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Quarter horses in their first competitive race kick off the 59th running of the Elloree Trials.
Photo by Mic Smith
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Back in the saddle
Veteran jockey Lamont Smalls competed in six races at the 59th running of the Elloree Trials, and he still finds each one a thrill. “It’s a lot of adrenaline, a lot of blood pumping. It’s exciting and I love it.”
Photo by Mic Smith
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Steeped in tradition
Veteran trainer Franklin “Goree” Smith, owner of the Elloree Training Center, likens the Trials to a big small-town reunion.
Photo by Mic Smith
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Horsing around
Tailgating. Beauty queens. Dove releases. Food vendors. Race day at the Elloree Trials is a major social event filled with fun and, of course, elaborate hats for the ladies. Peggy McGee of Elloree and her granddaughters, Kinsley McGee, 11, left, and Peyton Hughes, 12, proudly show off their race day finery.
Photo by Mic Smith
After the last bugle notes of “First Call” have sounded, and the rear starting gate has clanked shut, a stillness seems to hang in the Elloree air. It’s like the moment before a thundercloud bursts—as if all the energy of race day is getting squeezed into a single kernel of pressure.
The jockeys scrunch tight against their racehorses, who ripple with muscle. The camera-clutching crowd leans against the fence rail, and everyone else cranes to see better—the women in derby hats on tiptoe, the camouflaged boys standing in the beds of their pickup trucks, the horse mascot taking off his horse head.
The front gate rattles open, and they’re off—the horses exploding from the gate, the jockeys leaning in and cropping the flanks as they come down the stretch. The galloping hooves kick up mud, and the crowd’s shouting ramps up toward crescendo. Still, somehow, no one seems to have exhaled. This is the moment everyone’s been holding their breath for—the return of the Elloree Trials.
Only after the first horse crosses the finish line, and the announcer declares the winner, does the pressure seem to release, as the winning jockey sits up in the saddle and raises his fist in triumph.
No one-horse town
Nobody could call Elloree a one-horse town. Despite a census count of less than 1,000 folks, this is horse country, and on one Saturday in late March, it becomes a many-horse town with the annual running of its famous horse race, the Elloree Trials.
“It’s about people realizing there’s something here,” says Franklin “Goree” Smith, the legendary racehorse trainer and owner of the Elloree Training Center, where his family has been racing horses since after the Second World War.
For seven decades, the Smith family has trained the likes of Pabida (1977), Hill Glory (1983), Good Offense (1990), Shake It Up (2000), and others who have taken the coveted Elloree Cup, given to the winner of the last race of the day. He’s also had four horses run in the Kentucky Derby and has been called the “best kept secret in horse racing.”
“Some of the best horses ever to look through a bridle came from South Carolina,” says his son, Greg Smith, who stayed in the family business to become a renowned trainer himself. “And we always wanted to get the community and the town involved as much as humanly possible. We never wanted it to be something our family did specifically.”
What makes the Elloree Trials a different breed of horse race, though, is the fact that they begin with two quarter horse races. Quarter horses are the sprinters—they go a quarter of a mile—whereas the thoroughbreds are the taller, leaner, middle-distance runners—they tend to race for a half-mile. It’s like the difference between drag racing and NASCAR racing.
In 2020 and 2021, however, no horses ran in the Elloree Trials due to the COVID-19 pandemic. And in 2023, due to staffing issues, they did not run again, for only the third time in almost 60 years. But a group of volunteers stepped up. They formed a nonprofit organization called the Elloree Palmetto Jockey Club, acquired sponsors including TriCoLink, Tri-County Electric Cooperative and the Medical University of South Carolina, and worked tirelessly to restore the event.
And now that the Elloree Trials are back on track, well, pick your horse phrase. Everyone is on their high horse again. Or making hay. Or feeling healthy as a horse. Or back in the saddle.
“For me, it’s like the sun finally came up this morning,” says Goree Smith during the 59th running of the trials, comparing the day to a big small-town reunion: “The people you don’t see until next year, you know they’re going to be here.”
For the love of horses
The 2024 race drew a herd of more than 6,000 people—horse owners, horse trainers, horse jockeys, horse handlers, horse groomers, horse farriers, food vendors, sponsors, announcers, pageant contestants, anthem-singers, dove-releasers, and tailgaters—all with a role to play in the social event that is race day at the Elloree Trials. What harnesses them all together, of course, is a love of horses.
“I bet I’ve handled a thousand heads, and there’s no two exactly alike,” says Wes Carter, an Edisto Electric Cooperative member and the owner of Wes Carter Training Stable outside of Bamberg. “They’re just like people. They all have their own personality, their own little quirks. And that’s part of the training process—getting to know an individual’s demeanor and disposition.”
Carter only has one horse in the eight races of the 2024 event—a three-year-old thoroughbred named Jim Bob—but he’s part of a stable of South Carolina horse trainers and owners out here today at a race traditionally sandwiched the weekend between the Aiken Trials and the Carolina Cup in Camden.
Debby McCutchen—co-owner of McCutchen Training Center in Kingstree, vice-president of the South Carolina Thoroughbred Owners and Breeders Association, and matriarch in one of the state’s oldest horse-racing families—says that her family has been bringing horses to the Elloree Trials for 50 years. And a quick glance at the past winners confirms it: the McCutchen family has taken home 14 Elloree Cups.
“When you bring horses here, they get the experience to see the big crowd,” she says. “And then, when you go to Keeneland [in Kentucky], they’ve seen all this. They’ve got the experience of going in the gate with the other horses.”
In the saddle
You can breed a good horse, you can train a good horse, you can own a good horse, but someone has to ride the horse to make it great.
That’s where the jockeys like Thomas Wilson and Lamont Smalls step up in the stirrup.
“It runs in my family,” the 19-year-old Elloree-native Wilson says before getting into his yellow silks to ride Take Charge Sophia in the day’s sixth race. “One day, Mr. Goree put me on a horse in this barn, when I was 13, and I never looked back.”
The 40-year-old Smalls, meanwhile, got his start racing at the McCutchen Training Center in 2012, but he’d grown up around horses in Florida. An accomplished veteran of the sport, Smalls is riding six horses today, including two quarter horses, and the maiden Sweet Windsor in the sixth race.
Both jockeys are lean and strong, and they are men of few words, as if the extra breath would carry extra weight. But their eyes light up when they talk about horses.
“You gotta have confidence,” Wilson says. “If you’re scared, your horse will be nervous, and your horse can flip on you. It can get loose.”
“You’ve got to feel him out—let him feel you out and go from there,” Smalls explains about getting on a new horse for the first time, usually the day of the race. “It’s a lot of adrenaline, a lot of blood pumping. It’s exciting, and I love it.”
Both jockeys mount up in the paddock—a split-fence corral encircled by onlookers—and feel their racehorses beneath them. These are maidens, or horses that have never raced before, and there’s good money on the line: $2,100 for the winner, $900 for the show horse, and nothing for the other two.
Wilson wears a serious game face atop Take Charge Sophia, but Smalls is all smiles on Sweet Windsor. After a few laps around the paddock, the teams begin their long walk to the racetrack, the jockeys bobbing like pistons and seeming to float above the cheering crowd.
Once inside the starting gate, they reach that breathless moment again when anything can happen. Because the race is on.
Get There
The 60th running of the Elloree Trials will take place on March 22, 2025, at the Elloree Training Center, 170 Wishbone Circle in Elloree. For more information, visit elloreetrials.com.