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The Other Half - what life is like being married to a trainer

By Ken Snyder
First Published: 14 October 2009 - Issue Number: 14

Call it “married with horses” – a box never to be found on any form, but surely the most accurate three-word description of life for a married trainer. Thoroughbreds are the other children for trainers with families, the children for those without a family, and, at the same time, four-legged taskmasters demanding the highly unusual start- and end-time in workdays that are every day. 
But while the TV sitcom “Married with Children” presented dysfunction among a human family, “Married with Horses,” at least in the lives of Kim and David Carroll, Anita and Graham Motion, Heather and Tim Ice, and Greg Blasi and Helen Pitts-Blasi, presents a world of humans and horses with way more positives than negatives. Marriages and families are forged and maybe strengthened more than most in an environment where failure gets short odds; where “soul-mate” means being, at the very least, part-time “barn help” and full-time cheerleader; and where, most surprising of all, children might get more parenting and “family time” than children of “nine-to-fivers.”
One thing is for certain: racetrackers marry racetrackers. The Carrolls were both exercise riders at Belmont; the Motions were “pupil assistants,” or “assistants to assistants,” to trainers in France when they met; Heather Ice was a veterinary technician visiting, among many barns, trainer Cole Norman’s, who employed an assistant named Tim Ice; and Churchill Downs outrider Greg Blasi’s ponies were and still are stabled just across the road on the backside from the barn of his bride of one year, trainer Helen Pitts-Blasi. In short, marriages may be made in heaven for some people, but they’re made in the shedrow, it would seem, for most trainers.
In producing racetrack romance, proximity, however, is probably secondary to a shared love of Thoroughbreds and racing, pure and simple. “I love to gallop horses,” said Kim Carroll. “This is what I do and who I am.”
“We love the horses and that’s pretty much all we talk about – the horses and campaigns we have planned,” said Anita Motion, who broke yearlings in her native England and here in the U.S.
Love and knowledge of horses gives spouses of trainers an understandi...

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