Before winning the 151st Preakness Stakes, Napoleon Solo almost wasn’t entered in the race known as the middle jewel of horse racing’s Triple Crown.
Subscribe to read this story ad-free
Get unlimited access to ad-free articles and exclusive content.
Napoleon Solo had won the first two races of its career in 2025, but this year had competed twice and finished fifth place both times.
It was after the second race, April’s Wood Memorial, that jockey Paco Lopez told the decision-makers behind the horse, owner Al Gold and trainer Chad Summers, that there was more to its potential than its most recent finishes indicated.
“Paco told Chad after the Wood to go to this race,” Gold said on the NBC Sports broadcast. “I didn’t want to come here, I didn’t think this horse could go this far.”
For months, Gold and Summers had concerns about how the 3-year-old horse would fare over the 1 3/16th mile distance at Laurel Park, the temporary Maryland home of the Preakness due to renovations at its longtime home course, Pimlico.
“The last few days we were worried about, can he go the distance? Are we gonna get loose?” Gold said.
The horse did, and then some, en route to earning the Woodlawn Vase trophy.
In a wide-open, 14-horse field after Kentucky Derby winner Golden Tempo and runner-up Renegade both sat out, pre-race favorite Taj Mahal ran in front entering the final straightaway but Napoleon Solo, with Lopez aboard, stayed close and then burst ahead to take the lead as the park’s main grandstand came into view. Iron Honor, another pre-race betting favorite, tried to challenge Napoleon Solo down the homestretch but couldn’t come within a length of the winner.
Napoleon Solo had entered as a 7-to-1 favorite before taking home $1.2 million out of the $2 million purse and claimed the second of the Triple Crown races.
“We’ve had everything go wrong this 3-year-old year, and we just kind of stayed the course and stayed the course,” Summers told NBC Sports after the win. “You know, we had a lot of critics out there that told us to just shut up, and we just kept with it, and it worked out today.”
More than a decade ago, Summers had tried a bit of everything to break into horse racing — except for training. He had “hotwalked” horses, walking them to warm them up or cool them down before or after workouts. He’d tried covering the sport as a writer, worked as a manager and later found success as a bloodhorse agent. To make ends meet in the racing industry, “I’ve lived in tack rooms, I’ve lived in my car,” Summers recalled in 2023.
In 2014, he’d even become an owner after helping assemble a group of owners to purchase a horse named Mind Your Biscuits.
“I didn’t really want to be a trainer, to be honest with you,” Summers said in 2017, citing the toll of the job’s long hours on a family.
But Summers ultimately did decide to train Mind Your Biscuits, and after losing his first five races, Summers watched in 2017 as the horse dominated en route to a major $2 million race in Dubai. It was a stunning first win for both horse and trainer. That win, and a repeat in the same $2 million Dubai race a year later in 2018, meant Summers no longer had to sleep in a tack room.
Yet for all that early success, Summers had never been able to break through in a Triple Crown race.
Until Saturday.
Summers primarily trains his horses out of New York, where Napoleon Solo had won its first two starts, both last year. Poor weather had led Napoleon Solo to split his time this spring between New York and Florida, with also time in Kentucky, Summers told the NBC Sports broadcast, and what he and his team noticed was a contender coming on strong even as it finished fifth in both of its starts this year, in February and April.
“He just kept getting better every day,” Summers said.
That led Gold and Summers to take seriously the suggestion from their jockey, Lopez, to run the Preakness.
“Paco, it’s you, baby,” Gold said. “You did this, it’s awesome.”
The race was Lopez’s fifth in the saddle on Saturday alone, and his second first place. In his career, Lopez now has 4,434 wins in more than 21,000 starts, according to Equibase.
At the start of the week, Summers assessed Napoleon Solo as “special.” But he cautioned that the rest of the field was shaping up to be fast.
“It’s the middle jewel of the Triple Crown, right?” Summers said. “I mean everybody wants to win that Woodlawn Vase.”
Several days later, Napoleon Solo had done so, convincingly. But Summers did not have much time to celebrate his biggest win in nearly a decade, however.
Saturday at the Preakness does not conclude with the main event; other races follow on the schedule, which meant that Summers was soon back in Laurel Park’s paddock, watching as another horse he trained prepared for its own trip around the track.