When I think of Linda Rice I think of how badass she is. I mean, she might be the most badass trainer in all of horse racing.
Think about it.
When you look at, say, Chad Brown, he of six million wins a year ago at Saratoga, he doesn’t get more milquetoast. Dale Romans has that jovial I’ll-dress-up-as-Santa-every-year kind of vibe. And he’s quick with a long quote. D. Wayne Lukas had the badass vibe when he was rollin’. Graham Motion is someone you want your daughter to meet. Bob Baffert 2.0, the post-heart-attack Baffert, has that I’m-just-happy-to-be-here energy that most men or women of a certain age get when they dance with the Reaper.
But Rice? She’s got those Terminator shades and I swear she’d make Joan Jett turn acoustic.
So it is that 10 years ago Rice came to Saratoga, as she does every year, but 2009 was a special year for the XX chromosomes. Rachel Alexandra would beat the boys and become horse of the year and Rice would edge out Todd Pletcher on the final day of the meet to become the one, the only, female to be leading trainer at Saratoga.
“It dawned on me it’s been 10 years since we won the title up there,” Rice told me, “and I was trying to think what has changed for me. I’ve changed my business plan. I stay in New York year round. I have not raced in Florida much. New York racing has been good for me overall. Since then I’ve tied for the Belmont title. I won the Aqueduct winter meet after being second five years in a row. I finally won this year. Winning at Saratoga was a springboard to bigger and greater things.”
Rice, on the back of those turf sprints and, to be fair, other races, she won the title with 20 wins from just over 70 starters. Pletcher had twice that number. She might be the only trainer in the past 10 years not named Brown or Pletcher to win 20 races or more in a single season and she did it in 36 racing days vs. the modern-day 40.
In sports, we often talk about the stars aligning to forge a new champion. Call it the “Sports Gods,” call it luck, but there was something in the air that gave Rice an edge heading into that 2009 meet.
“There were a few things that helped,” she said. “That year there were 74 races taken off the turf at Belmont Park, because there was two months of straight rain. I scratched horses out of those races. I didn’t run them on the dirt. That was a positive thing and we had great results at Saratoga. We ran a lot of two-year-olds that did well too. By the time we got to Saratoga and the skies cleared, we had great weather and my grass horses were fresh and ready to go.”
Success often comes at the intersection of preparation and luck. Rice and her team were prepared with horses with a bit more tread on their tires heading up to the Spa. The condition book played to her strengths and she capitalized the way great coaches/trainers/athletes do when the opportunity rises.
Amazingly, and perhaps unbelievably, few women trainers still crack that upper echelon in a male-dominated sport. In theory, training knows no gender. It’s not a “strength” game. It’s a knowledge game, a feel game. And yet Rice is one of the few recognizable woman conditioners in the game. There have been other glimpses of it, say when Kathy Ritvo won the Breeders’ Cup Classic with Mucho Macho Man or when Maria Borell won the Breeders’ Cup Sprint with Run Happy. Ritvo has only started 51 horses in 2019.
I don’t know the circumstances behind that. Maybe that’s all Ritvo wants to train. But Rice has 339. In any case, there hasn’t exactly been a wave of new women trainers in the game despite Rice’s historic 2009 campaign and beyond. Maybe that says more about the prejudice among owners.
“It’s a very trying industry in these times,” Rice said. “It’s not an industry for the faint hearted whether you’re male or female. There’s a lot of demands to run a business in New York. The last few years we’ve been inundated with the Department of Labor and compliance. The workman’s comp issue in New York is higher than most places. It’s a difficult industry to wade through for a man or woman. It’s very taxing on anyone who comes to New York, much less a woman. It comes with a lot of struggles.”
No matter for Rice, she keeps going. She keeps sharpening the saw. She compares herself only to herself. She evaluates her business and keeps on improving her own game.
“I get excited about horses that are training well, young horses, claiming horses, any horse,” she said. “At the races when horses compete well at any level, that’s always great fun for me. That’s why I do it. It’s a seven-day-a-week job, long hours, you have to enjoy the competition.”
Brendan O’Meara is a freelance writer and author of Six Weeks in Saratoga.
