‘I’m a lot older now than when I started!’ – interview with record breaker Kathleen O’Connell, still going strong after 2,386 wins

Kathleen O’Connell: became leading female trainer of all time with 2,386th victory at Tampa Bay Downs on March 12. Photo: SV Photography

Understated Florida-based conditioner last month became the leading female trainer of all time by victories in the US with the 2,386th win of a long career

 

USA: Kathleen O’Connell never set out to win 2,386 races. She did not plan to become the leading female trainer by wins in North American Thoroughbred racing history. “I went to the racetrack to see what I was going to do and figure it out from there and I’m still here,” she says.

That was circa 1971, although O’Connell, known popularly as ‘K.O.’, did not begin training until 1981. More than four decades later – on March 12, 2023, to be exact, at the age of 70 – she saddled My Eagle Soars, owned by P & G Zambelli in partnership with the trainer, to win the fifth race, a six-furlong maiden claimer at Tampa Bay Downs, at odds of 6-1. The victory put her one ahead of Kim Hammond, the previous record-holder, who is also still training. (As of Saturday, O’Connell had moved onto 2,390.)

So many things about that record-breaking race at Tampa were emblematic of O’Connell’s career. To begin, My Eagle Soars is a Florida-bred, a group with which she has had much success, and his breeder is Stonehedge LLC, founded by the late Gilbert G. Campbell and his wife Marilyn, with whom O’Connell partnered for many of their collective greatest wins.

The jockey, too, was emblematic. Antonio Gallardo, by his own admission, owes much of his success in Florida to the encouragement and support of O’Connell, who years ago advised the native of Cadiz, Spain, to stay the winter at Tampa Bay Downs, where he went on to win multiple riding titles. Gallardo is a longtime, loyal associate of O’Connell’s, as are many of her employees.

Tampa is special to O’Connell as well. She has won two training titles at the Gulf Coast venue, but more than that, it is the place she first landed when arriving in Florida in 1976, and it is her favorite racetrack anywhere. 

Citing it as “an old-type track, very fan-friendly,” she adds: “It’s probably one of the safest tracks to train on. It’s still got that old homey feeling, and they treat my owners very well here. The turf course has been one of the best in the country.”

She’s a record breaker: Kathleen O’Connell with her team and connections of My Eagle Soars and after record-breaking success at Tampa Bay. Photo: SV PhotographyIt has also been the site of, arguably, some of her greatest moments, although O’Connell is not one to cite greatest moments. She describes her record-breaking win as “a nice feeling” and “an added bonus,” and of her career victories to date says: “There’s just been so many, I wouldn’t say there was one favorite race or one defining moment.”

Nonetheless, she allows that winning the Tampa Bay Derby in 2011 with Watch Me Go, a Gilbert Campbell-bred colt who went off at odds of 43-1, “was very special, because I had been at Tampa so many years.”

(Let it not be said that O’Connell’s success has been confined to Florida, though. She campaigned the speedy Lady Shipman up and down the East Coast in 2015, culminating in a neck second to Mongolian Saturday in the Breeders’ Cup Turf Sprint against colts at Keeneland – another race that holds special meaning to the conditioner.)

Many people have a story of how they ended up in Florida. Ill health and the palmy allure of the peninsular state to a kid from Detroit frame O’Connell’s.

‘I had always loved Florida’

“I had pneumonia three times – twice in Michigan, and once the year I went to New Orleans, which was 1975,” she says. “I had always loved Florida – everything about it – but I had just visited when I was a kid.”

When trainer William R. Harp, for whom she was galloping horses at Fair Grounds in New Orleans as well as in Michigan, went to Tampa Bay Downs, she went with him. “And of course I just fell in love with the place,” she says, “Tampa Bay Downs and the whole area.”

Narrow defeat: O’Connell saddled three-year-old filly Lady Shipman (maroon silks) to finish runner-up to Mongolian Saturday in the Breeders’ Cup Turf Sprint at Keeneland in 2015. Photo: Breeders’ Cup/Bill LusterThere is a backstory, and it is this. O’Connell did once have a plan – not to win races, but to be a veterinarian. She applied to vet school but was rejected. Vet school is difficult to get into, much more so if you were female in the early 1970s. 

