Tommy Trotter, longtime racing official, dies at 93

Tommy Trotter, a longtime racing official who served as a racing secretary at tracks from coast-to-coast died Sunday in a hospital in Aventura, Fla., after a brief bout with pneumonia. He was 93.

Trotter, who hailed from a family of racetrackers, was best known as a racing secretary who was not shy of assigning significant weight to the best horses. In 1976, as racing secretary at the New York Racing Association, he assigned Forego 130 pounds or higher six times. In that year’s Grade 1 Marlboro Cup, Forego, under a 137-pound impost, beat Honest Pleasure, who carried 119 pounds, by a head.

In the 1960s, Trotter assigned Kelso 130 pounds or more 16 times.

“I don’t think there’s any question,” Trotter told then Daily Racing Form executive columnist Jay Hovdey in a 2016 interview, “Kelso and Forego wouldn’t be remembered the way they are today if they hadn’t carried the weight.”

In the 1960s, Trotter was the official handicapper in assigning weights for the Experimental Free Handicap, a weight-based assessment of the previous year’s leading 2-year-olds, with weights compiled for a hypothetical race on dirt.

Trotter began his career in racing in 1945 as a clerk in the racing secretary’s office at Fair Grounds in New Orleans. He came to the NYRA in 1959 and worked as racing secretary, over two tenures, for 14 years for the association’s three tracks – Aqueduct, Belmont Park, and Saratoga – until he resigned in 1978. Other tracks at which Trotter served as racing secretary or director of racing included Arlington Park and Hollywood Park. He worked as a steward at Delaware Park and Atlantic City Race Course as well as Gulfstream Park and Hialeah in Florida. He retired in 2001.

Trotter was a racing official when Walter Blum was a jockey. Blum, who was inducted in the Hall of Fame in 1987, ultimately worked with Trotter when both were stewards at Gulfstream Park.

“There’s not a finer person that I know,” Blum said. “He had the most integrity of anyone on the planet. He was an outstanding racing secretary and an outstanding steward.”

“I was just in awe of how many people respected my father to this day,” Danny Trotter, one of Tommy’s sons said Monday. “I remember standing outside Greentree at Saratoga and this gentleman yelled out, ‘Bring back Tommy Trotter.’ He had an impact on a lot of people and it was in a positive way. That’s certainly how we’ll remember him.”

Tommy Trotter was preceded in death by his wife of 47 years, Sally, and a son James Barry. Trotter is survived by his second wife, Eleanor Gordon Trotter, children Maureen, Thomas, Timothy, Lisa, and Dan in addition to 12 grandchildren and five great grandchildren.

Arrangements were pending.