John Nichols has never NOT been around the racetrack. His mother and father took him to Churchill Downs for the first time in 1975 — when he was four days old. Dad was a horseshoer and a skilled horseman. John’s uncle Jimmy Nichols was a prominent jockey who later was instrumental in the sales purchase of eventual 1988 Preakness and Belmont Stakes winner Risen Star. The racetrack life was the only life John knew, and that largely holds true today.

A morning clocker employed by Churchill Downs since 2003, John gets up every morning from March through November at 3:45 am, leaves his Louisville condo at 4:30, and tracks all the workouts under the Twin Spires from about 5:20 am until the track closes at 10:00 am.

“It’s a grind,” John admitted. “It consumes my life.”

At this point, though, you don’t know the half of it.

When he gets home from the track, John embarks on several hours of painstaking video study, examining workouts at other major tracks and training centers around the country. This is not part of his “day job,” though. 

“The video stuff I do…that’s just for me,” he said.

Nichols does it because he loves playing the races in the afternoon. He’s also very good at it — and last weekend, he experienced his biggest contest score ever, winning $196,230 for capturing the 7th annual Spa & Surf Showdown here at HorseTourneys.

“In contests, you handicap like you play every day, but in win-place contests, I’ll often go with the horses I would usually play underneath because of the price difference,” he said. “Still, a winner is a winner—even if they’re short.”

On Saturday, a winner was a winner was a winner was a winner for Nichols. The Spa & Surf Showdown requires contestants to make a $2.00 mythical win-place bet on every race of the Saturday and Sunday cards from Saratoga and Del Mar. When play began on Saturday, Nichols fired off four straight winners right from the outset — and not all of them were short.

Saturday’s 3rd at Saratoga was a race that played to John’s strengths — seven horses, seven first-time starters. One of them was Shug McGaughey trainee Five Bars.

“I loved the way she moved so easy in her works,” John recalled.

When Five Bars won and returned $21.80 to win and $8.40 to place, John was a perfect three-for-three. He followed that up with second-time starter Long Pour ($20.80, $7.80) in race 4. At that point, a friend texted Nichols to congratulate him on his hot start.

Going 4-for-4 at the beginning of a contest is definitely heady stuff. It would have some of us feeling invincible. That’s not John Nichols’s style, however. His persona is that of someone who has seen everything—at least at the racetrack—twice.

Pleased, but a thousand or so miles from giddy, Nichols picked up his phone to return his friend’s text. “I’m seeing the ball well at Saratoga so far,” he typed, “but the way Del Mar is for me, I could go 0-for-10 there.”

For the first time on Saturday, Nichols was wrong. Buoyed by five Del Mar winners, Nichols never relinquished his Spa & Surf Showdown lead all day long. 

The top four players in the end-of-Day-1 standings each received Day money. That meant $12,742 for Nichols.

The final day of the $510,720 competition was no cakewalk for him, however.

A slow start gave way to 3-1 and 9-2 winners for Nichols in the 5th and 6th races, respectively at Saratoga. He was still in good shape. The one problem was that Curtis Adams (10th after Day 1) and Dylan Donnelly were starting to heat up and close the gap. 

Then came the 7th at Saratoga.

When Bedford the Brave ($37.40, $13.20) won, Nichols was leapfrogged by both Adams and Donnelly. Corbin Blumberg, meanwhile, was now breathing down his neck in 4th place. 

An hour or so later at Saratoga, Roswell ($26.20, $5.90) took race 9. The players at the top didn’t have her, but others farther down did and the leaderboard was tightened further. 

While all this was happening, two interesting things happened for Nichols. In a 5-race span, he hit a 2-5 winner and four very chalky runners up. These little chip-ups allowed him to reclaim the lead. Also—Nichols’s lesser entry contained both Bedford the Brave and Roswell. That “bad ticket” was now up to 11th place!

Was Nichols kicking himself for not using one or both victorious longshots on his “good entry”?  Nope. As noted earlier, that’s just not in his nature.

“Hindsight is always 20/20,” he explained. “I rarely go on tilt over anything. I don’t think you should change your mind on a contest play unless you really need to. You can’t let these things control your emotions good or bad. If you do, you start doubting yourself. I’m a laid-back, no-distractions kind of person. Better to put your blinkers on, get focused in and keep an even keel win or lose. As my dad used to tell me, there’s always someone at the racetrack having a worse day than you.”

