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It was one of the high points of Alyssa Strainer's life, and it lasted all of 46 seconds. In 2005, during the summer after her junior year at UNH, she was training to be a jockey in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. At 5 feet even and 98 pounds, she had the stature for the job—and she had been working hard to build the requisite strength. Unlike other riders, jockeys can't control a horse through their legs and seat; it's all in the arms. The small flat saddle used in racing, she explains, is just there so you can get off the horse's back. "We don't want to inhibit their motion, and that's why you see the short stirrups, because we're actually standing above the horse."

"Your triceps are flexed the whole time," says Strainer, who graduated in 2006, "and if you tire, you can get run off with. You don't feel like you can stop the horse. It's a 1200- to 1500-pound animal going 40 mph, and you're just along for the ride."

By this point, Strainer was a licensed exercise rider, and her arms were strong. It was on a June morning, after the fog had burned off, that she got to "breeze" a certain chestnut colt for the first time. "He had a big white face on him," she recalls. "He was really flashy." The colt knew just what to do as she brought him into an easy gallop and steered him toward the inside rail—the fast lane—for the breeze, which is a short, timed run at racing speed. At the 3/8-mile pole, she gave him a little rein and a cluck and went into a crouch over the saddle. As the powerful animal beneath her gathered momentum, the gallop felt like gliding over the ground, faster and faster. The horse's ears and wind-whipped mane framed her view of the track ahead, and she heard nothing but the drumbeat of hooves punctuated by the freight-train chugging of the horse's breath and the sound of her own voice urging him on.

Then they were over the finish line, and it was time to slow down. Strainer didn't know the official time yet—it would come in at just a hair under 40 mph. But she did know how it had felt. Freeing. The closest she would ever get to flying. And she knew this was what she wanted to be doing, what she was meant to do.

Richard Meirs '78 describes a similar feeling when driving a two-wheeled sulky behind a standardbred horse in harness racing: "You can't imagine the connection you have to a thousand-pound animal that's literally solid muscle, right there under your thumbs," he says, "and the emotional rush that comes when you perform together at a high level." This is the thrill—experienced directly or vicariously—that has driven horse racing through the centuries. Strainer and Meirs are among several UNH alums with ties to some of the fastest horses on earth—including last year's winners of the Kentucky Derby, the Belmont Stakes and the Hambletonian Stakes, also known as the Kentucky Derby of harness racing. All of them share a love of raw speed and refined horses—and a fervent hope that their industry, increasingly beset by economic challenges and ethical concerns, can survive.

At 28, Strainer has reached the upper echelons of thoroughbred racing—but not by the path she envisioned on that shining day in June. There is, unfortunately, an inherent danger in moving at a high speed perched atop an unpredictable creature just barely under your control, with no more protection than a helmet and a foam vest. She was injured several times that summer, suffering two concussions in three days. Then on an oppressive day in late August, a horse she was riding spooked and headed for a large piece of farm equipment. Strainer jumped off, and the next thing she knew, she was lying on the ground unable to see or speak. As light poured back into her field of vision, the people who had crowded around told her that she had been trampled. Face down. Her injuries included a broken jaw, teeth, hip and leg. There were copious amounts of "road rash" and horse-shoe-shaped bruises all over her body. Two days later, as she gazed at the x-ray of a compression fracture in her neck, the magnitude of what had happened—and what could have happened—hit her.

Within a few days, Strainer was back on a horse, but it didn't feel right. She was, however, able to drive back to UNH—without changing lanes—and start her senior year. She was still an equine studies major, but with a new mission: to find a way to make a living doing something she loved without risking life and limb. The equine program had just split off from animal science and now offered three tracks: therapeutic riding, equine science (in preparation for veterinary or graduate school) and equine industry and management. Strainer chose the management track, combined with a minor in business.

After graduation, Strainer took a job at a thoroughbred training farm in Connecticut. But she soon moved to Lexington, Ky., to work at a "bloodstock," or thoroughbred-breeding and sales, agency. Today she is director of sales at Denali Stud, one of the top bloodstock agencies, with annual sales of $20-30 million. The owner is a former jockey who retired after a racetrack accident left him without the use of his right arm.

At first Strainer wondered if a college degree was even useful in a business where she kept hearing, "I learned this from my father." But the industry has been evolving. "I carry my iPad constantly," she says, "and I'm always making my own databases and adding entries and notes. Say I have a horse I have to sell for a million dollars. In the past, that might have taken a couple of weeks. Now it takes a couple hours—and the horse might be in Japan." As for those statistics classes she sometimes skipped? "Now I use stats all the time—it's almost like karma."

As director of sales, Strainer still has her hands on the animals—some 100 foals are born at the farm every year and they must be inspected monthly. Most of Denali's sales take place at auctions at nearby Keeneland Racetrack, where one of the biggest customers is Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, known locally as "Sheik Mo," the ruler of Dubai and owner of hundreds of racehorses. Strainer gathers and presents the data needed to advertise the horses, and sometimes she can convince an auctioneer to add some "fluffy selling points" to boost the appeal of a horse who lacks a stellar pedigree.

