New Face in Town

There's a bright new trainer on the backstretch on the racing circuit these days and when I say bright I don't mean shiny. Michelle Nihei (pronounced Nee-hay) is probably the only trainer at Saratoga with a Ph.D. in neuroscience. So what's she doing training horses?

It turns out that the "politics" of academia were not for her, according to a piece in the New York Times. She earned her doctorate at the University of Kentucky and was working her way up the junior faculty ladder at Johns Hopkins when, in 2001, she decided to return to Kentucky to re-evaluate her career choice. After talking her way onto a horse as an exercise rider at Keeneland, she never looked back. "After my first horse, it was like the light went on," she said. "I just knew that's where I was supposed to be."

In 2003, she got a job as an assistant trainer with Todd Pletcher and just recently went on her own. In 2007, she set up shop at Tampa Bay Downs with seven horses, most owned by one of Pletcher's former owners, Elisabeth Alexander. "When she wanted to go out on her own, I was very happy to back her," Alexander told the Times. "She's proving to the world that she's as good as we thought she'd be. I don't think there's too many other Pd.D's on the backstretch."

Niehli currently has 14 horses at Saratoga and is hoping for a few winners during the course of the meet. "No matter what I take on, I have to feel like I'm in it to win," she said. "I'm not going to do something I'm not good at."

No word as to whether or not her former work researching and conducting clinical trials on such issues as the effects of lead paint on humans has any correlation with horse training, but I'm guessing that the brain cells developed in the pursuit of a doctorate will not go to waste. At the very least, she will always know how and where to look for answers to some of the myriad questions she is bound to encounter. And if there is some connection between the brains of horses and those of humans who better to find it?