Article By Teresa Genaro (Forbes Magazine)

On July 17 at the annual preview of the Saratoga race meeting at the National Museum of Racing, trainer Linda Rice was asked if there were any horses she was looking forward to running.

“Palace,” she said without hesitation.

He finished fourth a couple of weeks later, but if the people in the audience that night stayed with him, they’d have cashed on Palace when he won the Chowder’s First Stakes on August 24, paying $27.

The win was Rice’s biggest at the meet so far, one of her five victories, a smaller number of races than she’d hoped to win up here this summer. Then again, her own record up here has set a pretty high bar for success.

A familiar sight on the Saratoga backstretch as she zooms around in her golf cart, walkie-talkie in hand to communicate with her staff, Rice owns or co-owns four training titles in New York, including the 2009 Saratoga meet title, when her 20 victories made her the first woman to be leading trainer at this meeting. In 2000, her City Zip—the sire of Palace—swept Saratoga’s two-year-old races. In 2011, she got her 1,000th win with a horse owned by her father, Clyde.

It’s to him, she said, that she owes that training title. It was with him, a Thoroughbred trainer himself, that she started working with horses, the fourth generation in her family to do so.

She grew up in Hershey, Pennsylvania, where her father was among the leading Thoroughbred trainers. Two of her brothers were jockeys, and she was riding from an early age and handicapping races from the Daily Racing Formby the time she nine.

“It served me well,” she said earlier this summer, sitting in the office of her barn at Belmont Park, getting ready to pack up for the move to Saratoga.

She and her brothers worked at her father’s barn before and after school, with no distinctions, she said, in the work they were asked to do. Alongside them, she fed horses, built fences, and bailed hay, at the cost, she said with a laugh, of more domestic skills.

“I’m not the best cook in the world,” she admitted.

An accomplished rider, she considered becoming a jockey–“I couldn’t imagine,” she said, “why you’d want to train horses unless you got to get on them every day”–but her parents had other ideas, requiring that she go to college.

So off she went to Penn State to study computer science, but, perhaps to the dismay of her parents, her years at university didn’t deter her, and at 23, she began training horses on her own, exercising her own horses until about 15 years ago, when her stable became so successful that she needed that time to manage her business.

At first, she trained a few horses for her father and some of his clients, working at Mid-Atlantic tracks before moving to New York in 1992. Her first big break came when a client shipped her some horses from Chicago, including one called Double Booked, who in Rice’s barn won multiple graded stakes, including the 1991 Bernard Baruch Handicap at Saratoga.

In recent years, Rice has been called “the queen of the turf sprints,” the result, she said, of a strategic decision about how to get to the winner’s circle.

“As a young trainer, particularly a young female trainer,” she said, “my job was to win races, any kind of races. To talk about winning the Triple Crown races or the Florida Derby or the Travers—that was not something that I needed to be reaching for. I just needed to reach for the winner’s circle and the fastest way to get there with the few clients that I had. It didn’t matter what distance the horses ran or what surface they ran on.

“I found a little niche there in that I could identify horses that would like the grass, and I was around a lot of the 2-year-old in training sales with my family when I was growing up. I found horses that were sprinters and that liked the turf, and I also found also that you could find some untapped resources with inexpensive horses that had never been tried on the grass.

“I found I had a knack for it. It allowed me to get horses to the winner’s circle so that I could get my foot in the door and develop the rest of my clientele after that.”

It also allowed her to pull off one of the more remarkable accomplishments in horse racing on August 18, 2008, when her horses finished 1-2-3-4 in the Mechanicville Stakes at Saratoga. The Linda Rice superfecta paid $3,490 for a $2 wager.

As the Saratoga meeting heads towards closing day on Labor Day, Rice admits that it hasn’t been quite the meet she’d hoped for. In addition to her five wins, her horses have finished second in 11 races and third in 10 others. Her record for the year is 60-55-53 from 315 starters, with purse earnings of $2,625,000.

“I’ve had a great year so far, and every once in a while, you have to grin and bear it that you’re going to end up on the wrong side of every photo finish,” she said, “and I’ve had that kind of a meet.”

As a member of the New York Thoroughbred Horsemen’s Association, Rice serves on several committees and chairs the organization’s scholarship committee, which offers financial awards to backstretch employees and their direct dependents for undergraduate study.

“I grew up in the business and it gives me satisfaction to help take care of the horses or try and help people find a better position,” she said. “I’ve watched kids do remarkable things.”

She also works on behalf of her horses whose racing careers are nearing an end, keeping an electronic file of inquiries from people who are looking for horses.

“When I have a horse that needs a home,” she said, “I try to figure out what’s the best direction for them. Could it be re-trained? Is it a horse that could be a stallion or a broodmare? The ones that just need a home are a little harder to place, but we have several places we work with.”

“I’ve gone through my entire life working with horses,” she continued. “I love the animals and when they’re not racing any longer, I want to make sure they have a good home.”

As one of few women in a sport still dominated by men, Rice pointed out that women have traditionally been perceived to excel in working with horses, in nurturing them and handling them. She has, she believes, played a role in demonstrating that they can handle the business side as well, managing a stable of 50 to 60 horses and both an office and a barn staff.  Still, she acknowledges the challenges she’s faced.

“No doubt, it was harder for me,” she said, harder than it would have been for a man to get started. “Bottom line, it was tough. When I was 17 years old and I told my father I was going to be a horse trainer, he said it would be a lot easier if I were one of his sons, and I can’t say that that didn’t hold true.”

But, she pointed out with a smile, there are benefits, too.

“People never confuse me with my male counterparts, and maybe that’s helpful, too.”

She also thinks that the perception of women in the sport is changing, and she hopes that she has contributed to that.

“I like to think that my being in New York and winning training titles has made it a little easier for the women that are coming up,” she said.

So even in a summer in which she’d have liked a few more of those second-place finishes to be wins, she’s still appreciative of what she’s accomplished and what the sport has given her.

“I’m not going to complain,” she said, sitting outside Saratoga’s racing office with a week left in the meet. “I’ve been blessed with such great, great memories of racing.”

Original Article – http://www.forbes.com/sites/teresagenaro/2013/08/29/thoroughbred-trainer-linda-rice-a-groundbreaker-for-women-in-racing/3/