PrimeWOMAN JULY ISSUE presents a Day at the Races with Terri Pompay

PRLog (Press Release) – Jul 08, 2008 – A Day at the Races with Terri Pompay
By Barbara Luna

Little girls love horses, but while most are content to wish for a pony for Christmas and even take a few riding lessons, Terri Pompay didn’t just dream—she has grown up a successful trainer of Thoroughbred racehorses and every morning, manages the care of 29 of them. Pompay enjoys a career that awakens her seven days a week at 4:30 a.m. in plenty of time to see the sunrise over the Atlantic Ocean of Fort Lauderdale near Gulfstream Park Racetrack in the winter, or over the same ocean near Monmouth Park in Oceanport, New Jersey in the summer.  

Living with her 11-year-old son, Chance, just ¼ of a mile away from the track, her days include checking out 116 legs (four per horse) before 5:30 a.m. when the first set goes out to the track for a morning gallop. She watches her horses train, runs back home during a training break to get Chance up, fed and onto the school bus for fifth grade at Seashore School in Long Branch, then returns to the track for more gallops, conversations with jockeys, their agents, veterinarians, and owners—all before returning home by 11 a.m. to get dressed for the races. The afternoons are for racing, and a workday can easily stretch into 12 hours if one is saddling a horse for the last. If she is lucky, she can squeeze in a hair or nail appointment, shattering anyone’s faulty impression that being around horses all day takes away a woman’s femininity.

“I like being under pressure, I like action all the time,” said Pompay, who at the age of 22 was galloping 12 or 13 horses every morning in her hometown of Saratoga before heading out onto the road as a district manager for Warner Lambert. A 1983 graduate of Sage College in Albany with a business degree in economics, she had been working at Saratoga Racecourse from the age of 16 in order to support her show horses, so moving into a trainer’s role was very natural. However, in the 70s and 80s, it was usually the men who trained and the women stayed behind the scenes.

After working for other trainers, in 1995 she went out on her own with the help of her father, John, who started up racing partnerships  with a few of his friends. One of her earliest owners was the late John Franks, founder of Franks Petroleum in Louisiana. One of the nation’s top owners and breeders in the 80s and 90s, he gave Pompay a chance to work with his lesser horses. “But when I told him that one or the other needed some rest from training, I’d ship them to his farm for time off, and they’d get off one van, and immediately put their feet on another, as he’d send them to someone else. It took a long time to gain his trust,” said Pompay.

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