by Mary Lou Lawless

Independence, IA — On a heated quest for a couple of Iowa performance titles, Aaron Mitchell and his animated freshman pacer Blues Hot Clues have found themselves under national scrutiny for several weeks, as they bask in the warm light cast upon the USTA’s top performers list.

Mary Lou Lawless photo

Blues Hot Clues is leading all North American freshman pacers in wins with 10.

A gelded son of the Iowa sire Hot Pans (Artsplace–Adored Yankee, by Nero), Blues Hot Clues paced in 2:02, to his 10th win in as many lifetime starts on Friday, August 10, at Iowa’s State Fair in Des Moines. Sporting a mark of 2:00.1h, achieved at Sioux Center, Iowa, and having earned almost $14,000, Blues Hot Clues has won more races than any other 2-year-old pacer on the continent this year.

“He never gets tired,” Mitchell said. The trainer-driver is an easygoing, but high energy horseman who hails from the southern end of the USTA’s District 4, near Dallas, Texas. The duo are at their summer headquarters on the Wapello County Fairgrounds in Eldon, Iowa, where Mitchell and his stable crew were loading provisions for seven horses and planning to leave early for the 2-day meet at the Missouri State Fair, in Sedalia.

The first full crop from Hot Pans debuted impressively in Iowa last year, and by the time Aaron Mitchell got out to Duane and Patricia Roland’s Grinnell, Iowa, breeding farm, late in the fair season, there were just three Hot Pans yearlings from the second crop to choose from, a filly and two geldings. Mitchell came away with an agreement between Duane Roland and himself for the son of Clooneen, a then 17-year-old daughter of On The Road Again and the Meadow Skipper mare Cloyne. Cloyne was out of Bret’s Romance, she by Bret Hanover, and Aaron has been understandably partial to the lineage of each of these legendary sires.

“He never gave me a minute’s worth of trouble,” Mitchell said about breaking Blues Hot Clues to harness.

Once Mitchell was settled in for the fall meet at Prairie Meadows, Duane Roland brought the yearling to the track and Aaron started him there. On a lead, behind a truck, Blues Hot Clues trotted, according to Mitchell, but when in full harness he’s a model pacer. He was amazed at how easily the youngster caught on, and after he’d hitched him for the third time, he was saying it out loud: “Boy, I really like this colt.”

The next time he spoke with Duane Roland, Mitchell was direct and to the point, saying, “This boy’s mama is mine.”

The proprietors of Iowa’s largest breeding farm, the Rolands stand four pacers, two of them trotting stallions, and they maintain a band of almost 30 broodmares. With weanlings and yearlings factored in, they care for about 75 to 80 head year round.

A practical manager, Duane Roland was about to transfer Clooneen to another member of the extended family, in the process of culling out a few older mares.

Mitchell has dissuaded him, however, staking claim to Clooneen and all of her babies before he left for Texas with Blues Hot Clues last year. He recently called at the farm to see a full-sister to Blues Hot Clues, and said he has hooked her five times already.

The baby at Clooneen’s side in 2007 is a colt, and Mitchell says “he looks like he will be bigger than Blues Hot Clues.”

We’ll just have to see. As the Dan Fogelberg song “Run For The Roses” relates, it takes breeding, training and “something unknown” to make a racehorse. Aaron Mitchell thinks he has discovered the key clue in the mating of a newly proven Iowa sire and a classically bred mare.

Like the rest of Iowa’s freshman competitors, Blues Hot Clues has three more Iowa-registered contests at county fairs, then opportunities on Iowa’s only one-mile pari-mutuel track at Prairie Meadows.

How long can he go undefeated and remain top dog among the top performers?

Stay tuned for the next episode of Blues Hot Clues.