Challenge


This Challenge Championship Runner Brings A Family Together
Loco Ocho with trainer Garth Blattner.

© Andrea Caudill / AQHA Racing
This Challenge Championship Runner Brings A Family Together

By Andrea Caudill

Q RACING—OCTOBER 20, 2020—When Loco Ocho races in Saturday’s $100,000-est. AQHA Distaff Challenge Championship (G1), she will represent family.

First, the 4-year-old mare will represent her own bloodlines: She is sired by The Louisiana Cartel and out of the First Wrangler mare Sign Of Pride.

She got her name because she is the eighth foal for her dam, who was herself a multiple stakes winner who contested the 2005 Distaff Challenge Championship (G1) at Los Alamitos, and she follows in the footsteps of her siblings who have raced in Challenge races, including her full sister, Sparklin Cartel, who herself qualified for the Distaff Challenge Championship in 2018.

Loco Ocho has won three of her starts this year, including winning the Weber Downs Distaff Challenge. She has a career record of finishing third or better in 13 of her 17 career starts, with earnings of $37,986.

This will be her first start outside the Intermountain region, as she travels to The Downs at Albuquerque to represent another family – the Barlows of Idaho Falls, Idaho.

Loco Ocho races in the name of her breeders, Les and Darla Barlow, and honors the memory of Les, who passed away last year.

Les grew up with horses, and was a passionate student of breeding. He carefully selected the crosses that produced multiple stakes winners from their lone broodmare, and he and Darla also enjoyed watching their three daughters, Brook Soelberg, Britney Christiansen and Brandi Newton, grow up with horses.

“When he passed away, at first I thought maybe I would sell the horses and get completely out of it,” Darla said. “But two of my three daughters are very much interested in the racing. It’s their link with their father. So we’ve kept on.

“It truly is that my daughters feel their dad’s presence every time they’re working with the horses,” she added. “I thought (I might sell), because I didn’t want to do chores every day, but I realized that that connection with their father is more important.”

The women care for and enjoy the horses just like their dad did, and that passion for horses is transferring to the next generation – granddaughter Isabelle Newton herself shows eventing on another one of Sign Of Pride’s daughters, the retired racehorse Ketels Pride.

“We have enough acreage that she sets up a jumping course in the back,” Darla said of her granddaughter. “It’s fun to sit on the deck and watch her put the horse through her moves.”

Trainer Garth Blattner has trained their racehorses for the better part of a decade, including Sparklin Cartel, whom they had planned to send to the Championships two years ago, when they found a fracture during an exam, a credit to the trainer’s care, Darla says, as the mare never showed signs of it. She has now been retired as a broodmare.

The Barlow family is looking forward to watching their homebred mare race on the Grade 1 stage.

“It’s been an emotional year-and-a-half, because they miss their dad,” Darla says. “Every time (Loco Ocho) ran last year, we would all stand in the winner’s circle and cry. I’m sure there will be some tears shed in Albuquerque, but we’re just grateful and blown away that from that one mare we’ve been able to raise this many really quality horses.”

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