Stalled At The Starting Gate

The main thing a woman has to understand about being a horse trainer is that it's a man's game. Never mind how unfair that situation is, or the heartaches and frustration it causes; the fact remains: Despite the growing number of female trainers at virtually every track in the U.S. , racing is very much a male province. About all a woman can do is grin, bear it and hope that someday she will find an equine jewel among the misfits and rejects that invariably come her way.

Ask a woman horse trainer if she would recommend her profession to another woman, and the response is usually silence. Even the most successful women in the business hesitate to endorse it as a career. You have to be a special kind of person, they say, an independent sort who can maintain her femininity while also being one of the boys, one who knows that having a slim chance of success on the track may cost her any chance of having a "normal" life away from it. Tough. Hard. The racetrack makes you that way.

"Do you think I'm hard?" asks Dianne Carpenter. She's frowning, as if the thought troubles her, as she sits at a table in Wagner's Pharmacy, across the street from Churchill Downs , home of the Kentucky Derby . In her mid-40's, she has blonde hair and a husky voice and is wearing gold-flecked makeup.

Carpenter doesn't wait for an answer. She sighs, then recalls the day in 1988 when she was getting Kingpost ready for the Derby and one of her other horses, a 2-year-old colt, snapped a leg during a workout and had to be destroyed right there on the track. She cried, sure, but she also went on about her business. Does that mean she's hard?

"I used to cry about the remarks people would make," she says. "If I won a big race, they'd say I was lucky or that the horse overcame my training. If I lost, I was a dizzy blonde. It doesn't bother me anymore. I don't have anything to prove, but I would like to get my name in the book. In the end, that's what everybody wants, to get their name in the book."

"The book" is the record book, the one that lists the achievements of the game's best. Every trainer, man or woman, wants his or her name in it—alongside those of Charlie Whittingham , D. Wayne Lukas and Woody Stephens—but so far no woman has trained a winner of a Triple Crown or Breeders' Cup race. In fact, you have to go far down the yearly lists of the top trainers in the country in wins and earnings to find a woman.

The reason has nothing to do with desire, effort or ability and everything to do with opportunity, or more precisely, lack of it. A woman trainer loses whatever illusions she may have had when she comes up with a promising colt, only to have the owner give it to a male trainer; or when she gets that rare horse that can run with the best, only to find that the phone doesn't ring with the opportunities that would certainly come to a man under similar conditions.

"The discrimination is the same today as it was 30 years ago," says Sally Ann Bailie, "and it's very powerful."

Bailie, 53, is an intense, sad-eyed woman with long gray hair that hangs down her back almost to her waist. She is sort of the matriarch of the nation's female trainers, a pioneer who has made great inroads but who has been so beaten down in the process that she would discourage other women from following in her footsteps. Until Bailie came along, the only female trainers were women with husbands wealthy enough to indulge their whims or with enough money to run their own stables. Nobody took them very seriously, and nobody considered training a legitimate job for women.

That began to change a bit in 1971, when Hazel Longden, the wife of jockey and trainer Johnny Longden , became the first woman to win a stakes at Santa Anita. In 1977 Bailie became the first woman to win a $100,000 race, taking the New York Empire Stakes with Tequillo Boogie. And in 1980 Mary Lou Tuck really shook the establishment by training the winner of the $400,000 Hollywood Gold Cup, Go West Young Man. Yet, these triumphs are treated more as freak occurrences than accomplishments—"Not bad, for a girl."