One such horse was Animal Kingdom, the son of a Brazilian stallion, who sold at auction for the unremarkable price of $100,000 in 2009. Having inspected him as a foal and managed his sale, Strainer still felt a connection to the colt two years later when she bet on him in the Kentucky Derby, even though he was a 21-1 longshot who had never raced on dirt before. Running at the back of the pack for most of the race, the magnificently muscled animal streamed past all the others in the homestretch, winning the race by nearly 3 lengths. Jumping up and down and screaming in front of the TV, Strainer managed to lose her voice in the minute and 55 seconds it took him to reach the finish line.

It has been suggested that the first celebrity athlete in the United States was Dan Patch, a standardbred pacer who not only set world harness-racing records in the early 1900s but augmented his million-dollars-a-year winnings with product endorsements. Tens of thousands of fans thronged to catch a glimpse of the gentle stallion. After he died of an enlarged heart in 1916, his owner died the next day of a heart attack, at 51.

Thoroughbreds grab many more headlines today than standardbreds. But harness racing is still a big business—and one in which the emotional bond between human and horse plays a huge role, as Richard Meirs can attest. After graduating from UNH and earning his doctorate in veterinary medicine from the University of Pennsylvania, Meirs got a taste of training standardbreds and the thrill of driving a sulky. But he concluded that he could be a better veterinarian than trainer and went on to do postgraduate work in both orthopedic surgery and animal reproduction. He joined his father in the business that he owns and runs today, Walnridge Farm and Equine Clinic in Cream Ridge, N.J., where he breeds and boards standardbreds. With two other vets in his practice, he is able to focus on the work that gives him the most satisfaction, mainly related to reproduction and the health of mares and their foals. Meirs, who waited tables and groomed horses to help pay for college, advises young horse lovers to get an education that will prepare them for a niche in the equine world that will be both emotionally and financially rewarding.

With a horse named Oolong, Meirs made what he calls a questionable business decision, but it paid off in both ways. As a filly, Oolong needed throat surgery, and her owner, already indebted to Meirs, asked him to operate on her in exchange for 25 percent interest in the horse. Meirs accepted the offer and helped train the unproven horse. Oolong went on to have a spectacular year as a 3-year-old in 1999, earning $800,000. She won the Hambletonian Oaks and North American Breeders' Crown before being named Horse of the Year. Meirs and her other owners then sold her, and she spent the next year racing in Germany. Today she lives on a farm in Maryland, where she has given birth to foals with names like Orange Pekoe and Tea for Two. Meirs, who traveled all over with Oolong in 1999 and feels a bond with the horse to this day, has arranged to bring her to Walnridge when she retires.

Aside from some horseback riding as a kid, Henry Sullivan '88 never took an interest in horses until about six years ago when his brother- and sister-in-law, George and Lori Hall, started a thoroughbred business called K&G Stables. A political science major at UNH, Sullivan is now the marketing director of a New York investment company, the Clinton Group. But he can be found on many a weekend morning, as early as 6 a.m., at Monmouth Park Racetrack, in an area of New Jersey tucked between New York City and the coastline of "Jersey Shore" fame, where he and Hall participate in the daily routine in a way that is uncommon among racehorse owners.

On a Sunday morning in May, in the maze of shed rows below the track, there is a hum of activity around a long shed that is the summer home to K&G Stables. Outside, horses stand patiently while grooms hose them down, and just inside, between the box stalls and sheltering green awnings, there is a steady parade of horses being "hotwalked" around a sandy track. Sullivan enjoys conferring with trainer Kelly Breen and joining in a game of Left, Right and Center with the jockeys during their morning break. Sometimes he acts as "pony boy"--guiding the racehorses onto the track and into position for their breezes. He does this, he's quick to note, "holding on for dear life" to a Western saddle on a retired racehorse. (He also handles PR for K&G.)

For a relatively new, smaller stable, K&G has had a remarkable record so far. Out of more than 35,000 thoroughbreds registered each year, only 20 will eventually qualify, at 3, for the Kentucky Derby. In the past four years, K&G has had three horses in the Derby. (In contrast, Sheik Mo, who has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in his quest to win the Derby, has yet to own a horse that placed in the top three.) 2011 was a particularly good year for K&G, whose Pants on Fire drew attention for being the seventh horse in Derby history to be ridden by a woman.

For the 2011 Belmont Stakes, however, K&G chose to go not with Fire but with Ruler on Ice, a "wild man" of a horse who had to be gelded to be raced at all. Shortly before the Belmont Stakes, Breen added blinkers to the horse's gear because, he told ESPN, "we couldn't castrate him a second time." He rode to the track in a van with an attendant stroking him the whole distance. The Sullivans and Halls almost didn't go to Belmont that day—there were intermittent showers, and their horse was a 32-1 longshot. But they decided to go and slip out when the race was over.

Derby winner Animal Kingdom was favored to win the race, the third jewel in the Triple Crown, but he stumbled coming out of the gate, and Preakness winner Shackleford led the pack. But Ruler on Ice, unfazed by clods of mud hitting him in the face, hung in right behind. At the halfway mark, Animal Kingdom made his move, but soon faded, and then Shackleford also "wilted," as the announcer observed, before shouting, "Ruler on Ice wins the Belmont—in a shocker!"

