Growing up on a tiny Pennsylvania horse farm, Bob Giordano was no stranger to the sunrise.

“Early mornings were the routine,” Giordano recalled. “Feed up, hay up, water up.”

Three quarters of a century later, he’s ditched the chores, but not the alarm clock.

“So here I am at 76, and it’s kind of a nice way to remember what life was like back then,” Giordano said as he strolled along the rail of the Oklahoma Training Track at Saratoga Race Course.

From spring until fall, Giordano spends most of his mornings taking in the sights and sounds of the backstretch at the track.

“It’s quiet. You get to see the animals out doing their thing,” Giordano said as a pair of horses galloped by. “You don’t see them all flat-out running all the time. You get to see the movement, you get to see them train, you get to see them act up.”

Giordano’s first visit to the track came shortly after his career brought him to the Spa City in the late 1960s.

“At that time, you peeked through the fence and just saw these gorgeous creatures coming back, and said ‘boy, this is neat,'” he recalled.

Giordano was a complete racing novice and relied on help from newfound friends to learn what was unfolding in front of him during morning training hours.

“I’d ask, ‘what trainer is that,’ or ‘which trainer is that?’” Giordano said. “[They’d] say, ‘that’s Bill Mott,’ or ‘that’s Allen Jerkens,’ and I’d say, ‘how do you know?’ And she’d say ‘well, you take a look at the saddle towel.’”

Many years after those first lessons, Giordano got the idea to share what he'd learned with today’s newcomers by publishing a reference guide to the hundreds of saddle towels that trainers use to identify their horses while training.

“My intent was to educate people and get people interested in the game, get interested in the sport,” he said as he flipped through the past decade of guides.

The free publication has been a staple on the backstretch for more than a decade, and is even relied upon by some who work in racing, like exercise rider Jennifer Paragallo.

“He’s great. He’s always a friendly face, and the guide he puts out is really, really useful,” Paragallo said as she briefly stopped to chat with Giordano and allowed him to pet her horse. “I mean everybody loves it.”

With access to the backstretch more tightly controlled due to the pandemic, Giordano spent last summer outside the gates.

“It was really difficult,” he said. “The conversations I’ve had today with people walking by, shooting the breeze, didn’t happen.”

As Giordano was putting the finishing touches on this year’s guide by photographing the towels of new trainers, he said he’s looking forward to sharing his passion during a more normal season at The Spa.

“I’m ready to see everybody again, I guess you’d say I’m excited,” he said. “You see the best of the best here, and you see your friends and you make new ones, so yeah, it’s an exciting time. I can’t get enough of it.”