By Evan Pattak For The Meadows Standardbred Owners Association, photo by Chris Gooden
Aaron Merriman notched career win 16,000 when he piloted Divas Dragon to victory in Friday’s second race at Hollywood Casino at The Meadows. The milestone win continued Merriman’s surge through the ranks of harness racing’s “winningest” drivers. He ranks third on the all-time list behind only Dave Palone and Tony Morgan, and he’s been North America’s dash champion in each of the last eight years.
Merriman, 46, a native of Greater Akron, said he became aware of the pending milestone only recently because no one was counting down the wins a la Roger Huston. That, he insists, is the way he prefers it. “I don’t want pressure on me,” he says. “I’m a no-pressure kind of guy.”
Yet the pressure he places on himself would be intolerable to most. He regularly performs at The Meadows and Ohio tracks, often tackling two-a-days, and he logs thousands of highway miles to do so. Shortly after his historic win with Divas Dragon, for example, he hopped in his vehicle to begin the more-than-300-mile schlep to Harrah’s Hoosier Park to drive Friday’s final four races there.
Merriman says he’s cutting back some, but the figures tell a more complicated story. He had 4,237 starts in 2023, well below the 4,739 he recorded in 2018. Still, he had 90 more starts last year than he did in 2022. No cutback there. Instead, Merriman has addressed the problem in a different way; he’s found a travel companion in fellow horseman Wyatt Irvine, who makes some of those long treks with him. “That’s made things a lot easier,” Merriman says.
Years ago, as he was about to begin his assault on the record books, Merriman allowed that he once considered a career as a postal carrier if harness racing didn’t work out. Is he happy with his decision?
“I think I made the right choice,” he says. “Harness racing has given me so much, but it’s also taken so much. You realize as you get older that you’ve missed a lot. That hurts a little bit.”
The Meadows Standardbred Owners Association (MSOA) is a nonprofit organization that represents the interests of approximately 700 Standardbred trainers, drivers, caretakers and owners at The Meadows. In addition to providing horses to race at The Meadows, MSOA administers such member-centric services as health insurance and retirement programs for horsemen and horsewomen.