July 2, 2025
By Tom Pedulla—
Sleepy Hollow resident Larry Doyle was in the right place at the right time when he ventured to Belmont Park with friends to watch horse racing for the first time.
The year was 1973 and Secretariat was vying for the Triple Crown in the Belmont Stakes. As track announcer Chic Anderson exclaimed, mighty Secretariat was “moving like a tremendous machine” as he demolished his competition by 31 lengths.
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Doyle, then a teenager, watched in awe. He left Belmont Park knowing he had discovered a new passion in racing.
“I got hooked,” he said. “I fell in love with it.”
It says much about Doyle that he did not wager on the race. “There wasn’t any money to be made,” he explained. Secretariat, an overwhelming favorite, returned 20 cents on a $2 wager.
Doyle, who grew up on Long Island and received his undergraduate degree from Pace University, has always been about big returns. “I have a propensity for numbers,” he said.
Now retired at age 67, he turned that propensity into a highly successful career in the world of investing. He founded two financial companies, Kinetics Asset Management and KatieRich Asset Management.
Doyle and his wife, Karen, have two children, Katherine and Richard. Their devotion to them is reflected in the KatieRich name. Beyond that, they race under KatieRich Stables.
Doyle rose from someone who hitchhiked to Belmont Park and hopped the fence to have an extra $2 to wager to become a horse owner and breeder on a large scale. He purchased his first horse, Bad Whiskey, in 1990. Bad Whiskey won his first race in commanding fashion only to have his brief career end abruptly with a leg injury, underscoring how challenging racing can be.
Doyle was undeterred. His operation has grown over time to approximately 100 horses. May Day Ready is the leader of the pack. She is a three-year-old that placed second in the prestigious Breeders’ Cup Juvenile Turf last year and has already earned $1,050,025.
He is particularly proud of breeding Instilled Regard and selling him for a whopping $1,050,000. Instilled Regard went on to finish fourth in the 2018 Kentucky Derby. He also bred Lady Apple and owned her in partnership through a distinguished racing career highlighted by her third-place finish in 2019 in the Kentucky Oaks, the companion race to the Kentucky Derby for three-year-old fillies.
Doyle learned long ago to deal with the extremes of emotion that are so much a part of racing. “You miss, you miss, you miss and then you hit and you’re on top of the world,” he said. “You wait for the big horse.”
Joe Lee, who trains May Day Ready for KatieRich Stables, praised Doyle for his ownership style. “He likes to be informed on how things are going, but he lets you do your thing,” Lee said. “You do your job and he’ll stand behind your decisions.”
Doyle plunged into the breeding end in a big way in 2007. He purchased a 330-acre cattle farm in Midway, Ky., in 2007 that he and Karen named, of course, KatieRich Farms. He has approximately 30 broodmares on that lush acreage.
“I enjoy the sales as much, if not more, than the racing,” he said. “When you breed a horse and sell it for a million dollars (think Instilled Regard), that’s a lot of fun. It’s like winning a Grade 1 race. You breed it, you take care of it and you’re rooting for the guy who buys it.”
While he has never witnessed another Secretariat, the racing scene continues to captivate him. “I love the people in the game,” he said. “They really are characters. You have billionaires hanging out with grooms. It’s kind of a neat industry in that way.”
Doyle briefly considered pursuing a stake in a team in one of the major professional sports leagues before deciding to pass. He has enough of a thrill every time one of his horses goes to the starting gate or whenever a foal arrives, creating new hope.
“This is my team,” Doyle said contentedly.
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