INGLEWOOD, Calif. - It’s not surprising that Kristin Mulhall came up with the idea of using a highly unusual one-side-only blinker to help the partly blind colt Imperialism overcome his disability and earn a spot in the 130^th Kentucky Derby on May 1. The 21-year-old wunderkind trainer has been figuratively wearing a set of the focus-enhancing gear herself since she was a toddler.

The idea of a trainer barely out of high school sending out a highly regarded horse to run in America’s most prestigious horse race is about as improbable as a book about Seabiscuit ending up on the best-seller’s list. But spend a morning with Mulhall at her Hollywood Park barn and the odds are excellent that you will leave marveling at the immensity of her talent and drive rather than the brevity of her lifeline.

Her horsemanship is unquestionably of the highest caliber, honed by years of training and riding show jumpers before she shifted venues and began training thoroughbred racehorses. But it’s her quiet intensity and obvious love of her horses that stamps her as one of the most promising new trainers to come along in many years.

Free video Derby bound April 25: NBC's Michael Okwu reports Kristin Mulhall's bid for history in the Kentucky Derby. Nightly News

“I was never a big party person . . . My whole life I’ve always just worked with my horses and gone to bed,” she said shortly before departing for Louisville and a chance to make history by becoming the first woman to train a Kentucky Derby winner. “. . . To me, it’s not a job. It’s fun.”

Steve Taub, a 49-year-old former car dealer who has logged more than 20 years in the racing game as an owner, recalls how in 2001, at a time when he was thinking of getting out of the sport, he met Mulhall one morning at the track and came away bedazzled by “her brains, her ethics and all the intangibles.”

Potential to be ‘the best’
“I did some homework . . . after I met her and I called a few veterans in this business who knew her and asked them (about her),” he recalls. “… One answer in particular that I remember from a highly respected veterinarian: ‘Potentially, Kristin is the best horseperson I’ve ever met in my life.’”

That’s a stunning statement when you consider it was being applied to a ponytailed 19-year-old with an infectious smile, a baseball cap seemingly grafted onto her head and just two months’ experience as a thoroughbred trainer.

But, as Taub soon discovered, looks can be deceiving.

“Even though she’s chronologically as young a she is, she’s really a grizzled veteran,” said Imperialism’s owner, who also has 25 other horses with Mulhall. “She’s been riding since she was 2 and doing horse business since she was 10.”

In a sport where pedigree is paramount, Mulhall’s is indeed immaculate.

Her father, Richard, was a trainer in Southern California for three decades before serving as racing manager for the late Saudi Prince Ahmed bin Salman’s Thoroughbred Corp. He helped build the operation into a global racing powerhouse before it was disbanded following the prince’s death of a heart attack in July 2002 at 43, just months after his horse War Emblem won the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness Stakes.

Kristin’s dad began putting her on ponies and horses about the same time she was learning to walk. One of her earliest memories is of “sitting on a horse with the cowboy hat and all the makeup and all decked out — against my will, but I was doing it.”

Since then, few days have passed without Mulhall stepping into the stirrups.

Nail derails Olympics bid
After years of riding show jumpers, she was a serious contender to represent the United States as an equestrian in the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens when a nail sticking out of a wall threw a curve into her career path.

“I got a puncture wound in my arm from a nail (when) I was setting up a tack room at a horse show (in the summer of 2001)…and it got infected,” she said. “I tried to ride and made it 10 times worse . . . (Doctors) said they thought the muscle was damaged at that point and when I rode it just pulled them more.”

Unable to ride for six months, Mulhall headed to Del Mar racetrack, first hanging around with trainer John Shireffs, who had a number of Thoroughbred Corp. horses in his barn, and later, as her arm began to heal, working for him galloping horses.

Just six months later, Mulhall decided she’d done enough watching.

“When I started working for him I wasn’t thinking I was going to get my trainer’s license right then,” she said. “. . . As time went on, I decided I wanted to try and get my license and go on with it and see what happened  — and here we are today.”

It wasn’t quite that simple. Her father had a different vision of his then-19-year-old daughter’s future.

“He wanted me to keep going with the show horses,” the younger Mulhall recalled. “. . . I had some really nice stock and I was making money buying and selling horses and he thought I should stay there. The backside (of a racetrack) is a rough place to be and . . . he thought it was going to be hard for me to make it.”

Battle of wills is no contest
The battle of wills turned out to be no contest.

“We’re both hard-headed and we both basically will get our way in any way if we can,” she recalled. “And when I want to do something, I basically just set my head to it and, until it’s accomplished, I never quit. I just keep on going.”