It was hard for even Nichols to keep a calm head during the 10th at Saratoga. Going into the race, Nichols was clinging to a $4.00 lead over Corbin Blumberg and a $4.30 edge over Curtis Adams in third. Nichols went with 4-1 Takechargesmiling (#3), while Adams opted for 6-1 Gatsby (#1).

In deep stretch, the two were nose and nose. Watching it live, it seemed like Takechargesmiling was going to blow by on the outside. Then Gatsby dug in, and it looked like he would prevail. The winner would determine whether Nichols or Adams would be in the lead with just six races at Del Mar left

“I was really sweating that one out,” Nichols let slip.

Fortunately for John, Takechargesmiling had one last lunge left in him.

Not only did Nichols retain his lead, the race marked the first of four straight winners he would record.

He might have had even better luck, though, in the race that would end his mini-streak—race 7 at Del Mar. 

This was the third-from-last race of the contest. It was a two-turn grass race won by a first-time starter…at a very big price.

The standings were still pretty tight, and after the horses crossed the wire, Nichols quickly pulled up the leaderboard to see if any of the top 10 scorers had used Waltz Across Texas. They hadn’t.

Then Nichols kept scrolling…and scrolling. 

It wasn’t until Nichols got down to Paul Cush in 63rd place that he found a player who had picked Waltz With Texas. It moved Cush all the way to 11th place at the time, but he still found himself $79.20 behind Nichols.

“I was surprised no one higher up had that horse. It shocked me. I’ve been that person…stabbing at a 50-1 shot because I had to!” Nichols laughed.

With one race left in the Spa & Surf Showdown, the leaderboard looked like this:

The contest finale was the 10th at Del Mar. It was won by #4 Sbagliato ($22.20, $7.80). Here’s who the top 13 selected in the race.

Not a Sbagliato in the bunch. The highest-ranked player to score with the 10-1 victor was Brendan Fay in 14th place. The hit moved Fay up to 6th place. But victory—and the $183,488 that went with it—belonged to John Nichols.

Sunday Day money went to Raj Satyan, Scott Rubinchik, Louis Masry and Tom Arndt.

When the Spa & Surf Showdown was finally over, Nichols—predictably—took his victory in stride.

“A friend reached out to congratulate me and said I should go out and celebrate. I said, ‘Why? I still need to get up and go to work tomorrow.’”

Does he have any big plans for his windfall?

“Not really. I just bought a new truck last year, so that’s taken care of. I’m just going to put it away, plan for retirement, maybe help one of my best friends out a little.”

From a professional standpoint, Nichols takes pride in the fact that workout information has been regarded more and more seriously by handicappers over the past couple of decades. He thinks tracks could engage players more deeply if they made workouts easier to access. This is because Nichols believes there is real value in doing the work yourself.

“I think the workout analysts out there do a fine job. The thing is, they’re all starting with the same information. One person might rate a work a B+. Someone else may rate it a B-. So, at the end of the day, you’re paying for an opinion. If you start watching works on your own and get really into it, you can learn a lot and start forming your own opinions. I tell people, “Horses are not just numbers on a piece of paper.’ You need to see the whole picture. You need to watch them physically…how they move. A good work doesn’t mean a horse is going to win…they may need a race…but it’s a tool.”

Nichols feels this tool is particularly valuable in the age of CAWs.

“In my mind, the only edge out there versus the CAWs is in maiden races. The CAWs don’t understand surface switches or horses that figure to improve in a second start. These are my best races.”

The Spa & Surf Showdown victory moved Nichols into second place, behind only Mike Gillum, in this year’s HT Champions Series standings. The top three finishers get prizes. The overall winner gets an entry into all five Champion Series tourneys in 2026.

Ironically, Gillum and Nichols were captured in a photo together at a Louisville cookout the Sunday before this year’s Kentucky Derby.

The 2025 HT Champions Series concludes with the Pick & Pray Classic here later this fall.

Nichols appreciates the contest space for its ability to drastically reduce the impact of CAW play. He also thinks it’s a cost-effective way to stay on top of things.

“It’s a good way to keep up with what’s going on day to day without having to really invest as much. There are days, especially in winter, where I look at Gulfstream and put a contest Pick & Pray in even though I only have one or two races to even play. They keep you sharper on the weekday cards you might not be too interested in.”

Even if there are some days now and then when his enthusiasm wanes a bit, few people in racing take their jobs as seriously as John Nichols takes his. He has dedicated his life to it. Perhaps on those mornings when the 3:45 am alarm has an extra cruel ring to it, memories of last weekend’s Spa & Surf Showdown triumph will help get him up and on his way. Yet again.