Why Dale Romans believes a life spent on the track prepared him for a seat in the Senate

By Dana O’Neil, CNN

Louisville, Kentucky (CNN) — Conveniently plopped just across the street from the backside stable gate of Churchill Downs, Wagner’s Pharmacy has served horsemen since 1922 – back when Leo Wagner let them buy their food and cigarettes on credit.

It is, to this day, exactly as it should be – serviceable and decidedly not fancy, with walls blanketed by horse pictures, TVs set to whatever live racing is showing somewhere or workouts on the track across the street. The only nod to present-day Kentucky Derby mayhem is the kitschy gift shop, filled with wares for out-of-towners who pop in because some influencer suggested it on TikTok.

At 6:30 on a Tuesday morning, Dale Romans is sitting in one of the mismatched chairs in the restaurant, behind a simple brown table. He is nearly as much a part of the fabric of the place as the pictures, a steady visitor who can practically use the Churchill backside as his own personal measuring stick. He made his first visit to the track as a five-month-old to see his daddy, Jerry, who trained horses out of Barn 4. He spent his childhood running around and playing in and out of the paddock and barns – becoming a licensed trainer by the time he was 18.

Romans eventually took over his dad’s barn and has since become the second-winningest trainer in Churchill history. People don’t so much know Romans around here as they assume him, as sure a thing at the track as the sun rising behind the famed twin spires.

Romans is at Wagner’s as a guest on Jerry Eaves’ radio show. Eaves is every bit the local legend as Romans, a member of the beloved 1980 University of Louisville national championship team who grew up in lockstep with Darrell “Dr. Dunkenstein” Griffith, first as high school rivals, then college and eventually NBA teammates. Blessed with the easy gift of gab, Eaves makes his radio show feel more like a kitchen confab, casually rotating guests in on the fly and even interviewing some who don’t have microphones.

It is Derby week, so naturally, everyone wants to talk horses and Eaves presses Romans for his picks. But Eaves is a basketball player, and this is Louisville. Invariably, the conversation turns to Pat Kelsey’s work in the transfer portal, what’s going on with Kentucky and the fact that the Cards went 2-0 (in football and hoops) against the ‘Cats this past year. Eaves throws up some Ls at that one.

Sitting off to the end of the table with his headphones on, Romans smiles. “I love ‘em both.’’

Eaves grins back at him: “Spoken like a true politician.’’

On May 19 of this year – Preakness week in horseman parlance – Democrats in Kentucky will cast their votes in their primary, choosing from among the seven candidates who will vie against the Republicans for Mitch McConnell’s vacated seat.

Dale Romans is on the ballot.

Aside from working as the president of the Kentucky Horsemen’s Benevolent & Protective Association, which advocates on behalf of horsemen around the state, he has no political experience, unless you think shoveling horse manure for a living makes you ready to sling its figurative version around in the political coliseum. He is running as a moderate straight talker who believes his advantage is that he is decidedly not a lifelong politician.

Still, with Charles Booker and Amy McGrath – who both previously won the Democratic nomination – among the candidates, Romans is a long shot.

But now you’re speaking his language.

Romans saddled up his first horse on October 19, 1986, in a claiming race at River Downs. He waited 52 starts and 16 months to get his first winner. And 15 Preakness weeks ago, he sent a horse by the name of Shackleford to the starting gate for the second leg of the Triple Crown. At 12-1, he was the fourth pick in a 14-horse field.

Shackleford won by a half-length.

“Nervous? No. I’m not nervous. I’m nervous when the payroll is due and I need a win. I’m nervous on a race day,’’ Romans told CNN Sports. “With this, I’ve got nothing to lose, right?”

‘I’m wearing a lot of hats’

Romans chomps on a sugar as he walks across a muddy track and into a small stand to watch his horses work. He has saddled 12 horses in the Kentucky Derby, the first in 2006, but does not have one this week. Just two in race undercards, one on Friday’s Oaks Day and another on Derby Day.

“Would be better for the campaign to have a Derby horse,’’ he admits. “But probably worse for me.’’

Romans is straddling two very disparate worlds, one that requires blue jeans and plain talk and another that favors fancy suits and empty platitudes. In horsing circles, the folks on the backside might track blue but the people who make the sport run – the well-heeled owners and trainers – lean very red, which puts Romans smack dab in the middle.

Back near his barn, a few people stop by to say hello and some even wish him well in the primary. Most want to talk horses, including a friend who ask if Romans would mind showing three girls visiting the track’s backside before school – they’re all dressed in their Catholic school uniforms – one of his horses.

Roman happily obliges, selecting one of his friendlier horses for them to pet.

“You have to keep at least one that’s good-natured,’’ he says.

The horse obliges the visitors, who thank Romans profusely for the opportunity as they leave.

As the girls leave, Romans turns his attention to his favorite visitor, grandson Henry, who is clearly accustomed to and entirely nonplussed by the animals surrounding him. He happily munches on his finger to ease his teething and smiles up at the horses.