With her secret set of blinkers firmly in place, Mulhall has never looked back after going out on her own in June 2002 with just three horses that she bought herself.

“I groomed them, galloped them, cleaned their stalls. I did everything myself for the first month and a half, two months,” she said. “Then I met Steve (Taub) up at Clocker’s Corner one day, and he sent me three horses to start off with, and within a week he sent me three more horses. It just kept going from there.”

Mulhall has encountered the crudity and disrespect that her father worried about on the sometimes rough-and-tumble backstretch. But she has learned to ignore the catcalls, whistles and occasional derogatory comments.

“A lot of the guys on the backside don’t really respect any of the girls, especially if you’re young. But young, old, being a girl on the backside, it’s rough,” she said. “But as time grew . . . I got more comfortable with it and just got used to ignoring all the guys. Now it’s a piece of cake.”

Making the situation increasingly tolerable is the support network she has created at the track, which includes her assistant trainer Jan Durepaire, son of the longtime assistant trainer to legendary French trainer Francois Boutin, foreman Ramon Arocha and longtime racetrackers like John “Short Man” Flakes, who is Imperialism’s groom. Even her dad has come around, and now supports his daughter’s career choice.

Mulhall already has proven she can more than hold her own on the tough Southern California circuit. She collected 10 wins from 40 starts at the recently concluded Santa Anita meeting, a 25 percent strike rate that put her among the leading trainers on a percentage basis.

On the threshold of history
Now, she is standing on the threshold of several historic accomplishments. At the very least, if Imperialism goes to post as expected, she will become one of just a dozen women to have saddled a Kentucky Derby starter, if Jennifer Pederson also runs Song of the Sword as expected. If Imperialism wins the May 1 race, she would be the first woman to train a winner of any of the three Triple Crown races — the Kentucky Derby, Preakness Stakes and Belmont Stakes — and the youngest person of either gender to do so.

As if that challenge wasn’t enough, she’ll be trying to do it with a colt with a physical defect known as a “sunken eye.”

Imperialism’s right eye is more than an inch lower than it should be, apparently as a result of a leg pressing against his skull on that side when he was locked tight in his mother’s womb. The defect left him with fairly normal vision in that eye when looking forward, but severely limited peripheral vision — a shortcoming that almost had disastrous consequences the first time Mulhall climbed on his back.

“When a horse passes him he can only see them once they’re already on top of him,” she said. “When they come flying by him, it just scares the living daylights out of him. . . . The first day I got on him, I almost went over the inside rail.”

Mulhall, who says she derives great insights into her horses habits and problems by riding them in the mornings, soon came up with an innovative solution to the gray colt’s problem — a right-eye blinker that eliminates unpleasant sideways surprises.

“I put it on him so he couldn’t see anything coming up on him and he’s been great in it,” she said.

So great that Imperialism has captured the San Vicente and San Rafael stakes and finished second via a disqualification in the prestigious Santa Anita Derby since Taub purchased him for $125,000 in mid-January. While he won’t be the favorite in the Kentucky Derby, many handicappers rank him among the top five or six horses in the race.

Mulhall doesn’t reserve such attention for stable stars like Imperialism. She also exhibits the patience of Job when it comes to helping the equine equivalent of a journeyman ballplayer work through various problems.

Patience pays off
On the cold and drizzly morning that MSNBC.com spent following her through her paces at Hollywood Park, Mulhall sat quietly on the back of a very nervous horse as he stood in one place for more than half an hour. Only when his nervousness had subsided did she take him on a slow jog around the track.

The horse, who used to “shake and vibrate and wash out (sweat) like crazy,” when he got near the starting gate in his races, is showing marked improvement under Mulhall’s relaxation regime.

“The other day I ran him and he was as dry as could be walking to the gate,” she said.

In addition to such attention to detail, Mulhall’s love of horses allows her to connect with her charges on an emotional level that any male trainer would be hard-pressed to match.

“I’ll go in (their stalls) and hug and kiss and play with every single one of them,” she said. “. . . If they try to bully over me, I won’t let them do that. . . . but as long as they behave, I love on them all the time. If they lay down, I’ll go in there and lay down with them.”

Mulhall may, in fact, make a different sort of Derby history by becoming the first trainer to plant a big kiss on her horse’s nose before sending him out to do battle.

She acknowledged that’s a possibility: “They’re basically all my kids,” she said. “I love every single one of them and treat them all like that.”