Rice off to a Fast Start at the Spa

SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. – After nine days of racing, Linda Rice has already had a Saratoga season most trainers would consider a roaring success.

Rice starts the third week of the meet Wednesday atop the trainers' table with 10 victories, one up on two-time defending champ Chad Brown and two ahead of Todd Pletcher, a 14-time Saratoga titlist. She is winning at a 32% clip and her 31 starters have finished in the top three 22 times, an impressive 70.9 %.

How does it feel to be Linda Rice these days?

“Pretty good,” she said. “Pretty good.”

Adding to the positive vibe, jockey Jose Ortiz, who rode Rice's first five winners of the meet and was named on the last four before he was injured in a spill Friday, will return to competition Wednesday. Ortiz suffered bruised ribs when he fell after his horse clipped heels in the first race, took off his mounts Saturday and Sunday. He is entered in six of the 10 races on the program. Three of them are on Rice horses, all of whom are the morning-line favorites.

While trainers are typically ranked on wins and purse money earned, Rice's in-the-money percentage is noteworthy. Her victories have come for eight different owners.

“We try to put them in a position where they're going to be effective,” she said. “They're not always going to win, but hopefully, they'll pick up a nice check for my clients, pay the bills, keep moving forward.”

Rice's stable had been on a very good roll since last fall. She finished second to Brown at the Belmont-at-Aqueduct meet following Saratoga and has won the last four meets–three of them at Aqueduct–since.

At the Belmont Park spring meet, Rice topped the trainers' standings, while Ortiz edged his brother, Irad, 59-58, for the riding title. According to Equibase, Ortiz rode 25 of Rice's 34 victories at Belmont. Together with 80 starters, they compiled a 25-12-11 record–a 60 % in-the-money strike rate–and earned $1.318 million of the $1.996 million Rice's stable totaled at the meeting. The six races they won during the first week of July helped clinch their championships.

In a preview of what was ahead in the first two weeks at Saratoga, Rice and Ortiz took the first race on opening day with Winning Move Stable's Bustin Bay. They won another on the second day of the meet, two more on the third and their fifth on the fourth day of the season.

Maintaining momentum from one meet to the next is difficult, Rice acknowledged.

“You're always concerned about that,” she said, “that you have used up your stock, and they will have to rebound and take some time to come back together and used up a lot of conditions, you may win at the next meet.

“That happens every meet, if you have a big meet. Obviously, we were running hard at Belmont. I wasn't sure that we would pull it together so quickly at Saratoga. But, frankly, it's gone very well.”

Some 2 1/2 weeks since the end of the Belmont season, Rice said her stable is in the midst of  replenishing its lineup.

“They're coming back into form,” she said. “Some of them need time. Some of them are older, mature and can run back on short rest. But we only do that when it's a good opportunity.”

With 99 wins so far in 2023, Rice has already eclipsed last year's total of 96. Sometime this week, possibly on Wednesday, she will pass last year's purse earnings total of $5,774,619. Her season career bests of 145 wins and $7,258,064 in earnings set in 2019 appear to be within reach.

Rice, who saddled her stable's first starter in 1987, made history in 2009 when she became the first woman to win the Saratoga training title. Even with the great start this summer, she said it would be very difficult to finish in the top spot again. She did not say if she had a win number in mind when the Spa season opened on July 13.

“I was sure we would win some races,” she said. “Last year, we won 14. When I won the meet her in '09 I won 20, but over the course of that last decade, the first and second trainers have had 40 by the end of the meet. That's a tall task. Right now, we're two weeks in and we've got 10 wins, so I'm pretty pleased where we are. I try to set goals that we can reach. I don't want to set the bar too high for me or my staff.

“When I came in here I was thrilled. We had a great winter. Last fall was good. Belmont was terrific. I came in here thinking 'let's just have a good meet.' We're going to win some races. I knew that. But that bar in the last decade with these large outfits has become pretty high.”