Romans sits down to talk politics, but the business of horse racing keeps interrupting. Questions about plans for his horses, as well as a visit by the veterinarians who routinely check in about the animals’ status and care needs.

Finally, he closes the office door and chats for a good hour before hopping into his car. He has tailor-made his political schedule to suit his training, loading up Mondays, when the track is dark and some Tuesdays for his campaign chats.

On this particular day, he has a 10 a.m. coffee confab with the president of the teachers’ union and a sit-down with some folks from the local Teamsters later in the morning.

Though the bulk of his campaigning will be concentrated in Louisville – the blue outlier in the otherwise very red commonwealth – Romans already traversed to the eastern part of the state and will head to northern Kentucky in mid-May, with scheduled visits still to come in western Kentucky.

Just a few weeks ago, he launched a state-wide ad campaign, leaning into his cross-pollinated career.

“It takes two minutes to win a Derby, but it takes a lifetime to win a community,’’ he tells viewers.

“I’m wearing a lot of hats,’’ he says with a chuckle.

Eyeing for the Capitol

Romans did not wake up one day and decide to run for Senate.

“He’s always said, ‘I’m gonna run when Mitch retires,’’ says Tammy Fox, his life partner. “I was like, ‘Yeah, right. OK.’ But he truly has been wanting to do this for a very long time.’’

Romans’ interest in politics was initially ignited by Frank Jones, a horse breeder, owner and entrepreneur who sent all of his horses to Jerry Romans and took Dale under his wing after Jerry’s death. Jones, who died in 2023, was a fixture in Kentucky Democratic politics, though he never ran for office.

But Jones only lit a fuse that had been slowly burning in Romans for a lifetime. He is a child who battled severe dyslexia and a man who contended with an alcohol addiction. He is the son of a man who taught him a love for horses and a mother whose fierce love saved him from disappointment. He has seen the system from the inside, with a firsthand view of its warts and, as a horseman who has won plenty and gained some level of local notoriety, he has learned to walk with the kings in the sport of kings but also listen to the commonfolk.

Finally, as a small businessman trying to survive in a profession where a head bob can be the difference between the winner’s circle and anonymity, Romans has learned the value of fierce loyalty tempered by compromise and the lost art of listening.

At least that’s the pitch.

He enters this Senate race armed with the eternal optimism and daily pragmatism that horse trainers need to survive, the first convincing them that their next horse will be the big one and the second reminding them that there will be a lot of also-rans in between.

“My job is working with rivals and fixing problems. What else do you do in politics but fix problems and you should work with your rivals,’’ he says.

“I just think about how much better it can be. I know that’s an enormous leap and everybody keeps telling me that you’ll get bogged down in the system. I don’t believe that. I don’t care how much I dislike somebody; I’ll go in there and talk to them. I’m not running to climb the political ladder. I’m running to do the job.’’

An unlikely journey to the campaign trail

It is not lost on Romans how unlikely it is that he, of all people, is running for state office.

Some 50-odd years ago, his teachers did not think he’d make it anywhere, except maybe the track. Romans grew up in Shiveley, a working-class neighborhood about three miles from Churchill. (His 83-year-old mother, Lynn, still lives in the house where he grew up, though she has the means to leave.) His parents divorced when Romans was young and though Jerry spent decades at the track, he operated on the lower level, less glamorous and far less financially fruitful runs of the sport. (Jerry died at 58 in 2000 following a stroke and cerebral hemorrhage two years earlier.)

Lynn raised her three boys largely as a single parent on her salary as an operator at South Central Bell. The boys would regularly dial 411 to chat with her, hanging up until she answered.

Saddled with late-diagnosed and crippling dyslexia as well as sensory issues, Romans struggled with his own self-worth as a kid. Only Lynn’s fierce convictions that her son was every bit as bright as his classmates and the dogged persistence of two elementary school teachers allowed him to recognize that he was not uneducable or stupid, as he thought; he simply needed to learn differently.

The triumvirate of protectors got Romans into testing that proved his IQ was off the charts and found programs that helped his mother learn how to navigate his needs.

So devoted was the trio that when Jefferson County’s new school busing plan meant Romans would be shipped to a different school, the teachers intentionally failed Romans so he could stay put and repeat second grade under their tutelage.

Even despite their best efforts, Romans couldn’t escape the painful discomfort that comes with being a kid who doesn’t quite fit in. He found solace in his father’s barn, where the boy who struggled to read and write had a gift to communicate with the horses. If a stubborn horse gave Jerry trouble, he’d turn to his son and nine times out of 10, Romans would soothe the animal into obedience.

Given his druthers, he would have traded school for a permanent classroom at the track but after his mother poured so much of herself into his success, Romans vowed he would at least graduate from high school. In 1984, he eked out of Butler High with a 1.2 GPA and never looked back, turning to a full life on the track.

