Roy Lerman is not one for reflection, but he does have a unique career to reflect upon.
This will be the 35th season at Saratoga as the owner, trainer, and breeder of Lambholm. Initially, Lerman planned to stay at the former Hobeau Farm in Florida for the summer due to the uncertainty around the COVID-19 pandemic.
However, when Belmont Park started racing at the beginning of June and the Florida weather started getting warmer, he decided to bring a small group of horses to New York.
“I had made no plans of coming up here because I didn’t know what was going on,” Lerman said. “I was planning to stay on the farm in Florida for the 2-year-olds still in training. Once [the track] said they were going to run, we decided to come up here. It wasn’t a good alternative to stay in Florida because we are 300 miles from Gulfstream Park. Plus, it’s brutally hot down there.”
Lerman has brought just 12 horses to his well-manicured private stable, which is a few hundred yards from the main track. Besides the improving 3-year-old Joyous Times, he has seven 2-year-olds who are still in training, including East Wing (by Soldat, winner the 2010 With Anticipation Stakes) and Private Code (by Honor Code, winner of the 2015 Whitney Stakes). Although, Lerman indicated those young horses may still need time.
“None of these 2-year-olds are ready to run yet,” he said. “I never push them along, but if they get ready, then they are ready. They have been training and breezing regularly in Florida. Now, it’s time to start increasing their speed.”
Each day since coming to Saratoga in mid-June, Lerman noticed that the area is not quite the same – especially around the track – as everyone is trying to be safe.
“You don’t get a sense of excitement or anticipation here,” he said. “I see a couple of guys who are here. There is no socializing. Saratoga is not the same. People can go to a restaurant, but I haven’t. I don’t want to be paranoid, but I also want to be safe.”
Lerman even had similar experiences when he was racing horses in Florida and more recently at Belmont.
“Nothing is the same,” he said. “When I was racing at Tampa, I knew it wasn’t the same. That’s a nice small facility that can hold 5,000 people, but no one was there. It was like virtual racing. When I was at Belmont a couple of weeks ago, it was bizarre. I came in, checked the horse in the barn, saddled the horse in the paddock, watched the race, got in my car, and drove back.”
Horse racing was not Lerman’s first career. He started as a lawyer for the Department of Labor and a private practice after graduating from Syracuse University and Georgetown Law School. At the same time, he had an interest in horse racing as he slowly made a career of buying a farm to develop and race horses in the mid-Atlantic region.
“It was a long slow process,” he said. “I had farms in Virginia. The principle reason I kept the practice going was for my son. If he ever wanted to become a lawyer, that would make his life easier. I wanted to leave possibilities for him.”
Today, his son Ethan is an assistant judge and has a general practice firm in Missoula, Mont., which also focuses on equine and racing issues. Even Lerman continues to be an occasional consultant on legal matters.
“I still have people who call me about cases in which I can tell them about as a lawyer,” he said. “I will tell them that not every lawyer is the same just like not every doctor is the same. There are different qualities and specialties. It happens all the time. We review the case with them. I am only a consultant in that sense.”
Lerman also indicated there are some similarities in being a lawyer and a trainer, especially since it takes time to develop a case – or a horse.
“The development of a race horse is not too dissimilar of the evolution of a case,” he said. “It takes a long time to get to the end of a civil case and a complex criminal case. You can’t jump over any step in a legal case. It’s the same thing with racehorses. If you skip over a step, you might get away with it, but not often.”
Since saddling his first horse at Shenandoah Downs in West Virginia in February 1978, Lerman has seen his fair share of winners. This includes his first stakes winner with Lava in the 1982 Capital City Handicap at Penn National, back-to-back victories with Dance Mask in his first trip to Saratoga in 1985 and winning the Grade 3 Long Island Handicap in 2016 with Evidently.
Lerman has also bred, raised, and sold many horses, including 1996 Breeders’ Cup Classic winner Alphabet Soup, whose auction bid was never met for $29,000 at the Fasig-Tipton Midlantic 2-year-olds in training sale in May 1993. George B. Ridder eventually purchased Alphabet Soup privately before the late-developing horse won five other graded stakes races in California.
Lerman knew Alphabet Soup had a lot of potential as a 2-year-old, which was confirmed by two of his exercise riders on the farm: Kim Keppick and Olympian medalist Karen O’Connor, the spouse of Olympian gold medalist David O’Connor.
“I knew something about him,” Lerman said. “However, these two riders were excellent. Kim and Karen rode this horse with a couple of other girls in Virginia. They loved this horse. That opened my eyes to the horse.”
Alphabet Soup, who was also a sire at McMahon Thoroughbreds in Saratoga from 2011-2013, has been retired from breeding since 2015 and stands at Old Friends Farm in Kentucky.
As for Lerman, he plans to stay in this business as long as he can. However, one thing Lerman does not regret is his career decision from being a lawyer to owner, trainer and breeder.
“It’s beats spending a career in the labor department as an attorney,” he said.
