LEXINGTON, Ky. – “He’s feeling pretty full of himself lately,” Brittany T. Russell sounds upbeat as she talks over the phone about her 3-year-old Preakness hopeful, Taj Mahal. “I picked him up late in the fall and took my time with him, and he’s really coming around.”

As she says this, a little voice yells in the background. Russell has her two kids, ages 6 and 4, in the backseat. They’re hustling to her home track, Laurel Park in Maryland, which will host the Preakness Stakes this year while Pimlico in Baltimore undergoes a facelift. She’s trying to make it in time to see one of her other horses run in the first race of the day and to put in a claim on another one. It’s 11 a.m. on Mother’s Day.

In a wide open field, the unbeaten but somewhat untested Taj Mahal has emerged among the morning line favorites. All his previous wins have come at Laurel, all with Russell’s husband, Sheldon, taking the mount. Just two weeks after Cherie DeVaux became the first woman trainer to win the Kentucky Derby in its 152-year history when her horse, Golden Tempo, won as a 23-1 longshot, Russell has a legitimate chance to do the same in the Preakness with Taj Mahal.

Such an achievement would be remarkable given the lengthy stretches between glass ceiling-shattering moments in horse racing. Women have competed at thoroughbred racing’s highest level for some time, but quite a bit of time has passed since the initial breakthroughs in the sport. Mary Hirsch was the first female trainer to run a horse in the Derby in 1937. The first female jockey to ride in a Triple Crown race was Diane Crump in the 1970 Kentucky Derby, although it was more than two decades before Julie Krone became the first woman to win one when she took the Belmont in 1993 aboard Colonial Affair.

DeVaux’s Derby success has highlighted just how few women have reached the top tier of the sport. It’s more notable, too, because of horse racing’s multi-gender appeal. Per NBC Sports, the Derby’s television audience is 50 percent women. Horse racing also often touts itself as the only major sport in which men and women compete equally.

What makes it so difficult for women to ascend into the sport’s elite? Is it really an old boys’ club?

“Not right now, not where I am,” Russell says, but then pauses. “Well, of course it is a little bit, but I think you can ignore it. I put my head down and work, and trust that the results will show.”

New York-based jockey Katie Davis is a little more direct: “It’s definitely an old boys’ club; I’m really just trying to kick down the door.”

Part of the challenge for women in the sport is a narrowed path to the top for everyone. Many trainers begin on the backside as grooms and hot walkers (those responsible for cooling down the horses after a race or intense exercise) before working their way to assistant trainer positions in the barn of seasoned veterans. These pathways remain open, but former jockey and NBC Sports reporter Donna Barton Brothers believes the disappearance of mid-level tracks closed off some proving grounds for emerging trainers and jockeys, especially women.

“Sometimes the best thing they can get at a top track is a good gallop job,” Barton Brothers said. “They can work with the top trainers, get nice bonuses if their horses run well, and it can be a more stable way to make a living.”

Add to this the rise of “super-trainers” — a select group of top trainers like Todd Pletcher and Bob Baffert, each of whom have hundreds of horses in their stable — and there are simply fewer chances for rising trainers to get horses and show what they can do. More so than the fact DeVaux was a woman, Russell believes part of the joy exuded by the horse racing community for Golden Tempo’s victory was simply that DeVaux represented a new face.

“She was someone different,” Russell said. “Someone people hadn’t seen year after year.”

In the week after her monumental Derby win — boosted by Golden Tempo’s miraculous last-to-first run and the viral video of her candid, ecstatic celebrations — DeVaux was everywhere. She appeared on the Today Show, Barstool Sports, the Rich Eisen Show and even joined Golden Tempo’s jockey, Jose Ortiz, to throw out the first pitch at a Yankees game. Everywhere she went, people asked her what it meant to be a trailblazer. DeVaux was not exactly dismissive, but she hesitated to embrace the term.

“I just thought it would be fun to be the first woman to win the Kentucky Derby,” DeVaux laughed from her modest, windowless office at Keeneland, the idyllic racetrack in the heart of Lexington, Kentucky’s horse country. “It wasn’t that I wanted to do it for gender equality, it was just something I could have that no one else could have.”

Barton Brothers echoes that sentiment.

“I was a jockey at the time [Julie Krone won the Belmont] and people kept asking me if this felt like a win for women,” Barton Brothers said. “And I said, ‘No, this feels like a win for Julie Krone.’”

Still, success in the sport demands sacrifice that can be tricky for those with families, including incredibly early hours and near constant travel. Russell, who heads to her first Preakness on Saturday, is based in Laurel. Her husband, Sheldon, is a Maryland-based jockey, and their kids are regulars at the track. Her mother-in-law also moved in with them.

“We always knew we wanted a family, that was No. 1, but I wouldn’t be able to do what I do without her help,” Russell said.

Katie Davis, who is a jockey based at Belmont Park, relies on the track’s own daycare facility, which opens at 5 a.m.

There’s no real offseason to the sport in the U.S., either.

“A lot of athletes win a title, and, you know, they take off, they go to Disney World. Well, we breezed 36 horses this morning,” the Derby-winning DeVaux says of the horse-training and exercise routine.

Beyond the structural issues in the sport, attitudes toward women trainers and jockeys seem to be shifting, but slowly. Jena Antonucci was the first female trainer to win a Triple Crown race with her 2023 Belmont win with Arcangelo, and she sees improvements.

“As a whole, the industry is getting more thoughtful and diligent about telling our full story, but there’s still a traditional view that female jockeys aren’t strong enough,” she said. “Personally, I don’t think that horses only run for the strongest person.”

When asked about others’ shrugging off the old boys’ club label, Antonucci disagrees.

“I’m shocked that someone would say that,” she said. “Statistics prove it out.”

Davis — who continued to race until the end of her first trimester — says some owners and trainers just don’t think women can do the job.

“They’d let me breeze their horses but wouldn’t give me a mount,” Davis said. “They were just kind of using me, but as a woman, you really have to stand your ground and prove yourself.”

Speaking on the phone from the jockey quarters at New York’s Aqueduct Racetrack between races, Davis relates stories about growing up in a horse family and her familial rivalry with her siblings. Her father, Robbie Davis, was a professional jockey, as was her sister and her husband, Trevor McCarthy. She recalls a moment earlier in the day when she hit the board and beat out her brother, Dylan, who rode a heavy favorite in the starting post just next to her.

Davis embraces a little bit of the gender rivalry and her competitive spirit is evident, even over the phone.

“Sometimes when I nail guys at the wire, we go back to the jockey’s room and the other guys are all messing with him about it. ‘You got beat by a girl!’” she said. “But it’s wild because, men, women, we’re all in the same jockey room together.”

Back in Maryland, Russell wraps up the phone interview with an implied apology.

“We’re on the move,” she says as she unloads her kids from the car – just another challenge in a career full of them, with the biggest race of her life just six days away.

“I think I just have this personality type where I thrive in chaos.”