Trainer Casie Coleman at the Delaware County Fairgrounds, Sept. 20, 2011, with Idyllic.Mark Hall/US Trotting Assn
Of course, Casie Coleman has her sights set on the Little Brown Jug.
In the harness racing world, the Little Brown Jug is the Holy Grail of the sulky set, a horse race equivalent to the Kentucky Derby, but in a more homespun way, with country folk chaining their lawn chairs to the fence surrounding the dusty little oval in Delaware, Ohio.
Coleman is a Canadian standardbred trainer who is finally poised to win the race on Thursday, with a horse with the Utopian name (in this world) of Betterthancheddar.
And the four-time Canadian trainer of the year could sweep the filly companion race, too, the Jugette. (Harness racing doesn't always change with the times.)
In the Jugette, on Wednesday, she has two shots: Idyllic and Pretty Katherine, with fancy résumés.
It could be a very good week, indeed, for Coleman, 31 and already a giant of the trotting and pacing game. A woman in a male-dominated sport, she has steamrolled her way to the top with a mind-numbing work ethic – "Horses almost 24/7," she says – not always winning glowing praise from her peers for doing so.
Coleman's training career began when she claimed a mare called Keeper Flying for $8,000 for new owner Merlin Howse.
At first, Coleman had to borrow equipment from her father to race the horse. But Howse also bought her a set of harness, her first jogging bike, her first racing bike, laying the foundation of what was to come.
When they lost Keeper Flying in a claiming race, they used the money to buy two more horses and did well with them. Two became three, three became four. Before she knew it, Coleman had a stable of 10 to 15 horses.
Her attention to detail paid off. She could turn a $33,000 claiming horse into a $100,000 claimer. Eventually, she trained American Ideal to win stakes races around North America and set a world record, only a year after she first started racing at Woodbine racetrack in Toronto.
When people saw that Coleman could manage a stakes horse, she got more of them. Now, most of her horses are stakes-calibre 2- and 3-year-olds. Last year, she won the $1.5-million North America Cup for owner Steve Calhoun, who says: "Casie changed my life. She's taken me to places I've never been before [as an owner]"
Jealousy and questions from horsemen and bettors followed her success. About four years ago, for an 11-month span, Coleman had to race her horses out of a detention barn at Woodbine, where security officials could keep an eye on her horses to make sure they were not being doped.
"No matter what, it's a hard business to get into," Coleman said from Delaware. "And as everyone knows when you're in this business, when you're doing good, everybody thinks you're using something [drugs] and when you're doing bad, they think you're an idiot and you don't know what you're doing.
"It's a no-win situation. It's just the way this business has always been. I wish it wasn't."
Coleman's horses have never tested positive at Woodbine. Her owners never wavered and stuck by her.
Coleman juggles an enormous operation, but says she has little trouble remembering everything: 70 horses in Ontario and New Jersey, six assistant trainers, 22 employees and endless work days. Her horses are pampered with a vitamin program, Jacuzzi soak tubs, time out of their stalls to walk, eat grass and run around paddocks, dentist checks others might miss. She prides herself on a stable that smells like a hospital, using disinfectant to prevent the spread of disease.
"You could eat off the floors," she said. "I'd like to be one of my horses, for sure."
If she were to win both the Little Brown Jug and the Jugette this week, she'd find herself in the company of only two other trainers (Brett Pelling and Billy Haughton) who have accomplished the feat of winning both races in one week.
Coleman is capable of pulling it off.
But winning the Jug by itself? Priceless.