Brittany and Sheldon Russell, Maryland racing’s power couple, prepare to take on the Preakness

Sheldon Russell was away at his bachelor party in Las Vegas when his wife-to-be, Brittany, got the call.

The farm manager on the other end of the line said he was pulling 20 horses from her fledgling barn at Laurel Park, leaving her with a grand total of three.

“That was a week before our wedding,” Brittany Russell recalled, laughing. “I was like, ‘Well, this is it.’ Sheldon’s in Vegas, and I’m just like, ‘Oh my god, we might be calling this thing off.’”

She can chuckle about it now that she’s Maryland’s leading trainer, now that she’s about to put her husband, one of the state’s top jockeys, on the back of a bona fide Preakness contender named Taj Mahal.

But that firing was no joke. It spoke to the tenuous grip many thoroughbred trainers maintain on the existence to which they feel called. The margins are razor thin when you go out on your own, as Russell did in 2018 after working as an assistant for such luminaries as Brad Cox, Ron Moquett and Jimmy Jerkens. And, with her husband holding down a physically grueling, no-security job in the same sport, she was all in, for better or worse.

Brittany Russell made it because she’s tough, organized, obsessed and attuned to the minute needs of the horses she guides to the winner’s circle.

“She just lives for it,” said her husband, a willing lieutenant in Maryland racing’s power couple of the moment. “It’s her happy place.”

In 2023, her fourth full season on her own, she became the first female trainer to top Maryland’s standings for the year. She remained No. 1 in 2024 and 2025. From her barns at Laurel Park and Fair Hill, she has forged connections with some of the top owners in the sport.

“She has all the tools,” said Sol Kumin, who owns a piece of Taj Mahal and sent Russell some of her first big winners after becoming aware of her through Cox. “She’s super dialed when she talks to you about your horses. She’ll tell you very quickly what you’ve got. She’s not afraid to be aggressive and put them in the right spots. She’s just a really good trainer.”

Taj Mahal is evidence of her growing reputation outside Maryland. Purchased as a $525,000 yearling by a group fronted by SF Racing’s Tom Ryan (his past champions include 2018 Triple Crown winner Justify), the colt began his career in the California barn of Bob Baffert, the winningest Triple Crown trainer in history. He wasn’t fulfilling his promise as a 2-year-old, so Ryan, Kumin & Co. moved him across the country, trusting Russell to get him back on track.

Now here he is, the co-second choice in the Preakness morning line, coming off a brilliant win, with Sheldon Russell aboard, in the Federico Tesio Stakes at Laurel Park. It’s rare for a locally trained horse to go into the second jewel of the Triple Crown with such acclaim, but Taj Mahal looks and acts the part, covering the Laurel dirt with easy speed and staring straight into the camera with beckoning eyes when it’s time to pose.

“His mane’s driving me crazy,” Russell said Saturday as her first Preakness horse munched contentedly on peppermints and hay. “It’s that one piece of hair that’s out of control; we’ve got to braid him for a couple days at least.”

That morning, Taj Mahal had impressed in his final breeze before the big race. All systems were go.

Russell asked a visitor not to mind the Wendy’s bag on the desk of her cheerfully cluttered office in Barn 5 at Laurel Park. “I have been craving these potatoes,” she explained.

Photos on the wall capture the career milestones she has enjoyed with Sheldon, who remains her preferred jockey, and their two children, 6-year-old Edy and 4-year-old Rye.

Unlike many racing people, Russell, 36, is not a second- or third-generation horsewoman. She grew up in Pennsylvania Amish country, the daughter of a drywall contractor and a postal worker, neither of whom could tell a thoroughbred from a buggy horse. But there was a horse farm nearby, and she felt drawn to it for reasons she still cannot explain. She began helping out there as a 13-year-old. No job was too menial. She loved it all.

