4-year-old season, Ponda Jet set Hoosier Park’s all-age trotting record, circling the Anderson, Ind., oval in 1:50. In that race, he held off Lexus Kody by a half length to lower the track standard by three-fifths of a second.
This season, he is 5-5-4 in 14 attempts, with earnings just under the six-figure mark. Behind those numbers is a horse who simply shows up ready to work, according to the driver who knows him best.
“I hate to refer to him as a machine, but he’s just a machine,” said Wilfong, who has steered the trotter since late in his freshman season. “When he goes on the track, he’s giving you what he’s got. There’s no doubt about where he’s going. He does his job. He enjoys it. He just knows what he’s doing. It’s like he’s just programmed to do that.”
And racing fans and horsepeople know that when the gate folds, Ponda Jet is heading to the front. That’s his nature. That’s how he is programmed. And that has produced results, again and again.
“It’s just the way he does it. He’s not a horse you can really duck off to last,” said Hochstetler. “One day I want to run the math when his career is over on how many times he’s been on the front, because I gotta say it’s 95% of his lifetime starts. For him to do that week in and week out, you just don’t find a horse that can take that type of pressure and enjoy it. The closer a horse gets, the more he digs in. He doesn’t care that he has to leave in :26.2. He thrives on it.”
Wilfong said that what makes the gelding great is that you can’t pick one race as his best.
“When he won in (1):50 in the track record mile, it had never been done before at Hoosier Park. And he raced giant,” he said. “You could just pull up all of his lines and just pick a random replay from his 3-year-old year on, and you’re gonna see an awesome horse out on the racetrack.”
That kind of week-in, week-out excellence doesn’t happen without a horse that holds up physically to the taxing miles synonymous with open-class racing, and Hochstetler credits part of Ponda Jet’s success with his soundness.
“He’s just naturally a sound horse,” he commented. “With how hard he races and the way he trains, he should have some stuff that we should have to take care of because every horse usually does. If I had a stable as sound as him, I would have extremely low vet bills and an extremely profitable stable.”
Soundness aside, the pairing with Wilfong has been just as critical to the gelding’s success. Hochstetler said it was the driver’s work with another horse a decade prior that helped with the selection.
“He drove a horse for my dad back at Balmoral named Anthonyskywalker, who was almost an identical horse, probably more out of control than Jet was at that time in his career. And Kyle got along with him,” he explained.
As gritty as Ponda Jet is on the track, the trainer said he is a “sweetheart” in the barn and a family favorite.
“When he’s on the track, it’s all business,” he said. “He’s just a pleasure to be around. He’s been such a cool horse and a blessing to our family. He’s my dad’s favorite horse — in recent memory, at least. He usually jogs him about every morning. I never fight over it because I know it’s his favorite horse.” After the surreal events of nearly three years ago, Hochstetler is just happy to have Ponda Jet in the barn. The fact that he has turned into an elite trotter is merely a bonus.