“I graduated 110th out of a class of 750, in the top ten percent, national honor society, and at the time I had a 3.8 average,” recalls O’Connell. “But really to get into a vet school they took only probably two girls a year at Michigan State University.”

People around her suggested she bide her time and try again. “It just wasn’t in the cards,” says O’Connell. “I didn’t have the patience. I did one semester at a community college and I just was very unhappy with the job I had and very unhappy going to school.”

‘Jeez – how easy is this?’

That was when she decided to figure things out at the racetrack, the now-defunct Detroit Racecourse, a mile oval where racing took place 120 days of the year, complemented by the also-obsolete Hazel Park. She started by walking hots, but with her background in breaking Arabians and Morgans for shows and riding in 4H, she soon graduated to taking horses to the gate on the pony. It wasn’t long before galloping beckoned.

“I thought jeez, how easy is this? You just go in a circle,” she says.  “No serpentines or nothing fancy.” 

She wound up in Ocala, breaking horses at Sugar Hill Farm, and learning to gallop Thoroughbreds. “After about ten years on the racetrack galloping horses,” she adds, “I figured I wasn’t going to be able to gallop the rest of my life, and in 1981 got my trainer’s license and I started out like everybody else, just with two horses, but it just kind of grew.”

There were eventually four horses in 1981, who together earned a shade over $20,000. That wasn’t the leanest year; in 1986, O’Connell had only two runs for earnings of $50. But by 1991 her runners were bringing in six figures, and since 1999 they have comfortably brought in over $1 million – sometimes well over – every year.

O’Connell’s first track license, in 1971, said ‘pony boy’. That is how rare, or unacknowledged, women on the racetrack were. She still laughs about it today, but does not feel offended. Nor does she highlight any discrimination against her as a young woman trainer a decade later.

“I don’t think there were any other differences,” she avows. “Any trainer starting out, you face the challenge of trying to get horses. I’ve always used my work as proof.”

And the work was noticed. By Gilbert Campbell, the prominent owner-breeder who first gave her the quality of horses to campaign in south Florida. Others followed, including Brent Fernung of Journeyman Stud in Ocala and John Franks, the multiple-Eclipse Award winning proprietor of Franks Farm, which had bases in Ocala and Louisiana.

Her background, with a decade of breaking and galloping horses – which she continued after gaining her trainer’s license – has informed her subsequent career. O’Connell remains a hands-on trainer, despite managing a barn of about 60 horses split between Tampa and Gulfstream Park, although she no longer gets on the Thoroughbreds.

Kathleen O’Connell: more than 50 years on the racetrack since 1971 beginning as a ‘pony boy’. Photo: Lauren King“I’ve always had a penchant for the babies, the two-year-olds,” O’Connell says, “and that’s why I think it started so good with Mr Campbell. He had quality horses and we could make it shine.”

The pipeline between leading breeders and the O’Connell stable led to 13 years when she was the leading trainer of Florida-breds by wins. As someone who considers herself a “semi-native” of the state, she says: “It was an honor to do that for the breeders.”

‘I like to be hands-on’

So what now for Kathleen O’Connell, and indeed for racing in Florida? Both have seen many changes over the years.

For herself, she acknowledges: “I’m a lot older now than when I started and it’s getting harder and harder to do things. I still ride the pony to and from the racetrack because I like to be hands-on, and I like to be hands-on in the barn.

“So as long as I’m healthy enough to do that and I can still enjoy it I’ll be fine. When it gets to the point where I can’t, that’s going to be difficult.”

As for racing, she adds: “I’m hoping that things can change on a level that’s good for the horses. Because I always say, what’s good for the horses is good for the owners, it’s good for the racetracks, it’s good for everything. So I just think money has to be spent, but the main problem, like with any other business, is where is money going to come from?”

For now, though, racing is still here and O’Connell is still here. Indeed, the stable has added more wins, with lifetime earnings approaching $47m. Who knows what combination of character and circumstance leads one person to survive and succeed where others do not – perseverance, dedication, more than a touch of obsession, the ability to inspire enthusiasm and loyalty in others, perhaps. 

O’Connell, understated as ever, has this to say on the matter: “I just have a lot of owners to thank and a lot of help to thank.”

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