Rodolphe Brisset has accomplished many things over the course of his career training race horses, but a win at Saturday’s 154th Belmont Stakes would be a first for him in many respects.
Brisset has been training Saturday’s morning line favorite We The People since July, which marks Brisset’s first Belmont Stakes starter, and a victory would give him his first Grade 1 triumph.
The 38-year-old Frenchman is far from a stranger in horse racing circles, but he took center stage on Tuesday after We The People drew the No. 1 post position and the morning line favorite. Brisset jokingly thanked the host of Tuesday’s event at Belmont Park for the post position his horse drew, but said the odds weren’t something that he paid attention to.
While Brisset has worked with plenty of winning horses over the course of his career, We The People taking Belmont would be a victory of epic proportion.
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“I don’t even know if I would be able to talk for the next 20 minutes after,” he said about the idea of winning on Saturday. “Being born in France and coming here 20 years ago and trying to feel like an American now, and follow racing and everything. It would be one down and two to go.”
A native of Tours, France, Brisset has been around horse racing since he was young. Trying to become a jockey in France before he eventually made his way over to the States and started working with Hall of Fame trainer Bill Mott. Brisset ventured out on his own in 2017 and won his first stakes race when Quip took the Tampa Bay Derby, a Grade 2 race, in 2018.
It was one of three graded wins that year for Brisset. Quip also became the first starter for Brisset in a Triple Crown race.
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Things have certainly changed for Brisset since he made the leap to being a trainer on his own and he has come a long way since he first arrived in the United States to continue his career in the sport, albeit there were differences he had to learn about.
“It took me five or six years to study everything to try to learn the history of how racing has been run on the dirt and everything,” Brisset said of his journey. “Then obviously being around good dirt horses with (Bill) Mott was very helpful too. I think I catch up pretty good now and it’s why we get up every morning. Like I said, if we end up winning this one it will be one down two to go.”
