Kentucky racing icon Ercel Ellis Jr. dies at 94

Kentucky racing lost one of its defining voices when Ercel Ellis Jr. died May 7 in Lexington at 94, ending a career that connected the sport’s past to its present with uncommon clarity. Ellis was not just a broadcaster or writer. He was the person people reached for when they wanted a pedigree, a race record or the human story behind a horse, and he spent decades making the sport feel immediate to fans across Central Kentucky.

That authority came from where he started. Born in 1931 in Fayette County, Ellis grew up around Thoroughbreds while his father, Ercel Ellis Sr., managed Dixiana Farm from 1929 through 1964. Keeneland noted that Ellis’s father was working for August Belmont Jr.’s Nursery Stud when Man o’ War was born, and Ellis later said he slipped the first halter over the colt’s ears and attended Big Red’s funeral. Few racing figures could claim that kind of proximity to the sport’s mythology, and Ellis turned it into a lifetime of keeping the old stories alive.

After serving in the Navy during the Korean War, Ellis worked briefly with trainer Jack Hodgins at Fair Grounds before moving into journalism and broadcasting. His most durable platform was BloodHorse, where he sold advertising in the late 1950s before taking over the nightly radio results program Post Time. He held that role for more than 50 years, while also working as a writer and editor for BloodHorse and Daily Racing Form. He later brought that same voice to Horse Tales, the two-hour Saturday show he started in 1998, which aired on WLXG 1300 in Central Kentucky and became available as a podcast in 2006.

A 2017 Keeneland profile called Ellis the sport’s “dean” of Thoroughbred racing, a label that fit because he wrote his own scripts and advertising copy and delivered them with a memory that seemed to reach across generations. Longtime journalist Mark Simon said there are not many like Ellis when it comes to telling racing as oral history. That was the work Ellis did best, whether he was talking bloodlines, reciting records or folding a listener into the same long Kentucky continuum that ran from Man o’ War to the present day.

Ellis was honored with the Charles W. Engelhard Award for contributions to the industry, and his book Kentucky Horse Tales was published in 2019. His wife, Jackie, was his radio sidekick on Horse Tales, alongside producer Ressie Dukes and regular contributor Michael Blowen. With his death, Kentucky racing lost a man who did more than report its history. He gave it a voice.