It a job she seemed destined to do.
“Growing up I used to watch a girl named Sis Arnold, she was an outrider at the all the tracks in Illinois, places like Maywood, Balmoral, Hawthorne and Sportsmans Park,” Holliday said. “I really looked up to her a lot.
“She has a picture of me riding one of her outrider horses when I was little. I was just five or six, and I’ve got my Mighty Ducks coat on.
“She was the first person where I said, ‘I want to be like her. I want to be just like Sis,’ Like all little girls, you see a girl on the race track with all those pretty horses, who wouldn’t want to do that?’”
Along with having a role model, Holliday had the genes for the job, too.
Her grandma, a Lebanon school bus driver, first got into the sport when she bought a share of a standardbred that raced at Lebanon Raceway.
Her dad, Ken “Doc” Holliday, has been a successful driver at tracks across North American since the 1980s and now — with the help of his wife, Sherri — owns and trains a string harness horses that he stables at the Lebanon Fairgrounds. Her brother is now a driver, too.
“I was probably a year old — like a baby baby — and they’d put me on the back of their race horses while they brushed them,” Holliday said. “When I was 10, my parents got me my first riding horse and pretty soon everybody who knew me associated me with horses.
“I was just that crazy horse girl.”
Her ‘gift’ with horses
That’s what a paddock judge at Northfield Park in Cleveland was thinking a dozen years or so ago when had a large Holsteiner — the oldest of the warm-blooded breeds and one known for show jumping — that would let almost no one on his back
“That horse, his name was Land Lyric, had the reputation of being a real jerk. He was pretty uncontrollable,” Sherri said. “And one day the man comes to us and says, ‘Do you care if I let Ashley ride him?’
“I said, ‘She can’t ride him!’ and another woman, a very good horsewoman, said the same thing. But he told us, ‘Listen, this horse is gonna love Ashley. I can just tell.’ And sure enough he put her on that animal and it was like the two were just made for each other.”
Ashley formed such a bond with Lyric that her parents eventually bought him for her as a surprise, and she ended up showing him all through high school and winning at the Ohio State Fair with him.
Sherri said a professional trainer who watched her daughter guide the problematic horse once pulled her aside and said:
“Listen, don’t ever take that girl off a horse. She has a gift.”
While going to Streetsboro High School near Cleveland — where her parents had temporarily relocated to race at Northfield Park — the 5-foot-10 Ashley played prep basketball and soccer.
“Unfortunately I’m not as coordinated as I looked,” she said with a laugh. ”For some reason I do a lot better work on top of a horse than I do on my own two feet.”
And that brings us back to her job as an outrider, which she first did when Gregg Keidel, the Dayton race secretary who also runs the show at Running Aces Racetrack in Minnesota, hired her for the position up there.
After three years there she took over the outriding duties at Batavia Downs in New York and — following a move to Florida where she worked as a Lasix coordinator at Gulfstream Park for the state’s racing commission — she returned to her southwest Ohio roots and took on the outriding duties this year at Dayton Raceway, which ends it 75-session meet on Wednesday night. She’ll do the same thing at Miami Valley Raceway in Lebanon when it opens January 9th.
While much of the job is more mundane — leading the drivers and their horses on and off the track for races, checking each entry so see that equipment is hooked up properly and making sure each horse gets lined in the proper post position behind the starter’s gate — there are moments when she called on to deal with potential — or already transpired — calamity.
An instance of the former happened a few weeks ago when a horse piloted by Kayne Kauffman, one of Dayton’s top drivers, broke its bit as the field was lining up behind the starters gate across the track from where she sat astride Hub, her outrider mount, along the outer rail.
Instantly, Kauffman had no control of the suddenly panicked animal.
“I actually heard the driver screaming my name from across the track,” she said. “From where I was I couldn’t quite see who it was at first, but I saw the horses moving side to side behind the gate and knew something was wrong. I heard someone on the radio say ‘broken bit’ and I took off running.
