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By Betsy Parker
Rappahannock News Staff Writer
BEN VENUE — They’re like night and day. Literally.
Soft-spoken Gregg Ryan is slim, an athlete. He can make weight, racing trim, without struggle. He’s a stockbroker, given to wearing natty tweeds and Italian loafers. He spends his mornings exercising racehorses, his afternoons exercising options. He’s gregarious and witty, but a twinkle of irony shines in his eyes. When he smiles, it’s more often a wry grin.
Mike Berryman may have started his racetrack life trim and fit, but after riding 20 steeplechase races he discovered that he “liked the breakfast table too well” to continue as a jockey. So he followed his father’s and uncle’s footsteps into training.
Berryman is what you’d call barrel-chested, a hearty man with a robust laugh to match his appetite. He’s a hands-on horse trainer, outfitted most days in khaki pants and paddock boots. Sometimes they’re clean, sometimes not.
He spends his mornings and afternoons working with horses at his Johnson City, Tenn. base deep in the Smoky Mountains. Berryman is funny, too, his good humor clear, his laugh contagious. When he smiles, it’s an honest, toothy, Cheshire beam.
Ryan and Berryman are the best of friends, on and off Virginia’s steeplechase circuit. At Saturday’s Old Dominion Hounds Point-toPoint, the partnership proved unbeatable. Berryman shipped two horses from his Tennessee base to the Ben Venue Farm event; Ryan handled riding duties on both winners.
In the day’s first hurdle event, contested under threatening skies, Ryan teamed with his new horse Indomitable to win his first series event of the season. The chestnut grandson of Northern Dancer started his steeplechase career at the powerful Kentucky stable of John Griggs, but Berryman said, “The horse had run out of conditions for Johnny, and he thought he might make a timber horse, an owner-rider type. I had Gregg in mind for him.”
Ryan and Indomitable had little trouble handing series leader Deal Again and owner
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