Sullivan and the Halls were as shocked as anyone. In the winner's circle, Lori Hall was speechless, the young Peruvian jockey was in tears, and the unruly Ruler refused to accept the blanket of carnations on his neck. For Sullivan, who knew this horse and his peccadillos—how he pawed the wall of his stall, and tried to twist around and bite your leg when you were riding alongside him to the track for a breeze—the sense of elation felt like winning the Superbowl.

Mark Mullen '79, like Meirs, was more or less born into harness racing, and their two farms are only a few miles apart in New Jersey's "little Lexington." Standardbreds outnumber thoroughbreds in the state by about 8,000 to 4,000, and the state's horse-racing industry as a whole keeps about 100,000 acres in open land, notes Meirs. Both his farm and Mullen's Fair Winds Farm are in land preservation programs.

Nearly 100 broodmares live or board at Fair Winds, and in May, the fields are dotted with brown and bay mother-and-baby pairs. The babies have a kooky, startled look about them, with sticky-uppy manes, fuzzy tails and extra-long, extra-springy legs. When one baby gets separated from his mother and starts charging this way and that, a mare in the next pasture races along the fence in sympathy, demonstrating her ability to accelerate from zero to tail-streaming-straight-out-behind speed in a split second.

Mullen studied animal science at UNH, where he also met his wife, Laura Bowering Mullen '80. (In 2001 the couple established a scholarship for UNH equine students). After graduation, he spent a couple of years working as a groom, did some training and drove in a few races. "If you have a good one," he says, "and you chirp to them on the racetrack and they lurch forward—it's that feeling you get when you stomp on the gas in a car, and you're pushed back in the seat. And you think 'Wow! I've got a horse here!'"

But he also remembers the unnerving feeling of being boxed in by other horses and sulkies, craning his neck to see past the horse's rear end, all at a speed of about 25 mph. Despite some success on the track, he decided to go into the business of breeding standardbreds with his father. Many of the horses he's owned or bred have performed well, and some have been stars. In 2011, Broad Bahn, bred at Fair Winds, won the Hambletonian Stakes at the Meadowlands Racetrack in New Jersey, the Kentucky Derby of harness racing, with a purse of $1.5 million.

One of Mullen's greatest pleasures is just being on the farm with the horses in an idyllic setting during carefree periods of their lives. Mares and foals frolic in the fields until weaning time in November, and then the foals are "basically out in the paddocks living the life of Riley," he says, until it's time to prepare them for the yearling auction a year later.

The welfare of racehorses has become a hot topic in recent years as racetrack injuries and catastrophic "breakdowns"—when a horse dies or is euthanized on the track—have increased. Both economics and drug use are contributing factors. As gambling dollars have migrated from racetracks to casinos, some states have allowed racetracks to add slot machines. Profits from these "racinos" have dramatically increased the purses offered on lower-level races, encouraging owners to enter unsound horses and resulting in a rise in breakdowns. And performance-enhancing drugs are as seductive to trainers of equine athletes as they are to humans. Horses with previous injuries obscured by painkillers are the most prone to injury on the track. Racing in Europe and Canada, where drug use is tightly controlled, is much safer for horses and jockeys alike than it is in the United States.

"I do think there needs to be an international protocol with independent labs doing testing," says Meirs, who treats thoroughbreds as well as the sturdier, less injury-prone standardbreds. "But I'm not so certain how long the industry will be able to survive the public scrutiny from animal rightists and journalists—in addition to all the financial difficulty."

One question that frequently comes up is whether or not racehorses are, in effect, willing participants. Horses generally are born to run, says Sarah Hamilton '98, director of UNH's equine program: "When you're a hamburger on legs to a predator, you want to be ahead of everybody else in the pack."

Still, some thoroughbreds, notes Strainer, have as little interest in racing as she has in running a marathon—and these are not worth training. Others, like Zenyatta, who in 2009 became the first female to win the Breeders' Cup, clearly have the will to win. "No matter what her jockey did," says Strainer, "she would see that homestretch and swing to the outside with her ears back in a really menacing way, just galloping up the ground, and then if you watch her replays, the second that she passed that last horse, her ears would prick up like she knew—and she loved it."

Meirs worries that the public may not be able to see the devotion of owners, like some in his practice who work two or three jobs in tough economic times to be able feed their children's horses. Or the dedication of trainers like his friend K&G trainer Kelly Breen. "You will not find an animal on earth who receives better care than Ruler on Ice," Meirs says.

At Denali Stud, a horse named Serena's Song, who made more than $3 million on the track, recently was in the news when she turned 20. "People will call up," says Strainer, "and say, 'I don't agree with racing, but this horse's story touched my heart. She must be broken down now.'" Strainer is only too happy to invite the caller to come and see the beautifully cared-for mare and her newest foal. Then she waits for the words she knows will be coming: "It isn't anything like I thought! This has really opened my eyes." ~