By 19, he was living in the small, dingy spaces on the backsides of various tracks across the South, embarking on his own training career. At 21, he bought a horse for $1,500 named Miss Mindy but couldn’t afford to pay anyone to gallop her. Instead, he asked a high school friend, Laura Hernan, to work the horse for free and as the horse got better – much to the consternation of others who thought he needed a more trained rider – he kept Hernan on the horse.

The two delivered Romans’ first win as a trainer on February 15, 1987, at Turfway Park.

But you don’t easily shake the experience of a childhood such as Roman’s. At 59, Romans is worldly, well-spoken and well-educated. He has no problem holding his own in interviews, public speaking events or political debates.

Yet he has never sent an email and prefers a phone call to a text. He can tell you all about the book, “Death of a Racehorse” but has never read it or any book in its entirety, really. He cannot singlehandedly fix the education system in the U.S. or even in Kentucky but as an empathetic listener with personal experience, he believes he can make a difference.

“If I had the opportunity to learn visually with iPads and all this technology, it would have been a whole different world but not every school can offer that even today,’’ he said. “How many kids are in prison or lost because they couldn’t figure a way out? I know what happens. You either act out or you’re the class clown. We still need reading, writing and arithmetic, but there are a lot of ways to get knowledge into people’s brains.”

Recovery and support – as a platform

Dale Romans walked out of the bar. Which bar doesn’t matter. Because at one point in his life, Romans was always walking out of a bar. Chasing horse racing success does not make for an easy life.

The hours are long and constant, beginning before dawn and not so much ending as pausing between whatever race, workout, catastrophe, or vet visit is next on the calendar.

It is a world built on excess and surrounded by vices – gambling, drinking and partying – and Romans doubled down on the unorthodox lifestyle. His weight ballooned to near 400 pounds and he hit the bottle so regularly, he doesn’t even know how to quantify his drinking. In 2020, a bout with Covid-19 landed him in the hospital and scared him enough to make some changes.

He had a gastric bypass sleeve, which curbed his appetite for food so much that some friends now call him “Slim.”

It did nothing, however, to quench his thirst for alcohol.

So, on this particular night four years ago, Tammy and Terry Finley, founder of West Point Thoroughbreds, who regularly sends horses to Romans to train, were waiting for him with a suitcase. They found a bed in a rehab center and Romans was going. He wasn’t thrilled about it but was smart enough to understand he needed to change; by day four of the program, he bought in.

Romans hasn’t had a drink since and in the clarity of his own sobriety, found yet another life lesson that guided him to run.

He thinks maybe one other person from his rehab group has remained sober and believes the system is set up for failure, the shortened insurance-fueled stints making it nearly impossible to truly shake addiction.

“It relies on repeat offenders,’’ he says. “That’s how they make money.’’

He points to a horse racing program, Stable Recovery, that runs not 30 days but 90 in treatment before creating a year-long path to success, complete with job opportunities for former residents, as a model for what this country needs.

“I made it just like I did with my school,’’ Romans said. “Because I had a support system. So many people don’t and we don’t help them.’’

The barn informs a political run

It is in that support system that Romans sees his truest connection to politics. His people are as disparate as his current odd jobs, coming from all points and all walks of life to coalesce into a functioning business.

As Romans walks into his barn office, which seems not big enough to contain his 6-foot-2-inch frame, his longtime worker, Cristina Bahena, walks in with a big foam cup filled with ice, wordlessly handing it to Romans. He reaches for a Diet Coke in the small refrigerator behind his desk and fills the cup.

This is how business runs at Romans Racing, with the seamlessness that only lifelong connections can make. Tammy, who started her career as a jockey, showed up at the barn more than 30 years ago looking for mounts. She wound up with a spot in history, as the only woman to ride in the Blue Grass Stakes, a life partner, two children and now a job as Romans’ exercise rider.

Hernan, the jockey who rode Miss Mindy to Romans’ first victory, is his bookkeeper. His son, Jacob, is a jockey agent but also is in charge of his father’s social media.

And then there is Bahena. Married to Romans’ assistant, Baldemar Bahena, she’s known Romans longer than her husband and he knew her before Tammy arrived. They met not long after Bahena walked across the border from Mexico into the United States, leaving her two daughters behind as she sought a better opportunity.

Bahena worked for Romans’ father, first as a hot walker and later as a groom and it was Romans who helped Bahena receive legal status through Ronald Reagan’s Amnesty Program.

But the program did not extend the same protection to children who didn’t live in the US. Desperate for her children, Bahena returned to Mexico and shepherded them across the border, following the same arduous path she had taken years earlier. Her daughters settled in the US, and later, Bahena became an American citizen in 2013. A year later, Romans named a horse after her.

Cristina’s Journey went on to win the Pocahontas Stakes at Churchill.

“I understand the quality of people who are here, who work hard and contribute to our country,’’ Romans says. “I have worked with all kinds of people and learned to work with people I don’t really like. What I’ve learned is that there are a lot of good people. We just aren’t very good listeners. We need to learn to listen.’’

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