Nicholasville racehorse owner Ken Ramsey has ‘a new lease on life’ after transplant at 88.

Though he won’t be able to visit Kentucky Downs this season, Ken Ramsey, the track’s most successful owner ever, will be watching from 800 miles away, handicapping and keeping score.

And being grateful that he’s still alive to pursue his decades-long obsession of trying to win more races than anybody else.

Just over two months after receiving a life-saving kidney transplant, Ramsey, 88, is in the midst of a recovery period at his summer home in Saratoga Springs, New York. The television in his house on Fifth Avenue will be on every day to keep him connected to the track where he holds the records — by a large margin — for the most victories (47) and the most leading-owner titles (nine), along with the most starts (195) and purse earnings ($4,197,574).

“No doubt,” Ramsey said, with a laugh. “I’ll be right here. I’ll not be taking any calls.”

In 2023, Ramsey topped the owners’ table in Franklin with three wins from 13 starts. He planned to run 11 horses this season, which started with two in Thursday’s opening-day program.

As usual, Ramsey has been aiming for Kentucky Downs and its all-grass, big-purse meet.

He bought two horses for his grandson, the young trainer Nolan Ramsey, to start at Kentucky Downs: Paris Surprise and Degree of Risk. He figured Abrumar, trained by Saffie Joseph, had a big shot in the $3.1 million, Grade 3 Nashville Derby Invitational on Saturday. His Joseph-trained homebred Reach for the Rose is headed to Sunday’s $1 million National Thoroughbred League Juvenile Mile.

Ramsey and his late wife, Sarah, developed a high-profile breeding and racing program based at their farm in Nicholasville. Between 2004 and 2014, they won the Eclipse Award as Outstanding Owners four times and were twice voted Eclipse Awards as Outstanding Breeders. Their homebred turf champion Kitten’s Joy was the foundation of their operation and was twice the leading sire. They top the owners’ career wins lists at Churchill Downs and Keeneland.

Thanks to his instincts and the determination that he and his wife used to find success in the business world and then in breeding and racing horses, Ramsey was able to clear a massive hurdle to receive the transplant on June 20 in New York. He believes he will be recognized by Guinness World Records as the oldest person to receive a kidney transplant. Ramsey said that when his granddaughter did some quick research she found information about a man in Toronto who had his transplant at the age of 87. Ever the competitor, Ramsey did the math.

“When I got my transplant, I was 88 years old, seven months and 13 days,” he said with his trademark chuckle.

Ramsey came close to not being able to realize and celebrate his medical good fortune. He had steadfastly refused to consider dialysis and said that by the time he received the transplant, his kidneys were down to a mere 8 percent of efficiency. They had been on a steady decline this spring as Ramsey frantically searched for a hospital that would agree to do a transplant on an octogenarian.

“I’d already started turning gray. You know that look you get when you’re about ready to die?” he said. “Two of my kids said, ‘Dad, you just don’t look good. You’re just so fragile.’ And I wasn’t feeling good. It was taking a toll on me.”

While being treated for a knee problem three years ago in Florida, Ramsey was first told that a blood test showed he had kidney disease. However, he did not get the same type of report during a follow-up visit to his doctor at home. He thought he was fine. A year and a half later, other tests showed that his kidneys were no longer functioning properly. He promptly started looking for a solution.

“At that point, it was down to 31 percent and I immediately went to the Mayo Clinic and told them I would like to get a kidney transplant,” he said. “They told me (the kidneys) was absolutely going down. There was no reversing them. I could change diet and all that, but it will probably last another three or four years, and that was it, and either one of three things would happen: you either go on dialysis, you get a kidney transplant, or you die. And the doctor told me, ‘I can tell you right now you are too old for a kidney transplant.’”

As his numbers continued to drop this year, Ramsey’s doctor told him that toxins were building up in his body and that it was time to get ready to start dialysis. Ramsey rejected that approach. He was against dialysis because of the time involved. He said it would take up to five to six hours a day, counting travel and prep, three days a week.

Ramsey visited the Cleveland Clinic, where he said he was turned down as a transplant candidate because of his age. Soon after, the University of Kentucky, where he attended college and has been a benefactor, agreed to review his case. He said that he passed the required testing but was told he was too old to be a transplant candidate.

That setback became a turning point, thanks to a UK doctor he had become friendly with who told him there might be an option.

“She said there was a doctor in New York,” Ramsey said. “‘He believes that if you’re healthy enough, you could get the transplant.’”

She put him in touch with Dr. Sandip Kapur, chief of transplant surgery and director of the kidney and pancreas transplant programs at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center.

Ramsey said he called Kapur and was sitting in his office in Manhattan the next morning. He said Kapur agreed to do a transplant if Ramsey could find a donor, but said it needed to be done within a month because of his rapidly deteriorating health.

When Ramsey made it known he was searching for a kidney he got a call from Rhonda Pope of Nicholasville, who had been one of his wife’s healthcare workers for about a decade before she died in May 2022. He said Pope told him that her health was not good enough to donate a kidney, but that her husband, Tom, 51, was willing to be a donor. Ramsey called Tom Pope, and the plans were made for him to go to New York for the testing required before the surgery.

“From the day I walked in the office up here, less than 30 days later, I had that kidney in me,” Ramsey said. “So things just fell in place.”

Ramsey had to remain in New York after the transplant, but was later allowed to move 175 miles upstate to his house that overlooks Saratoga’s Oklahoma training track. He is on a regimen of anti-rejection medication that lowers his immune system and cannot go out in public. He said he hopes to be able to return to his Kentucky farm at the end of September.

“I’ve now got a new lease on life,” he said.

In fact, Ramsey said Dr. Kapur told him: “We have tested you for just about everything, because a lot of things can go wrong that’s not on the surface. You’re as healthy an 88-year-old as I have ever seen. I really don’t see any reason why you can’t live to be 100.’”

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