2025 Thoroughbred Makeover: Reliving Sibelius’ Big Racing Win

Part 1: After winning $1.8 million on the racetrack, Sibelius is heading to the 2025 Thoroughbred Makeover.

From the moment 2025 Thoroughbred Makeover contender Sibelius walked into Jerry O’Dwyer’s barn as a 3-year-old with a charismatic presence, he stood out. Chestnut with white front socks and a wide blaze tapering down into a pink diamond between his nostrils, Sibelius undeniably was easy on the eyes.

He had a personality to match, racehorse trainer O’Dwyer discovered. “He’s a complete ham,” he said. “He’s like the nosy neighbor. Nothing can happen in the barn without his head being out to see what’s going on or who’s coming in.”

But Sibelius also was a bit of a question mark. His owners, Kentucky Performance Products owner and Thoroughbred breeder Delia Nash and bloodstock agent Jun Park first spotted Sibelius as a yearling at the 2019 Keeneland January mixed sale in Lexington, Kentucky. They were surprised when he failed to meet his reserve price at that auction on a final bid of $62,000. So, they bought him privately, planning to prep him for resale at Keeneland’s September yearling sale.

Nash and Park had established a successful business spotting promising young horses for resale, and they never intended to become racehorse owners. But when a routine pre-sale X-ray showed a potential issue at the back of one of Sibelius’s knees, auctiongoers again failed to bid up to the reserve price in September. Nash and Park opted to keep Sibelius and race him themselves.

The knee never did bother Sibelius, and what at first appeared to be bad luck would turn out to be a blessing: Sibelius, overlooked at auction, went on to win the Grade 1 Dubai Golden Shaheen in Dubai in 2023 and earned more than $1.8 million in his four-year racing career.

“He has an incredible heart and determination, and he gave us unforgettable memories on the world stage,” Park said.

But the path to the top required careful navigation and management right from the start.

Careful Navigation and Management

To help ensure the knee wouldn’t trouble Sibelius, Nash and Park gelded him by January of his 2-year-old season. “He tended to be a bit stocky, and we gelded him because we felt it would help keep extra weight off the knee,” Nash remembered. “We also took our time with him.”

Bypassing a 2-year-old racing season, Nash and Park finally sent Sibelius to O’Dwyer at age 3. The trainer soon got an inkling that Sibelius could run. “He always showed a lot of forward momentum and a bit of potential,” O’Dwyer recalled. “He just kept improving.”

In Sibelius’ first race at Laurel Park in Maryland, he finished second. This augured well for Nash and Park’s plan: to run Sibelius, hopefully with some success, and then sell him once buyers could see his athletic potential. After Sibelius’s first start, purchase offers rolled in. But the gelding’s owners—so used to declaring themselves “sellers, not owners”—had second thoughts.

“Delia and I realized that this was a unique opportunity, and we couldn’t let him go,” recalled Park.

Added Nash, “We realized we had a horse that had potential. I suppose, truth be told, we didn’t want to miss out on the glory.”

The payoff was immediate.

Shipped back to Kentucky for Keeneland’s prestigious spring meet, Sibelius showed his mettle, dueling in close company with his rivals before hitting the finish line first. “Keeneland is top grade,” Nash said. “Once he won at Keeneland, we were like, ‘This is going to be a fun horse.’”

The Right Decision for the Horse

The fun was tempered by the vagaries of racing. After that Keeneland win, Sibelius didn’t like running on a sloppy track during Penn Mile at Penn National in Pennsylvania. Returned to Maryland for a try at Pimlico, he clipped heels with another horse and finished poorly again.

“We regrouped,” O’Dwyer said. “Horses, you know—they keep you guessing.”

In the 2022 season, there were signs Sibelius might blossom into something special. That August, in the palmy atmosphere of historic Saratoga Racecourse in New York, everything seemed to click. Sibelius dug deep in a tough, competitive race to hold on for third. Then he captured a six-furlong sprint by more than three lengths.

In his next race at Pimlico, Sibelius duly won again, this time by a whopping 7½ lengths.

By that point, O’Dwyer, Nash, and Park already were quietly nursing bigger dreams: a trip to the Breeders’ Cup championships or perhaps even much farther afield, to Dubai, for their Golden Shaheen sprint race, which offered a combined $2 million in purse money.

“We were considering running him in the Breeders’ Cup Sprint. The Breeders’ Cup was at Keeneland,” said Nash, whose Kentucky Performance Products is headquartered just a few miles from Keeneland in Versailles, Kentucky. “Did we all want to run a horse in the Breeders’ Cup? Sure we did. But as I said to Jerry, ‘Make the right decision for the horse.’”

That was the night before the entries were due. The following morning, with the deadline imminent, O’Dwyer said, “I think it’s the right decision to aim for something else. I don’t think he’s quite ready.”

A Big-Race Dream

As it turned out, the big-race dream wasn’t deferred for long.

Sibelius closed out 2022 with a victory in the Grade 3 Mr. Prospector Stakes at Florida’s Gulfstream Park, ending his 4-year-old season with four wins and $366,044 in purse earnings. Then in February 2023, Sibelius earned an easy victory in the Pelican Stakes at Tampa Bay Downs. That clinched the team’s decision to head for the Meydan Racecourse in Dubai.

A win wasn’t assured, but Nash, Park, and O’Dwyer liked their chances. Once Sibelius arrived at the gleaming desert racetrack in late March, he “just excelled the whole week there.”

