At a Kentucky farm, star racehorses help people fight a monster: Addiction

Washington Post

03-05-2025

NICHOLASVILLE, Ky.
By the time he trembled in the courtroom at age 41 in April 2024, he had spent 24 years brawling back and forth with the beast of drug addiction, and the fight had hurled him to another brink of dismal. 'I was facing three years,' John Bowman recollected, 'and the prosecutor was not wanting to back down at all.' Yet as he began to address the court on his own behalf and as he described the unforeseen 10 months that had preceded his appearance on the docket, he outlined a story that doubled as a wonder.
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From this courthouse in the commonwealth of Kentucky — that foremost American harbor of the uncanny 5,000-year relationship between humans and horses, not to mention the host of another Kentucky Derby on Saturday — this defendant who had never really touched a racehorse before June 2023 told of what had happened since he began working with them routinely. It had rearranged his life and provided his cleanest chance yet against the scourge of drugs. He read lines such as, 'This program has taught me how to have accountability, structure, discipline and responsibility,' and, 'These milestones are only the beginning of my new life.' That stirred something in at least one listener, and that would be the judge, who reckoned it might behoove Bowman and all society if he went back to horsemanship rather than incarceration.
'I was blown away,' Bowman said, standing last May by a well-tended barn, looking out over the can't-be-true view of the green-quilt fields and thousand-pound equine athletes. 'The judge even said, 'I want to thank you for that heartfelt story.''
John Bowman poses with his favorite racehorse on Taylor Made Farm.
It turns out he had immersed with a program that, at its outset, many a bystander (or farm owner) might have labeled harebrained. He had joined and thrived at Stable Recovery, the organization with which venerable Taylor Made Farm attempts to help those grappling with addiction, housing them in one of its roomy residences and teaching them the fastidious care of elite racehorses.
'We've probably got about 60 men in housing and have graduated 110 men now,' Frank Taylor of Taylor Made said, 'so it's really starting to grow.' The partners have four houses going (including the one on farm premises). They have gotten around the bend of some narrow financial moments for operational expenses and have wound their way to 2½ years of age; to an Eclipse Award; to partnerships with many, including both Keeneland racetrack and a farm setting up a similar program for women; and to a recent annual gala attracting 550 people and north of $1 million in donations.
A man walks near a mare and its foal.
A member of the Stable Recovery program feeds the racehorses.
A racehorse eats food out of a man's hand.
And Mr. Bowman, from that Shelby County courtroom? The other day his mother, Margie, over in Frankfort, sick to her stomach back on that day in court, told John she had chatted lately with one of the old regulars from the gas station where John worked for 10 years. She had told the man, 'If you talk to John today and compare John to what he used to be like, it's worlds apart.'
And John said of his mother, 'I think this is probably the most proud she's ever been of me.'
He has an apartment in Lexington. He has a job at Stable Recovery as a program director wherein his tasks include overseeing the cadre of house managers and the fleet of transport vans. He has viewpoints such as this: 'And you know, I look at it like this: If you can take care of a 1,300-pound horse, that paves the way for you to be able to take care of yourself. I really don't know why.'
He has witnessed the human-equine bonds that seem to whoosh up out of magic such as the empathy he had with 2022 Breeders' Cup Juvenile Fillies winner Wonder Wheel, before she departed for Japan. He would see her lying down in her stall, and he would go in there and 'lie down with her and wrap my arms around her and hold on to her — and she'd just let me!'
Then he would tell her something puckish like, 'Are they mistreating you today?'
'Oh, I'm amazed,' he said of all of it and of Stable Recovery.
The idyllic setting at Taylor Made Farm provides a peaceful environment for its residents.
Two members of the Stable Recovery program learn how to prepare medicine for the racehorses.
Boxes of Narcan are on the top of a refrigerator in case of an overdose.
Two men lead racehorses out of the paddock to be groomed.
