At Saratoga, Mary Lou Doyle embraces role of track ambassador

SARATOGA SPRINGS — Around the racetrack, the best three-word description of Mary Lou Doyle is "Ambassador Without Portfolio."

Equipped with a three-passenger golf cart and an infectious smile, Doyle spreads the word about the sport she loves by conducting morning tours of the backstretch area and the track itself for any and all who might want to become horse owners someday.

Although she does not sell bloodstock herself, she is willing to introduce soon-to-become active participants in horse racing to trainers, breeders and owners to give them an inside look at what goes on in that place on the other side of the track — and across Union Avenue on the Oklahoma side.

Last week, one of her morning tours was devoted to a group from Virginia who came to Saratoga to attend the ballet. However, they also expressed a desire to see what goes on at one of the world’s most famous tracks before the races start. It is a group like the ballet-goers who not only get interested but, according to Doyle, “will spread the word” among their friends about the lady in Saratoga.        

Although she admits to “never being a rider,” Doyle has an almost lifelong association with horses and racing. The graduate of St. Clement’s School and Saratoga High began her on-track experience far from the actual sport of racing for Thoroughbred horses, she reports, “working for Harry M. Stevens selling hot dogs as a teenager in the late 1970s.” In the early 1980s, “worked for NYRA at Saratoga as a food and beverage manager.”

Doyle reports with pride to a family association with the late Lucas Dupps, a longtime fixture at New York Racing Association tracks as an employee and racing official, referring to him as a “mentor.” By being Dupps’ “shadow,” she reports he “taught me the things to watch in a...