Being a horse trainer is impossible.
It’s difficult to find live bodies to work let alone good employees.
If you have good horses there are all sorts of people micro managing what you should do and if you have bad horses it really doesn’t even matter because they are bad.
Expenses go up and owners pay slower or not at all…and total solar eclipses occur more often than anyone at a track or commission will help you in this regard (despite everyone having a professional license issued by the state)
Pared down racing schedules means even less proper spots to run in and increased pressure from the racing office to go into races that don’t really fit your horse. If you wait for a better spot, officials bitch that you don’t run enough. (ps - they never bitch out loud at the big trainers who are the ones crippling them)
I hear from more smaller/medium sized trainers that apply for x amount of stalls that get assigned X minus 2 or 3…while empty stalls abound at most tracks.
God forbid you ship out looking for a better spot like a big outfit does…
The new rules are mostly just paperwork bs or barriers to your ability to train your horses as you are now dealing with a whole new layer of relatively incompetent officials. Plus the added expense of new regulations eats away at your cash flow
If you do well everyone thinks you are cheating and if you don’t do well, everyone thinks you’re an idiot.
Not to mention there are tons of nitwits on internet that believe that they know more about horses or training than you do when most of them would spend their first day at the barn wandering around searching for the key to the quaterpole.
being a horse trainer is not easy.
pressures.
fragile athletes.
dealing w owners.
chasing bills.
jockeys and jock agents.
and coordinating all the new rules.
i could never be a horse trainer.