Career
Born in Lindenhurst, New York, Feustel was only ten years old when he began working in the horse racing industry as a stable hand. At age twenty-four he became a professional trainer. He had a long association with August Belmont, Junior., working as a lad at his stable and rising to the position of foreman. and head trainer.
In 1913, Feustel conditioned Belmont"s colt Rock View to American Champion Three-Year-Old Male Horse honors with wins in several major races including the Brooklyn Derby and the Travers Stakes.
In 1914, August Belmont began winding down his racing operations and sold off a number of his runners. When the United States entered World War I, the sixty-five-year-old August Belmont, Junior. joined the United States Army.
While overseas he decided to liquidate his racing operations and Louis Feustel went out on his own, racing horses for himself before going to work as the head trainer for Sam Riddle"s Glen Riddle Farm. Prior to the 1918 Saratoga auction of the Belmont horses, Feustel had urged Sam Riddle to purchase a yearling son of aa August Belmont horse he was very familiar with named Fair Play.
Riddle"s reluctant purchase was named and Louis Feustel prepared the colt for the 1919 racing campaign at training facilities in Maryland.
The term Triple Crown did not come into use until 1930 and in February 1920 Sam Riddle announced that would not make the long train journey south to run in the Kentucky Derby. In addition, he set records at New York tracks while winning the Dwyer, the Lawrence Realization and Withers Stakes. At the end of the year, was retired to studies
His1920 earnings helped Louis Feustel become that year"s leading money-winning trainer in the United States.
Following its formation, both Feustel and the horse would be inducted in the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame and in the Blood-Horse magazine List of the Top 100 United States. Racehorses of the 20th Century, was ranked Number one. Later Relations between Louis Feustel and Sam Riddle became strained and near the end of June 1921 he made arrangements with his old employer, August Belmont, Junior., who had rebuilt his racing and horse breeding business, to prepare his yearlings for racing.
2 over the European superstar, Epinard. August Belmont, Junior. died that year and Feustel was once again out on his own.
In the latter part of the 1920s he began conditioning horses for newspaper publisher, Bernard Ritter and in the 1930s he trained a successful racing stable for Mistress
Elizabeth Graham Lewis. A serious automobile accident in February 1943 kept Louis Feustel out of racing for several months and in 1950, after forty-two years training horses, he retired. Following his wife"s death, in the late 1960s Feustel was living with a son in Chicago.
Louis Feustel died on July 7, 1970 at age eighty-six.
