Trainers Find Wright Mix Credit Goes To Kim, But Couple Shares Success

Dale Wright left a little of his youth at a lot of different racetracks.

He can feel the worst of his years of jockeying in mended legs that occasionally talk to him of spills and fractures and surgeries that saddled him with premature retirement.

He doesn’t really miss riding, but then he never ventured very far from it, graduating as many do from rider to trainer.

Well before the typical male mind finally grasped the concept of gender equity, Dale Wright as a trainer was working side by side with his wife, Kim, basically as second banana.

When the racing season starts at Playfair tonight, the first of 20 horses stabled in the Wright barn will be listed in the Daily Racing Form as trained by Kim Wright.

No mention of Dale.

He’d never encourage the label but Dale Wright could be horse racing’s original feminist.

Insiders - most of all Kim, his wife of 34 years - know that Dale Wright is at least half the story. The Wrights have developed some of the region’s best fillies and mares of the last decade and a half. Credit that to their shared expertise.

Still, the light of public attention is shined on Kim.

The emphasis is well-placed, Dale maintains.

Their explanation comes in tandem. Married as teenagers, Kim and Dale do almost everything together, including completing a sentence.

One broaches a topic, the other finishes.

“Dale was still riding when we started (training),” Kim said.

“I was gone a lot,” Dale agreed. “When I was a state steward, Kim had the horses here pretty much on her own. When I quit stewarding, I went to Seattle (Longacres) with the horses. Kim would get them ready here and send the good ones to me over there. I’d send the cripples back to her.”

Pretty slick. The marriage flourished even with an arrangement so one-sided, where Dale got the stars and Kim inherited the projects.

Kim never seemed to mind.

“I’d been around horses for years growing up with them in Missoula,” she said, “but there was a lot to learn about training, starting with patience. You have to learn when the time’s right for them.”

Learn she did, sometimes as her own boss, when her husband was off running the Seattle half of the training business. At the time, training was still a mostly male enterprise.

Kim learned to regard horses as children, due all the attention, discipline and affection of dependents. The couple’s own children, Michael and Missy, are twentysomething, with kids of their own.

“Horses are individuals,” she said. “When they win it’s like your kids winning. You spend as much time with them, more even. When they finally figure it all out and make it across that wire first, it’s a great feeling of accomplishment.”

Any major blowups, working so closely with your spouse?

“Not when it comes to horses,” Kim said, laughing.

“Two heads are better than one,” Dale smiled.

“We’re willing to try change,” Kim said. “You have to in this business because every horse is different.”

They own a small piece of only one of the 20 head they train. The rest belong to clients.

“We’ve had ownership in horses over the years and I don’t see anything wrong with it,” Dale said. “But we felt with a public stable we didn’t want our interests to conflict with our clients. It’s to our advantage, we feel, to concentrate on the horses owned by the people who pay our bills.”

Notice the community “we?” Few if any unilateral decisions are part of the Wrights’ stuff.

Their success started with a filly named Katy Kould, their first stakes winner. “When she started doing so well people starting coming to us,” Dale said.

Next came Mary Mackee and Casey’s Irish Queen. The Wrights claimed Syn Jyn’s Tide for $4,000, who went on to earn $70,000. When he slowed down he found work in dressage competition, Dale said.

Stabled in the Wright’s barn now is a colt named Pursuit, “a full brother to a horse we just lost in California for $28,000,” Dale said. “He shows a lot of potential.”

There’s plenty to do with all the potential in Barns 14 and 15, the Wrights home away from home at Playfair.

“We made a decision two years ago - the last year I was in Yakima - to stay here and race,” Dale said. “It’s terribly expensive to keep going everywhere.”

It’s also terribly expensive not to. Horsemen here have scraped by with no racing in Spokane in ‘96 and only an experimental winter meeting to kick off ‘97.

“The owners, not just our owners, but all owners who’ve run here the last two years, have to be commended for sticking with it,” Dale said. “It’s been very expensive. But this is the first time in three years we can see a light.

“I think we’re going to have good racing.”

I?

Kim has a lightly altered view.

“This meet might be tough while they flounder a little bit with the simulcasting (out of state),” she said. “But I think next year we’ll have a real good meet and hopefully it’ll get better. Simulcasting is going to help us. It’s a savior.”

Dale came out of Freedom, Wyo., in ‘62 to be the leading apprentice rider at Playfair. Kim was waitressing in a nearby restaurant.

Love bloomed over the lunch counter.

“When I broke my leg, she took me back to Wyoming but I didn’t stay there very long,” Dale said. “I came back and married her.”

That was in ‘63. From there Wright moved to Longacres, where he was leading apprentice, then it was on to Turf Paradise and into Canada for a half-dozen years - Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver. Wright cracked the big time briefly at Pimlico in Baltimore.

“I flew back to ride a stakes race and won it, so I decided to stay,” he said. “I was there about a year. I didn’t do very well.”

“He was doing quite well in Canada and it was time to go back,” Kim interjected.

The legs told him it was time to change tacks.

“I got to hurting too bad,” Dale said. “I had so many operations, too many broken legs.” That’s history, like winter racing is history.

“Back in the sunshine,” Kim Wright said. “It feels natural.”

Notes

Although track officials still hope to put together an impressive lineup of out-of-state off-track betting sites by September, the fact is no out-of-state OTB is taking Playfair this weekend… . Trainer Fred Hepton is recovering from surgery to remove an aneurysm in the neck area, director of racing Ted Martin said. … Playfair today and Sunday will offer wagering on two complete afternoon programs - Emerald Downs at 1 and Del Mar at 2, with Playfair’s first post at 5. … The track has dropped its “enter to run” dictum of last winter, so handicappers watch for scratches. In tonight’s second race, scratch No. 9 Time’s Tapestry and No. 10 Oto No Custard. In the sixth, scratch P.D. Too and We Be Trying.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo