Kathleen O’Connell says her passion for racing and the 55-60 Thoroughbreds in her care is as strong as it was when she arrived at Tampa Bay Downs from Michigan in 1976 to gallop horses for trainer W. R. Harp.
On a typical morning, O’Connell watches her horses work from the top of her stable pony, an Appaloosa nicknamed Rocky. She is attuned to their movements and demeanor as her mind weighs options for planning a path that leads to the winner’s circle.
“I think you can learn a lot about horses by observing,” said O’Connell, the Oldsmar oval’s Leading Trainer for the second consecutive season and fourth time overall. “I like seeing how they act, just watching them gallop around the track and coming back home. I like observing them after a workout – how heavy are they breathing, do they seem stressed out or are they nice and relaxed.
“That’s why it bothers me when someone says they have sensors you can put on the horse’s girth (to help evaluate a variety of performance metrics),” O’Connell said. “It’s great we have this technology and that owners can watch their horses gallop on their computers, but you can’t do everything by looking at a video. You have to use common sense, too.”
And a whole lot of “horse sense” from her years of study. She has sent out 52 winners here, 10 more than meet runner-up Juan Arriagada.
O’Connell, who will accept the Leading Trainer trophy on Sunday in a ceremony between races, emphasizes none of her success would be possible without a dedicated team of employees and loyal owners. “I can’t say enough for my support staff. It’s due to them and my owners who run their horses where they belong that I’m able to accomplish everything,” she said.
O’Connell has been getting up-close-and-personal with horses for a lifetime. She got her first racetrack license in 1970 at Detroit Race Course; in a sign of the times, she was identified as “Pony Boy” on the license. But O’Connell knew she had found her happy place from the outset.
She never had a thought about turning back, instead becoming totally immersed in the racing lifestyle.
“With the horse business, you’re either in it or you’re out of it. It’s very consuming to do it at 110 percent of your ability,” said O’Connell, who keeps about 40 horses at Tampa Bay Downs and the others at Gulfstream Park during the winter and early spring.
“I tell people I don’t have any regrets, but I sacrificed time, relationships and family. My father and his sister wanted me to go to Ireland with them in 1997, but that was the year I had Blazing Sword and I was all over the country with him. There was no way I could have gone.”
Blazing Sword, a Florida-bred owned by the Stonehedge Farm concern of the late Gilbert G. Campbell and his wife Marilyn, was one of the leading 3-year-olds in the country that year, winning the Grade III Calder Derby and finishing in the money in four other graded stakes.
Blazing Sword was far from done after his sophomore campaign. As a 6-year-old, he won the Grade III Widener Handicap at Gulfstream and the Grade II Washington Park Handicap at Arlington.
The homebred son of Sword Dance remains O’Connell’s top money-winner, with earnings of $1,158,555, but the conditioner has trained dozens of other memorable competitors. She won the 2011 (then)-Grade II Tampa Bay Derby with Watch Me Go and the 2019 Grade III Sam F. Davis Stakes with Well Defined, both Florida-breds hailing from the Campbells’ operation.
Other outstanding runners trained by O’Connell include Grade II winners Stormy Embrace and Ivanavinalot and the freakishly fast multiple stakes-winning turf sprinter Lady Shipman, who finished second as a 3-year-old to 5-year-old Mongolian Saturday in the 2015 TwinSpires Breeders’ Cup Turf Sprint.
O’Connell, who will compete at Monmouth Park when the New Jersey track opens May 10, has 2,571 career victories, second to Linda Rice, with 2,605, as North America’s all-time leading female trainer. Her horses have exceeded $1-million in earnings in 27 consecutive years, including 2025, and she has been the leading trainer of Florida-breds 13 years in a row.
O’Connell’s first Tampa Bay Downs title came in 1998-99, when she saddled 26 winners. She tied Jamie Ness for the crown with 51 each in 2009-10, a few months after becoming the first woman to win a training championship at the Calder Casino & Race Course Tropical meet, and ended Gerald Bennett’s eight-year Oldsmar reign last year with 54 winners.
If it seems as if O’Connell has been just about everywhere (except Ireland), that impression seems pretty accurate. Watch Me Go’s Tampa Bay Derby victory earned him and his conditioner a trip to Churchill Downs for the Kentucky Derby, and although he beat only one horse, the experience was transcendent.
“The Derby walk is everything I thought it would be, and then some,” O’Connell said the following winter. “You look at the grandstand packed to the rafters, and it’s like a sea of heads. You just can’t believe there can be that many people packed into a space like that.”
It’s only when you’re around her for a period of time that you begin to grasp her horsemanship and devotion to providing care. In the sixth race last Saturday, a 6 ½-furlong sprint, jockey Jose Ferrer pulled up King Gerald right after the break when the 3-year-old colt banged his head on the side of the starting gate, causing a bleeding incident.
Joe DiBello, a partner in King Gerald, watched O’Connell tend to the horse after they got back to the barn. “It wasn’t a huge thing, but it wouldn’t stop bleeding (from the nostrils),” DiBello said. “Kathleen was back there putting ice packs on his head and using cold water over the top for 30 minutes to get the bleeding to stop.
“King Gerald is OK because of what she did to actually stop the bleeding,” DiBello added. “She’s as good as anybody when it comes to taking care of a horse.”
