I couldn’t figure out how to respond to the private email I just received but yes I do remember John Piesen, another great man.

Thank you for the kind reply to my vignettes about John Forbes but I have another one that was very unusual and is so telling about who John was. One afternoon at Monmouth I was diving in John’s suburban down the road between the barns alongside the race track, for those of you familiar with Monmouth there is a hill that goes up to the track as the race track turns into the final turn. The races where running that afternoon and as luck would have it, there was a race leaving the starting gate from the 6 furlong chute, our windows were open so John hearing the bells as the gates open, pulls over to side of the road towards the track, he stops the car and without saying anything to me, he jumps out of the car and starts racing up a fairly good hill to get to see the horses coming down the backstretch going into the turn. Of course not knowing what the hell was going on, I jump out of the car also and run up the hill after John, I catch up to him as the horses are 100 yds from the turn, John still isn’t saying a word but is watching what I believe where the horses. We both stand there until the horses cross the finish line in dead silence and I say to john, which horse were you watching? He says “I wasn’t looking at the horses, I was watching the Jockeys, I wanted to see how they were riding. After knowing him for many years, I came to realize what a student of even the smallest details john was. He was so innovative and always thinking about some minute detail of something about, horses, jockeys, breeding, interval training, you name it. He will never get the true respect he deserves, but there are others like him still out there but they are quietly disappearing.
I strongly recommend if you never watched or listened to a race on the backstretch it’s quite amazing, when there is no one else around you and the horses come tearing by you like a nascar race, and you hear their hoofs hitting the surface and you hear and see the kick back, you can actually hear the jockeys talking and sometimes yelling at one another, it’s really amazing. Put it on your bucket list if you haven’t experienced it yet. You will not be disappointed.
So many things I learned about racing from Mr. Forbes
Cheers
Brendan Cassidy