Speaking of amazement, imagine the three other Taylor brothers — Duncan, Ben and Mark — upon first hearing Frank pitch such a concept. 'It wasn't, 'No,'' Frank Taylor said. 'It was, 'Hell, no.'' That no and its accompanying hell gained added oomph with the very idea of 'exposing all your customers and your million-dollar horses to this,' as Frank put it recently. Ultimately their conglomeration of concerns proved no match for the mighty hammer Frank brought forth upon them: ''Part of our mission statement, in the middle of our mission statement, is that we live out our Christian values by doing business. Right?''
Ouch.
'So I threw that on 'em.'
One day last spring, he told of the drinking ritual splayed across five of his own decades. He called himself 'an enthusiastic drinker' who 'started every party and tried to finish every one' and figured he would 'never have any more fun again' without alcohol, concluding: 'My alcoholism was slow-progressing. It took away a little bit more each year over five decades.' When his own son said to him, 'I know I'm an alcoholic,' that spurred Frank toward sobriety, toward the awareness that it could mingle with enjoyment and eventually toward visionary thoughts.
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When he ate at the restaurant DV8 Kitchen in Lexington, he began to ask owner Rob Perez about its workings, which include that for eight years now, Perez and his wife, Diane, have employed people from recovery programs — 42 at a time generally (and Diane's idea originally) — and have unearthed results that run counter to slapdash fears. In a phone interview, Rob Perez said that far from the proliferation of chaos, the idea birthed a flowering of gratitude, loyalty, diligence, collaboration. 'The concentric circles of good just keep popping up,' he said, soon adding, 'I'm just totally embarrassed that I didn't run a business like this before.' Further, he found Taylor's idea even more promising because of 'something called a horse that just changes people's hearts.' Further along still, Taylor began to envision Stable Recovery as a potential nexus of two solutions: 'You've got all this addiction. And then you also have a problem with no workers. So these two major problems can actually help solve each other,' even as further ripples could include rebuilt families.
A man does work inside a barn as racehorses idle nearby.
Members of the Stable Recovery program work long shifts on the farm.
Members of the program complete 90 days of groom training and horse work before moving on to other trades.
That's how this approachable man accustomed to large dollar figures and large adrenaline rushes around horse racing, at a farm where stars such as American Pharoah and California Chrome and Knicks Go have galloped through at one stage or another, wound up at the morning meeting. It happens just about every weekday dawn. It operates like AA. Each man around the large room takes a turn speaking while the sun starts to think about coming up through the big windows outside. One day last spring, the topic was quelling resentments. Voices carried sadness, regret and uncommon candor.
Typically, Stable Recovery accepts men who have spent 30 days in another program so that heads can clear some. 'We tell guys, and this is common in recoveries: All you have to change is everything,' said marketing director Robert Osbourn, and so they start with 90 days of groom training and horse work that can lead to all manner of trades and jobs at various places, all while aiming to boost mental, physical, spiritual and financial health.
As CEO and co-founder in 2022, in came a force of a man with a staggering background he contentedly shares in harrowing detail. Christian Countzler, already four years into recovery when he joined Stable Recovery, served 15 months in Iraq (2003) and 12 in Afghanistan (2005), got kicked out of the Army, went home to western Kentucky, caught a marijuana charge and a DUI and became 'the very thing I grew up telling myself I would never do.' That would be a coal miner, and so he spent 10 years largely underground, 'working 70, 80 hours a week, hard labor, didn't see the light of day, went in before the sun came up, went out after the sun had gone down.'
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He did this 'during the OxyContin craze' and said, 'And what was so sad about that is I could walk into any doctor, and all I had to say was, 'Hey, I'm a coal miner,' and they're like: 'You need these. Your back must hurt.'' And so: '30 Lortabs a day and drink a pint of vodka to go to sleep that night.' Then the OxyContin craze subsided, 'and that's when heroin and fentanyl and methamphetamines [surged], and I was 35 and I started shooting dope at that time, and that's when things got really out of control, and I ended up homeless and eating out of dumpsters.' And: 'Lost my wife, lost my kids, lost my job, lost everything.' He slept at a homeless camp in Owensboro, at abandoned houses, on 'street corners,' on 'riverbanks.' He learned a gas station's food-discard schedule so he could snare the food while 'fresh.' He shoplifted conspicuously in cold months so as to gain the warmth of jail.
