LINDA RICE ISSUE 17.qxd_Jerkins feature.qxd 05/08/2013 18:06 Page 2
LINDA RICE
LINDA RICE Making her mark on the big stage
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HEN you get tired of getting beat by her every day, then you call her up!,” affirms longtime New Yorkbased owner Chester Broman, who has sent horses to Rice for about four years. New Yorkers, in particular, have been aware of her since she took City Zip through a sweep of all of Saratoga’s graded stakes for juveniles, topped off by the Hopeful Stakes (G1), in 2000. As the leading trainer of New York-breds, she supports racing in the state year-round. “I enjoy racing in New York,” Rice says. “It’s my favorite place to race, and New York is home. I’m a fan of dirt racing. Frankly, for winter racing, I think New York is maintained as good as any I’ve seen. I might try to move more of my turf horses to synthetics in the future, but I don’t want to race on synthetic year-round.” She has 36 stalls at Belmont, which is the limit, and 35 at Saratoga – mostly two-yearolds – and divides her time between the two tracks. The second division is stabled at Palm Meadows and moves to Saratoga after racing at Gulfstream Park and Tampa Bay Downs. She rarely ships, so when she does, bettors take notice. “I ship for stakes,” she says, and will travel often to Keeneland, where she won the Grade 1 Queen Elizabeth II Challenge Cup Stakes with Tenski in 1998, but is loyal to what the Northeast offers. Saratoga is where she really shines. Sixtime Saratoga champion Todd Pletcher respectfully acknowledged her defeat of him in the close race for the 2009 title, saying, “She did a good job. She deserves it.” Rice adds her own mark to the historic
If you win the training title at Saratoga, people will notice you. Linda Rice, catapulted into national recognition when she became the first woman to achieve this coveted honor in 2009, has been turning the heads of those in the know for many years now. By K.T. Donovan Saratoga venue with regularity. She trained the first four finishers in the 2008 Mechanicville Stakes, and won six races in a row in 2007. Hall of Fame trainer D. Wayne Lukas, who grew up with her father, Clyde Rice, has been familiar with her family and with Rice’s ability her whole life. “They are excellent horse people and excellent family people, and they are underestimated,” he said emphatically. Growing up in Hershey, Pennsylvania, where her father was leading trainer with a stable of 100 horses, she did the breaking and riding for him as assistant and exercise rider, and followed him to the sales. In all aspects, she helped him manage his business, and she learned from one of the most astute horsemen around. “I bought Family Style from Clyde as a two-year-old before she started racing,” Lukas recalls. “He picked her out. I developed her into a champion, but he gave me something to work with. “She developed a good eye for a horse, but she has the bloodlines for it. Her father has a VERY good eye, and her brother Bryan does, too. I still send yearlings to Bryan to break. Linda inherited the role of trainer in the family and has done very well.”
She went to college to further her education, but never had any intention of leaving the horse business. Her chosen major, computer science, helped her modernize the business side of training. “My father had an incredible work ethic,” she remembers. “He is talented with young horses, and a very good teacher of young horses; he understood them. But I think the most important thing I learned from him was how to run a business. I learned never to operate beyond what your business can sustain, how to make good decisions for my help, my owners, and my horses. I’ve learned a lot since then on my own, too.” She graduated and at age 23 took out her own trainer’s license, working in New Jersey for three years before going to New York in 1991. Among the things she learned was that she could not do it all, so she gave up riding as her stable grew. She is wistful about it, having spent 20 years in the saddle, but her innate realism told her she was not serving her barn well if she was missing the training of some horses while on the back of another. “The advantage of being a rider is you can instruct other riders,” she notes. “I was good with young horses, having spent all those years breaking them. So having been a rider, I can see if a horse is cheating the
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