Freezing Reins Playfair Thoroughbred Trainer Takes First Winter Season In Stride

Everything takes time in the dead of winter at a racetrack, everything but the parade to post. When it’s brutally cold, riders don’t waste a lot of time hustling horses from the paddock to the gate. Ceremony is the first casualty of a cold afternoon.

Lynda Leffel, mother of three, a rancher in Davenport, owner and trainer of thoroughbreds, is working through the first winter season in the 60-year history of Playfair Race Course.

It’s a novelty in Spokane. The shifting to winter of a traditionally warm-weather sport even seems to have the geese confused. One recent clear and chilly morning on the back side of the track, when the temperature had yet to reach 20, a honking flock overhead was headed west.

“Shouldn’t they be going south?” wondered Leffel, who trains a half-dozen horses stabled at Barn 19.

The same could be asked of her.

Inland Northwest horse people have this much in common with the geese. The ones who intended to go south for the winter are already there.

“If you’re still here you’re pretty tough,” Leffel said. “You’re in it for the long run.”

Hard-core owners and trainers who worked through an occasionally brutal January are Playfair’s bridges to better times. The promise of warm-weather racing dates later this year, the likelihood that winter racing is a one-year experiment here, and the reality that a winter season beats no season at all keep Leffel fighting her war of attrition.

The Lynda Leffels of Playfair survived a year when the doors never opened. The track was dark through all of ‘96. Through inactivity and uncertainty her business plunged.

“Owners sold horses when we didn’t run for a year,” she said. “Clients with better horses took them to bigger tracks. Some went to California. One year off put a dent in the number of owners who were still involved. That was the hard part.

“I went from 36 horses in training to zero for 12 months,” she said. “I had 85 head of horses at my farm in Davenport. Now I have 30. I had zero training income last year.

“That’s a big hit.”

Big, not fatal. Racing people have rallied their ailing sport and industry from the brink of failure.

Although Leffel has only a half-dozen horses at the track - down from 30 in ‘94 - she continues to post a high percentage of in-the-money finishes.

She was an effective voice who carried the concerns of the area’s horsemen to the state racing commission through ‘96. It was in part through such testimony - dignified begging might be one way to describe it - that the state was persuaded to sanction a winter race meet here.

The chair of the racing commission, Barbara Shinpoch, expressed reservations before racing dates were transferred from Yakima to Spokane. Shinpoch suggested that winter racing in Spokane couldn’t be done.

Leffel and hundreds of others have proven otherwise.

Even Leffel’s husband, Mike, a Davenport accountant, was among the skeptics.

“I’m surprised it’s gone as well as it has,” he said. “They’re showing it can be done.”

Not only done, but for the most part done well. A month into the season of weekends that ends on March 23, horsemen have lived up to a promise many expressed at a number of commission meetings to provide competitive races.

For them it hasn’t been a canter through the park. Leffel suffers from asthma.

“It’s difficult for anybody who has that to be out in the cold like she is,” Mike Leffel said. “She has to wear masks and take care of herself.”

Some of the load in Barn 19 is shouldered by an assistant, Richard Klamerus. At 7 o’clock on a winter morning it helps to have somebody there, to share the work and laugh at your jokes.

“Spill any water and it’s instant ice,” Leffel said. “It’s there ‘til spring.”

The inevitable cuts and scrapes a horse incurs in training and racing that disappear almost overnight in warm weather can take forever to heal.

“When it’s real cold,” said Leffel, “you lay the hose down and it freezes before you pick it back up again.

“When we wash a horse off, their tails freeze. Their legs freeze. We clean them up, put them away (in their stalls) and their legs eventually dry out so we can do them up. But it takes time.

“It takes more time to get a horse cooled out. It takes a little more time to care for the horses’ eyes.”

The winter racing surface is a mixture of sand and salt. “If they run from behind and get sand in their eyes, that’s as bad as salt,” Leffel said. “The difficulty is getting water warm enough to clean anything off. Anytime water freezes out here it makes it extremely difficult. The high 20s and 30s isn’t bad.

“When it gets real cold it can get a little hazardous. Helen Morgan (a Playfair trainer and owner) slipped and fell the other day. But, hey, we’re tough, and for the most part we’ve been blessed with some pretty nice winter weather.

“It might get worse before we’re done.”

Conditions once considered impossible have racing people pulling together, Leffel said. By nature independent and competitive, the people from all sides of the track have tackled the job of putting on a winter show.

“The riders are trying to help the trainers,” Leffel said. “A lot of them had a year off, too. It would be miserable if riders wouldn’t gallop in the mornings, if they were hiding out all the time. But they’re not. Even at my barn, with maidens (non-winners) and young horses, people are here, helping us out.

“The track accommodated horsemen by changing (training hours) to 8 to noon (from 6 to 10). That makes it easier to work. Management put a lot of money into the new rail. We couldn’t ask for a better track surface.

“Everybody is trying to make this program work. It should have been like this all along.”

Like this, only warmer.

A Leffel strength is dealing with discouragement, both in people and horses. Playfair is a 5-furlong track - 3 furlongs shorter than a mile racing surface, where the deeper stretch can be an imposing sight to a tired and sore animal, she said.

“Horses know where the finish line is,” she said. “They don’t get discouraged when they’re running down a shorter lane. By the time they turn the corner and line out they can switch leads, start running and they’re at the wire.”

The state needs Playfair and Yakima Meadows, Leffel added, as well as Emerald Downs.

“If we’re going to develop owners - and we need to - we have to give them a chance to win races,” she said. “If there’s only one track, some owners will have horses that can’t cut it and they’ll get out. If they win they stay involved.”

She sees Playfair’s sluggish betting handle improving as the season takes hold.

“Give it another month because some people still don’t realize we’re up and running,” she said. “If we can get people used to winter racing there’s very little competition as far as entertainment here.”

Not at 1 o’clock on a Friday afternoon, when Playfair starts the first of three weekend days of racing.

“Horses are her life,” Mike Leffel said. “With the track down for a year in Spokane it made it very difficult for her. The hardest part was the uncertainty. This is a business you can’t turn on and off.”

Getting back to her high of training 30 horses will take time, and more encouraging signs.

“It’ll be done slowly,” Mike Leffel said. “We’ve got to see what the future holds.”

Even so, Leffel has reason to plan for tomorrow with the hope that the worst days of winter, like the worst days of the race track, are behind her.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 3 Photos (2 Color)