by Harness Racing Communications, a division of the USTA

A little more than a year ago, a four-year-old trotter named Homestead Dreamer traveled east after dominating the Iowa fair circuit and found success at the Meadowlands and Yonkers. History might be ready to repeat itself in the form of I Pity The Fool, a three-year-old trotter who on Wednesday will make his first appearance outside of the Hawkeye State.

Trained and driven by Dan Roland of Grinnell, Iowa, I Pity The Fool has won 19 of 25 career starts and earned $41,306. He has won seven of nine races this year and was second in the two races he didn’t win. From August 24, 2003 to July 27, he put together a 13-race victory streak that was halted when he was beaten a neck by Message To Marv at Oskaloosa. On Wednesday, he will be entered for the largest purse of his career — the $52,000 Alexander Memorial Review Stakes at Springfield.

“We come to Springfield every year and try to bring one horse to race,” said Roland, who owns the homebred I Pity The Fool with his wife of eight years, Jeralene. “When he raced as well as he did last year, we decided to pay the supplement to get into this race. We’ll see how good he is. I’d like to think there’s a couple horses in that race that we can beat. If the horse is right and races the way he can race, I don’t think there’s anyone better. They might beat him, I might mess up driving him, but I don’t think they’ll beat him on sheer ability.

“He’s a touch on the wild side,” Roland added about the gelding. “He’s used to being the boss and getting things his own way. In the barn, he’s perfect to be around, but on the track he can be kind of a bully. He’s used to being the top dog, I think.”

Homestead Dreamer, owned by Roland’s friend Dale “Doc” Hein, won 27 of 32 starts and earned $60,854 in Iowa as a two- and three-year-old, then won 13 of 34 races and $130,474 on the East Coast. “That’s basically the footsteps [I Pity The Fool] has been following in,” Roland said. “He’ll return to race in Iowa through Prairie Meadows and he’s eligible for the Hanover at Balmoral in November; after that it’s up in the air whether to sell him or send him to Canada or maybe the Meadowlands.”

I Pity The Fool has a career record of 2:00.4, taken on Eldon’s half-mile track in an Iowa Sire Stakes event. His time is the slowest among the starters in Wednesday’s race, but that doesn’t concern Roland. “We figure we can improve six to eight seconds going from our county fairs to this track,” he said. “You can just about bank on it, depending on the trip and what the pace is.”

Roland, a 34-year-old Web site designer, and his wife, an accountant for a beer distributor, have been involved in racing for about six years. “My uncle and cousins have raced horses since the 1970s,” Roland said. “I used to spend my summers working for them. I took some time away from it when I went to school and started working, but after we got married we decided to get back into it.”

In what Roland described with a laugh as “a ploy” to further his wife’s interest in racing, he bought her a horse. The horse was a filly named Mistress Shadow, and Roland purchased her for $600. Mistress Shadow did well for the Rolands, so they later bought her sire, Shadow Of A Crown, for $1,000. Shadow Of A Crown sired I Pity The Fool, out of Miss Molly Maguire, a $550 purchase.

“We went from one horse to four to nine, and now we’re up to around 27 with eight mares pregnant,” Roland said. “We just bought a 155-acre farm; it’s not full time for us, but it’s moving in that direction. I Pity The Fool is the best horse we’ve had. We’ve been kind of lucky in that each year we seem to get one horse better than we ever had. We want to build up quality and keep the quantity at a manageable level. We’d like to be coming over [to Springfield] for this type of race every year.”