“Why Racing?” With Maggie Sweet

Maggie Sweet

As part of a new series, we asked a number of people not born into racing families why they got into the sport, and what their first racing memory was.

MAGGIE SWEET, COO, Todd Pletcher Racing Stables

Why did you get involved in the sport, and what is your earliest racing memory?

My father took me to Narragansett Park in East Providence, Rhode Island when I was about four years old. In order to convince me and my brothers that we should stay for the last race, he promised us Burger King if he cashed a ticket. His horse won, we got Burger King and that was the first of a long list of racetracks that he and I visited together. My first trip to Saratoga for the 1981 Travers was a soaking wet day that resulted in me cashing a 10-cent place ticket on Pleasant Colony, who lost to Willow Hour in a major upset. Perhaps our most memorable trip was braving a French transit strike in 1994 to make an hours-long, circuitous journey to Longchamp from central Paris, where I was studying. My father's health had already started to fail, and I knew how badly he wanted to say he'd been racing in France. He passed away in 2006, and not a single opening day at Saratoga goes by without him very strongly on my mind. There's no way a little girl from Rhode Island who didn't have a single family connection to racing would have made it her career and passion without his influence.

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