In The Money · Contests

By ITM Staff

The Best Horseplayer in the Game Right Now Might Be Dylan Donnelly

Racing loves a superstar. We build our whole calendar around finding the next great horse, and when one arrives we give it the coverage it deserves. But every so often the superstar isn’t on four legs — and right now, the most compelling competitor in the sport is arguably a 34-year-old horseplayer from Rancho Cucamonga who keeps winning the biggest tournaments there are.

Dylan Donnelly won the National Horseplayers Championship in March. This past weekend, he won the Del Mar Summer Challenge. And the way he did both should make you sit up and pay attention.

A champion by 84 cents

Start with the NHC, the sport’s marquee handicapping championship. Donnelly went into the final race of the Las Vegas final table sitting fourth, needing something to happen. It did: a win-place score on Crazy Cavalier in the fifth at Santa Anita vaulted him to the top of a leaderboard that was so tightly bunched nobody in the room was quite sure who’d won until the race went official. The final margin over runner-up Frank Polk was 84 cents of mythical bankroll. First prize was $825,000 and an Eclipse Award as Horseplayer of the Year.

That’s the kind of finish most players wait a lifetime for and never get. Donnelly got it from behind, on the last race, against the deepest field the game assembles all year.

Then he did it again by the sea

Fast forward to this past weekend at Del Mar. Another live-money contest, another top field, and another player sitting in front of him — this time it was Dave Chenvert, who seized the Day One lead in the 23rd Annual Summer Challenge. And once again, Donnelly rallied late: a large exacta wager in the very last race turned his $4,000 starting bankroll into $54,448 and ran down the field to take the title over 107 entries. All told, between cash and prizes, he netted $141,948 — including $72,000 in cash, a $10,000 Breeders’ Cup Betting Challenge entry, and a spot in Del Mar’s own Pacific Classic Betting Challenge on Aug. 22. Come from behind, close the show. It’s becoming a signature.

The broadcaster Todd Schrupp made the point this weekend that Donnelly has now cleared $1 million in tournament earnings on the year — and with the NHC and Del Mar hauls alone approaching that mark, the rest of his contest ledger evidently carries him past it. Schrupp’s larger argument is one worth amplifying: as a sport, we’re quick to celebrate equine greatness and slow to promote the humans who master the hardest version of our game. Donnelly, he wrote, is redefining what it means to be an elite horseplayer, and the industry ought to take notice.

The story behind the story

There’s a reason Donnelly is one of the most popular figures on the NHC Tour, and it’s not only the winning. We got to know that story firsthand a few years back, when Dylan sat down with PTF on the Players’ Podcast in the summer of 2021 and traced the whole arc — and it’s worth hearing in his own words.

It started at the track, with his grandfather. “Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, I was at Santa Anita with my grandpa when I was 4 or 5 years old,” Donnelly told PTF. “So it was pretty much ingrained in me from then, and I haven’t looked back really.” The way he describes his own game is a son building on a father figure’s foundation: “I just wanted to take what he gave me, how to do things, and then kind of put my own twist on it and do it a little bit better.”

Then, in November of 2017, the accident — he was asleep in the back of an RV on the drive home from a hunting trip when it crashed. Donnelly burst his C5 vertebra and has used a wheelchair since. He is unsparing and, somehow, entirely without self-pity about it: “I’m lucky to be alive… it sounds cheesy, but I’m alive. I’m good… I’m playing the horses. I have a beautiful wife. I have a beautiful son… I’m in a wheelchair, but I don’t care.” The game never left him, because his grandfather wouldn’t let it. With Dylan unable to move his arms in a hospital bed, the older man drove to the OTB near the hospital and came back with a paper: “He would flip the pages for me and be like, ‘give me one horse,’ and he’d go and put 20 bucks on it for me, every day.”

He handicaps today with Daily Racing Form’s Formulator past performances and a set of speed figures he builds himself — old-fashioned work, done well, at the highest level. And he shows no signs of slowing down.

One mountain left

Which brings us to the piece still missing from the résumé: a Breeders’ Cup Betting Challenge title. And there is a weight to that one for Donnelly that goes far beyond a trophy, because the BCBC already holds the most emotional day of his playing life. At the 2020 BCBC — his first — he  won a cheap online qualifier and parlayed that into a third-place finish worth roughly $265,000. The timing was unbelievable.

“That was the day my grandfather died — the guy who got me into everything — was the day of the BCBC,” Donnelly told PTF. “It’s weird how this world works.” He described emptying his bankroll on an exacta in the Classic and knowing, somehow, that it would come in. When it did, the moment overwhelmed him: “About 20 seconds after, I broke down. That was probably the hardest I’ve cried ever.” For his grandfather, who lived with him, stood in his wedding, and taught him the game: “He was my best friend… he was the GOAT.”

He earned another BCBC seat with this weekend’s Del Mar win, and it’s quite possible that this amazing story could add it’s wildest chapter yet. To take the NHC and the BCBC in the same year — to go, as Schrupp framed it, from NHC champion to BCBC winner — would be a feat no horseplayer has ever pulled off. It would put Donnelly, in Schrupp’s words, in his own orbit. And given where the BCBC already sits in his story, it’s hard to imagine a more fitting place for him to get there.

Whether it happens or not, the larger point stands. Handicapping is the most accessible entry point our game has — anyone can be a horseplayer — and yet we rarely tell the stories of the people who do it best. Dylan Donnelly is giving the sport a great one, in real time. The least the rest of us can do is watch, and root him on toward the one prize he hasn’t claimed yet. If we know one thing it’s this: don’t bet against Dylan Donnelly.

Hear More from Dylan

Gaspar caught up with Dylan last summer — a great listen alongside our own two conversations with him over the years:

• And the Tournament Winner Was, Ep. 9 — John Gaspar’s sit-down with Dylan on life at the top of the leaderboards.

• Players’ Podcast, August 2021 — PTF and Dylan on the whole journey, the source of the quotes above.

• The Owner’s Box, Ep. 48 — Billy and Michelle with Dylan after his first win as an owner at Santa Anita.

This piece was informed by an appreciation of Donnelly’s weekend written by broadcaster Todd Schrupp. Contest figures per the NTRA, the Del Mar Thoroughbred Club, and Daily Racing Form.