'I can remember lying down many, many nights with a spoonful of dope and a bottle full of booze, thinking: 'Man, this is great. I'm okay. This is not that bad,'' he says. 'Which is insane.' It went 'incarceration, treatment, incarceration, treatment,' as he puts it, until an overdose in 2018 from which three people he wishes he could find — two nurses, one doctor — saved him and then got him on a bus to treatment three hours away in Lexington.
By now, he exudes strength and health and looks like, No way does he have that story. His recovery has sprouted to such degree that two teenage daughters reside with him. Amid a country rich in treatment programs involving horses but not necessarily racehorses and with Countzler rich in experience at treatment concepts in general from experience, he wonders: 'Here's what I can't figure out: Why didn't somebody think of this sooner in central Kentucky, the way addiction rates are and the way we have horse farms?'
The morning meeting is a critical part of the Stable Recovery program.
Members of the program participate in a meeting, which often get emotional.
Residents share a house on the farm and prepare meals together.
Residents play pool after a day of work on the farm.
Residents play volleyball in the yard before dinner.
He and all know they're striving alongside hellacious fallibility, dealing with 'broken souls,' as Countzler puts it. Men often depart the program early on and sometimes return, as if, Bowman says, 'Maybe you go out and you just need a little bit more pain of what these drugs can do to you.' Of those who leave, Taylor said, about 70 percent do so right off the bat, finding the workload a misery or the setting a mismatch.
There's no reveille type of deal; men must wake and ready themselves. There are rules without authoritarianism, self-policing with teammates enforcing, all peer-driven the way football coaches prefer things. Everyone must meet any new guy. 'The newest guy is the most important guy here,' Countzler said. 'He's the most dangerous. He's the most sick. He needs the most help. He's the most vulnerable.' As explained Joshua Franks, a whopping success story who has gone from 10 years of incarceration to a house on the farm, the grooms and budding grooms start the 7-to-4 shift by giving the horses treatments and medicine, then grooming them while checking for cuts and nicks, all on a schedule that winds up demanding and pinpoint. 'You either love it or you don't,' Franks said last year.
Christian Countzler, the CEO of Stable Recovery, overcame his own struggles with addiction.
Stable Recovery participants were honored for remaining in the program for at least a year.
Stable Recovery participants pose together on the farm.
'There's definitely disappointments,' Taylor said. 'We've been very blessed so far that we've only lost one guy to addiction that died out of all the time that we're doing it, which is unusual. There's definitely cases where you see guys that get good and do good and then they relapse.'
'The unfortunate fact of the matter,' Countzler said, 'is that the business that we're in probably has the highest fail rate of anything you could do. There is so much that has to go right and so little that has to go wrong. One bad choice.'
Someone asked Countzler how they measure success.
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'Every single night that one of these guys lays down sober,' he said, 'we've won that day.' He said: 'I tell the guys all the time: 'The very thing that tells your heart to beat and your lungs to breathe is the same thing that's telling you it's okay to do the drugs.''
And so, Taylor said, 'I focus on the successes.'
Stable Recovery has had those even as it shies from crowing about exact numbers. 'Once we get them 90 days sober,' Taylor said, 'we have about a 70 percent success rate.' The successes include guys who have gone on to thrive for — or as — Kentucky trainers. They include one who once overdosed and survived only with Narcan. Another, Will Walden, has surpassed the impasses during which all around him gave up, plus three turns at Stable Recovery, and trains a horse who was set to run Friday in the Kentucky Oaks, the highbrow annual Derby Eve race for fillies.
The horse: Bless the Broken.
Men use a leaf blower to clear hay from a barn.
A man hoses off a racehorse at a barn on the farm.