“As I got closer I saw Kayne’s horse had wheeled around and it was coming back right at me. Thank God my horse is really handy, and we were able to get right on it. Since I couldn’t grab the bit, I was able to grab the halter.”
Kauffman remembers the moment well: “It looked like my horse and I were in real trouble, but then she was right there and caught me. She did a really good job. We were safe then.”
Her ‘toughest moment’
Just before the races 10 nights ago, Holliday and I sat outside the stall in the Dayton Raceway paddock where she kept her outrider horse, Hub, and talked about one aspect of her job she’d never faced.
“I’ve had a few horses go down, but luckily I’ve never had one be critically injured and have to be put down,” she said quietly. “I hope to God that does not change because I don’t know that I could handle it.”
Then, unbelievably, just two nights later — in the most personal of scenarios — she had that very thing happen and it tore her up inside.
Her dad had Rocky Mountain Guy entered in the fourth race, a mile pace, on Saturday, Dec. 19. In 31 starts, the horse had four wins and been in the money 15 times. He had more career earnings ($52,910) and a better time (1:50.4) than any other entry in the nine-horse field.
That very morning Ashley had cared for him at their barn at Lebanon.
But during the race, he took a misstep, became off stride and then hobbled and did not finish
“I could tell there was more to it than him just going off stride,” she said. “I went out to my dad and said, ‘Did he break down?’ Meaning did he break something? My dad said, ‘Yeah, it’s not good.’
“I held onto (Rocky Mountain Guy) and deep down I just sensed something was seriously wrong. When we started undressing him out there, I could see the blood and he actually had a compound fracture. The bone was coming right through the skin. He had to be euthanized
“It was pretty rough. It tore me up pretty good, but I had to be professional out there and try to keep my mind off it and do my job. I had a whole night of racing ahead. It was almost like I was outside of myself, but it still was terrible.
“It’s the toughest moment I’ve ever had to deal with in my career. And I’ll tell you, I did a lot of crying on the way home.
“That’s something that’s going to stay with me. I love this business, but there can be a very dark side to it, and that was it right there.”
’Making strides’
When she had arrived at the track the other day, she walked Hub — who once had been a quarter horse racer known as Tyrant Ruler and won $117,000 before changing careers — to his stall.
She has two more outrider horses that are turned out in Morrow and will be brought back fresh for the Miami Valley meet.
Next, like all the drivers, she had to blow it the racing commission’s breathalyzer before she began preparing her tack and studying the night’s racing program. She scours the line-up of horses the way a Major League Baseball pitcher studies the opposition’s line-up card, noting who usually does what.
Often trainers and drivers will come to her beforehand to give her a heads up on a horse that is a bit troublesome that evening.
As she readied herself that night, you could sense how much she likes being around these race horses.
“The thing I like most is that when it comes down to it, they are wild animals who let us do what we ask them to do because they trust us and they get to love us and bond with us,” she said.
“I hate to sound cliché, but there is something very majestic about a 1,200 pound animal that let’s you do anything you want to it.”
Bonding with the horses, she admitted, was easier at times than bonding with some of the men in this predominately male sport.
“It is a macho world, but women are making strides,” she said. “Still, it takes a while.
“Horses are big, powerful animals and I won’t lie, I’m not as strong as most men. I don’t think some of them took me too seriously the first couple of weeks I was here, but then I caught a couple of loose horses and they were kinda like: ‘OK, this girl might be OK.’
“Like anything, girl or not, you’ve got to prove yourself to get any respect when you’re new.”
With a bit of reflection and a growing smile, she added:
“In my position out there I try to be as nice and polite as I can be, but every now and then you gotta holler and get after ‘em and show ‘em who’s boss. But I think as more and more women get involved, we’re showing them we’re here to stay and they better get used to us.
“We can do the job.”
But then what would you expect from someone who, all of her life, has been known as “that crazy horse girl.”
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