Russell tried her hand at riding competitively but quickly sensed that wasn’t her ticket. She studied to be a veterinary technician in Philadelphia. But she took a summer job in trainer Tim Ritchey’s barn at Delaware Park, and when it was time for classes to start again, she couldn’t bring herself to go back.

“I was hooked,” she said. “I think my parents thought I was crazy, because all I did was jump in my car and travel to a different racetrack. I was never home for holidays.”

That was also when she met Sheldon, two years her senior.

He was born in Louisiana, where his father rode for a stretch in the late 1980s, but grew up in South Africa and England, where he caught the bug as a teenager watching his father work in the horse-crazed village of Newmarket. After high school, he went into the family business, only for the trainer he worked for to retire.

His mother, Alison, showed him a want ad from a trainer named Michael Dickinson, who was looking for help on his farm in Delaware. Sheldon had a U.S. passport, so he figured why not give it a shot for a few months? He liked the environment enough that he returned for a longer stint and then, permanently, before his 21st birthday.

“I really wasn’t throwing away anything,” he recalled. “I didn’t have anything in England.”

He was working for trainer Tim Keefe one morning at Laurel Park when Brittany showed up with a string of Ritchey’s horses from Delaware.

“We just had a connection. We were talking the whole way to the racetrack,” Sheldon said.

They went from friends to dating, though they understood their respective trades might pull them to different corners of the country at a moment’s notice.

That was exactly what happened. “My natural racetracker in me jumped in my car one day, and I drove away to Arkansas,” Brittany said. “I wasn’t finished traveling.”

“We were probably a bit too young,” Sheldon said. “We were in different places. Right person, wrong time.”

Brittany eventually made her way back to the mid-Atlantic, working for Hall of Fame trainer Jonathan Sheppard and then managing a string of Moquett’s horses at Laurel Park. She phoned her ex, they went out to dinner and the rest was history.

Then came that uncertain start to her training career, the firing that left her with a nearly empty barn in the summer of 2018. “We loaded all the horses up,” Sheldon recalled. “We were left with the three. We had a barn full of people and a payroll. So we scraped. Once I got my check on Fridays, we were cashing it and she was taking it back to pay the grooms for two weeks. Those were good people. The cool thing is that some of those people, once she got back up, they came back, and they’re still working for us.”

One of the grooms was Luis Barajas, now Brittany’s right-hand man at Laurel Park.

Over the next two years, she forged connections with a few key owners, and the wins began to flow — 46 in 2020, 71 in 2021, 100 in 2022, 177 in 2023.

Those numbers set her up to get horses like Taj Mahal.

“It’s hard for any trainer because, at the end of the day, you need to have good horses to win the big races,” Kumin said. “You have to do really well with what you have at the beginning, because that’s what makes owners take notice. It’s a slog, and it’s a process and it takes time. But you really just need a couple people to believe in you, and it can change quickly. She’s making the most of her opportunity.”

Kumin played lacrosse at Johns Hopkins and sits on the university’s board of trustees, so he’s particularly taken with the story of a Maryland trainer-jockey couple building a stable from the ground up.

“I think it’s awesome,” he said. “The two of them work so well together. They do it seamlessly. I’ve spent the afternoon at Laurel, just hanging out with her and watching our horses run. She makes it fun. She’s a young mom, and she’s balancing all of it in an awesome way.”

Brittany didn’t think much of her future Preakness runner when he arrived from Baffert’s barn last fall.

“He’s got a lot of good horses out there, so if they’re not showing him something, he’s going to try to put them in a place where they can be successful,” she said. “[Taj Mahal] had breezed a whole lot, but he just had not progressed to the point where he was ready to race. I mean, he didn’t knock my socks off right away.”

She sent him up to Fair Hill for a few weeks “just to let him be a horse.”

He returned from that pastoral interlude a more confident athlete. Russell has done the same with other horses to no effect, but something unlocked in Taj Mahal.

“I mean, much of it, we cannot explain,” she said, identifying a broader truth of her craft.