Two men lie on the patio after a day of work on the farm.
A man embraces a racehorse while giving her a bath on the farm.
The broken battle the odds at Stable Recovery with one considerable godsend: the aged bond between Homo sapiens and Equus caballus. That mysterious feature of life on Earth can lend softened edges to hardened men. Franks told of one who had come out every day calling and cooing for a particular gray mare. Countzler spoke of 'guys that have been in prison for 15 years and [have] face tattoos and everything else whispering sweet nothings in the ear of a thoroughbred.'
'They say that dogs are man's best friend,' Bowman said, 'but I think if people really had the opportunity to have horses in their lives, I think horses would be man's best friend. There's just something about them that just takes your heart and mends it and builds it. Just how they can pick up on people's emotions and understandings. They're so perceptive toward people's emotions. I've had guys tell me, 'I was really sad today, and this horse just came up and put his head on my shoulder.' … They're probably the most emotionally intelligent creatures on this planet.'
'Something about broken people and horses,' Countzler said. 'I don't know what it is. It's like the horse knows this person is damaged. They have this sixth sense: 'This guy needs me.''
'We're fear-based individuals our whole life,' Franks said. 'And we get here, we've never touched this horse, and it's like this magical animal that will allow you to pick up the feet, and to go through those processes and break the barriers with them, I just think it's really special, and I see it come on in guys.'
At lunch one day last spring, Josh Bryan, a young man and a second cousin to the Taylors, said: 'If you go into that barn in the morning frustrated or just mad at the world, they'll give you a handful. They'll be ornery and look at you. But if you go in there and you're calm and collected, they'll work with you, and I feel like if you're kind of in a depressive state, they'll be calm and they'll kind of be by your side. They can really sense your heart rate, and, you know, they react to that.'
Riders breeze a pair of racehorses on WinStar Farm, a partner of Stable Recovery.
Frank Taylor poses with a racehorse on his Taylor Made Farm.
'I focus on the successes,' Frank Taylor says of his work with men in recovery.
Bryan knew all about all of that because he had been to some depths and back. He had begun life with Goldenhar syndrome, a rare congenital condition of underdeveloped bones and muscles in one side of the face, capable of wreaking complications upon the everyday acts of eating and speaking. He had lost both parents, had felt lost in the world, had used alcohol to numb his sense of purposelessness.
One day he had what he called an 'aha' moment, realizing the farm and horses were his purpose. 'You're the one feeding them,' he said that day. 'You're the one taking them outside. You're the one rubbing on them. So that horse becomes your purpose in life.' He said: 'You know, you can talk to horses, and they're not going to judge you. They don't care if you're from the inner city. They don't care if you're from a rich family.'
He ceased to drink and began to thrive. He helped start and lead Taylor Made's school of horsemanship, which led to the hatching of Stable Recovery. 'Amazing to watch how he blossomed,' Taylor said, 'and the last two years, he's been sponsoring at least three other alcoholics all the time.' He began to try out a practice new for him: dating.
He also needed yet another surgery come this past April, his 15th or so in life, a seven-hour saga gauged to ease his worsened capacity for eating and speaking. He joked that the guys ought to have a 'last supper' even for a surgery with risk that did not seem overly daunting. On April 16, he took a date to Keeneland. He wore a jacket and tie. He walked around and accepted so many hellos — 'Hey, Josh!' 'Hey, Josh!' — that when he met up with everyone later at a restaurant, he joked his date hadn't realized she would be accompanying a celebrity.
'He was as happy as I'd ever seen him,' Taylor said, calling it a 'pinnacle.' Bryan went into surgery the next day, and all seemed all right until five days later, when he died suddenly from complications in a latter phase of the surgery. It left everyone 'just devastated,' Taylor said as he called it 'just a bad deal, totally unexpected,' and as Stable Recovery mourned a mainstay who, in his 33 years, had done something formidable. He had found his way all the way from unfair hardship and untold hopelessness to the magic realm at the ancient intersection of human and horse.