O’Dwyer’s preparations were aided by good planning. Well in advance of the journey, he consulted with a friend, a successful jockey in Dubai, about conditions there. When he learned that Meydan’s stables were a couple of miles from the track itself, O’Dwyer incorporated long, relaxed hacks before training into Sibelius’s daily routine at the Palm Meadows training center in Florida. “He loved that walk to the track,” Nash said of Sibelius, “and when he got there, he loved all the commotion and the cameras. He’s a very inquisitive horse, and there was a lot for him to look at.”

Sibelius also was on a Kentucky Performance Products supplement regimen that included Summer Games® Electrolyte to replenish critical electrolytes and speed recovery and Elevate® natural vitamin E, which helps a horse fight damaging oxidative stress, maintain healthy muscle and nerve function, and support a strong immune response.

“Even before Delia had a horse with me, I’d always used their products,” O’Dwyer said. “Summer Games was our go-to for electrolytes, always, even before Sibelius. He was on the vitamin E, and sometimes when we were traveling, I’d also put him on Neigh-Lox®” to support gastric health.”

The Perfect Build-Up

The Dubai trip’s16-hour flight from Miami to the UAE didn’t faze either Sibelius or his human team.

“The whole week, you’re staying in the hotel there at the track. You wake up in the morning, and the horses are out there training. … It’s a really cool atmosphere.

“Did we feel good going into the race? We were as nervous as we could be at that stage. You do dream of it, but I don’t know that we were thinking, ‘Oh, we’ve got a great chance.’ It was more like, ‘Imagine if we won!’ But we felt we belonged there and had a horse that was in form and had the perfect build-up to the race.”

For Nash, the day itself was a blur of nerves, scenes from a visit to Sibelius at the barn, and snippets of the races that preceded the Golden Shaheen. “The nerves definitely had kicked in!” she said.

Ridden by Ryan Moore, whom Nash considers among the best jockeys in the world, Sibelius “broke a little tardy,” Nash said, but when a gap opened in the pack of horses and Moore pushed him to go, the chestnut gelding kicked into high gear.

Watching railside with a group of friends and supporters, Nash struggled to even see her horse in the churning fray of horses sprinting down the homestretch. She heard the racecaller say his name, the horses flashed by, and there was sense, Nash remembers, “that we had it” but that it was close—and uncertain. She wasn’t 100% sure of the result until a man interviewing her told her to look at the video screen where the photo finish decision had just flashed up: official.

“It was chaotic with TV cameras and all that,” she said.

“But,” she added with a smile, “he won.”

Training for His Second Act

There were other victories for Sibelius after the 2023 Dubai Golden Shaheen, but nothing matched the thrill of seeing him race across the wire in front—by a nose—at Meydan. The Golden Shaheen took a little over 70 seconds to run, but it was years in the making for Nash, Park and O’Dwyer. They started with a good eye for a young horse, added skilled management, thoughtful planning, and a dash or two of good luck—not to mention regular scoops of supportive nutrition from Nash’s own company.

“It was the highlight of a lifetime in racing,” Park said. “He truly made a dream come true.”

“I would be lost without him, you know?” added O’Dwyer, who recalls the 2023 Golden Shaheen as “one of the greatest days of our racing lives. He was great for my career and helped us get noticed, for sure,” he said.

Sibelius’ Second Symphony

But in 2024, Sibelius sustained a bowed tendon injury during routine exercise, prompting Nash and Park to retire him.

It was a poignant moment for all.

“We were feeling very sorry for ourselves,” Nash said. “But, at the same time, we were very grateful that it was coming to an end with a healthy horse that was going to be just fine, was going to rehab, and then be able to go on to a second career.”

Sibelius left the track with nine wins from 27 starts, six of those in stakes company, and $1,803,011 in earnings. He also had three second place finishes and four thirds to his credit. And he made a lot of friends along the way.

“Everywhere he went, his personality seemed to come out very fast and he won the hearts of everybody,” Nash said. “Even before he was anybody. He’s a very easy horse to be around, an observant horse, with a lot of personality.”

If a racing career can be said to be a horse’s symphony, Sibelius hit the right notes.

Bound for the 2025 Thoroughbred Makeover

Now he’s training for his second act, as a competitor in the sport of dressage at the Retired Racehorse Project’s 2025 Thoroughbred Makeover, an event that showcases the athleticism, versatility, and suitability of ex-racehorses for a variety of equestrian disciplines. Although his new sport is more about grace and precision than speed and power, it is as physically demanding and mentally exacting as his former career at the racetrack. In part 2, we’ll check in with Sibelius’s new trainer, Alison O’Dwyer—Mrs. Jerry O’Dwyer and a dressage trainer—about the flashy gelding’s progress in his new career as a sport horse.

Sibelius and Alison O’Dwyer are scheduled to compete in the Thoroughbred Makeover’s Dressage Division Wednesday afternoon and the Freestyle Division Thursday morning. For more information on the horses competing in the Makeover, click here.

Read 2025 Thoroughbred Makeover: Sibelius Takes to Dressage.

Photo Captions

1. Sibelius neck-in-neck on his way to winning the 2023 $2M Grade 1 Dubai Golden Shaheen. ©Mathea Kelley Photography

2. Sibelius warming up in Dubai in 2023 ©Mathea Kelley Photography

3. Trainer Jerry O’Dwyer and owner Delia Nash at the Saratoga Racetrack in New York in 2022. Courtesy, Delia Nash

4. Nash and Jun Park with Sibelius the day he won his last prep race before heading to Dubai. Courtesy, Delia Nash

5. Sibelius with jockey Ryan Moore thundering down the Meydan Racecourse in Dubai. ©Mathea Kelley Photography

6. From left, Park, Nash, O’Dwyer, and O’Dwyers wife, Alison, in Dubai. Alison will be riding Sibelius in the 2025 Thoroughbred Makeover. ©Mathea Kelley Photography