Sheldon noted that, when they put Taj Mahal next to older, more capable workout partners in the mornings, he would keep up. The closer he got to his first run at Laurel Park in early February, the more his inner racehorse seemed to burst forth.

He broke his maiden by 4 1/4 lengths, then Brittany made the aggressive decision to “throw him to the wolves” 15 days later in the Miracle Wood Stakes. Once he handled that assignment with aplomb, she knew she had something.

Taj Mahal can be a goofy boy, but he has begun to carry himself with the arrogance trainers like to see from a burgeoning champion. He seems to believe people should be looking at him.

He burst from the gate in the April 18 Tesio, charging to a 10-length lead at the half-mile pole. Brittany worried he had expended too much to hold up in the longest race of his life. But Sheldon felt him naturally gear down as he went around the turn, replenishing his tank so he’d have plenty left to pull back away and win by 8 1/4.

Brittany wanted to be wowed before committing to the Preakness. She was.

In the wake of Cherie DeVaux becoming the first female trainer to win the Kentucky Derby, Russell has been asked about the potential thrill of becoming the first woman to win the Preakness (Nancy Alberts finished runner-up with Magic Weisner in 2002).

Like DeVaux, she’d prefer to be seen as someone who worked her way up in a brutal profession and just happens to be a woman. Not that it wouldn’t be cool, especially given how completely she has integrated her work and family lives.

“It would feel a little fairy tale-like,” she said.

The Russells aren’t the first trainer-jockey couple to enjoy success. Rosie Napravnik as rider and Joe Sharp as trainer come to mind. But they’re unusual enough that they field lots of questions about their dynamic.

“It just works,” Sheldon said. “I know what she likes the horses to do in the morning. I know how to ride the first-time starters. I know what makes her happy and what makes her mad. Look, we have good days and bad days, but when they lose and I make a mistake, she knows that bothers me. She has faith in me that, if it happens once, it probably won’t happen again.”

Brittany laughed when asked if she vents to a third party about Sheldon’s riding. “I think I’m usually pretty fair and levelheaded about things,” she said. “But to be honest, he hears it all. Constructive criticism, right? He needs to know what I think.”

She’s the boss. There’s no confusion there.

But they never have to explain to one another why the work is so consuming. They try to carve a little time for family vacation in the winter.

“I can’t be gone long, though,” Brittany said. “Mentally, I don’t enjoy it. We went on a cruise once for a week, and I can’t enjoy myself. There’s a problem [in the barn] every day. Maybe a couple problems. And I have to be busy fixing something.”

They sometimes joke that, once Sheldon’s body is sufficiently broken down, he’ll become her assistant.

“But he’s not,” Brittany said.

“I think I’d drive her crazy,” Sheldon said. “I’ll find something to do.”

After working out a few horses Tuesday morning, Sheldon was dispatched to tidy the couple’s home in Clarksville before an NBC camera crew’s scheduled arrival at 11:30 a.m.

His chief enemies? Brittany’s ever-growing collection of chickens that seems to have taken over the three-acre property. They recently had a husband-wife chat about curtailing the growth of her coops. She responded by purchasing two turkeys.

“Maybe after this big race, if everything goes good, we’ll check her into like a rehab or something,” Sheldon deadpanned.

But the Russells are relishing the merry chaos this Preakness opportunity has brought to their busy lives.

What will Saturday be like for Laurel Park’s first couple? Sheldon will ride a few races on the Preakness undercard and compare notes with his wife on track conditions. But, when he’s ready to hop on Taj Mahal in the paddock as the 7:01 p.m. post time nears, he doesn’t anticipate there being much left to say. He knows she will have tended to the horse’s every need, and it will be his turn to execute amid a two-minute blur of speeding bodies.

The Russells couldn’t ask for more than a live contender running in Maryland’s biggest race in their own backyard. “If we were to win, I can’t even imagine what it would feel like,” Sheldon said. “If I were to ever win one, how cool would it be to win it for your wife?”