Beloved DRF horse racing reporter Mary Rampellini dies at 53

Mary Rampellini, the Daily Racing Form reporter and handicapper who covered Oaklawn Park, Lone Star Park and the stakes circuit across Louisiana, Texas and Oklahoma for nearly a quarter century, died Saturday at 53 after complications from sepsis in a hospital in Grapevine, Texas. For racing readers who relied on her every day, her death removes one of the sport’s most familiar and trusted regional voices.

Rampellini worked 24 years for Daily Racing Form after joining as a freelancer in 1997, and DRF’s author page lists her start as 1996. Based in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and Grand Prairie, Texas, she built a reporting beat that touched the core of the summer and fall calendar in the Southwest, from Oaklawn’s day-to-day racing to Lone Star Park and the major stakes that connected the region. In a sport where mornings are built around entries, scratches, changes in condition and backstretch chatter, her reporting was part of the operating rhythm.

She came to racing with the game already in her blood. Rampellini was the daughter of horseman Ralph F. Rampellini, and before DRF she covered the sport for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, including at the dawn of Lone Star Park. She had also started her own newspaper in Texas at 19, an early sign of the drive that later made her a fixture in racing media. That background gave her reporting a rare blend of local knowledge and backstretch familiarity, the kind horsemen and bettors lean on because it comes from years of showing up.

The National Turf Writers and Broadcasters called her death a loss for a longtime member of the racing media community, and DRF published tributes from colleagues, including a remembrance from her brother Ralph. Those memories pointed to more than a sharp reporter. They described a journalist known for kindness and for the kind of steady, practical coverage that helps an entire circuit function.

Rampellini also had ties outside the racing shed. She was a member of St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church in Grapevine, and she had been published by North Texas Catholic and Arkansas Catholic. Funeral services were still pending, and her family asked people to share prayers, memories or stories, with correspondence directed to Mary Rampellini and Family in Roanoke, Texas.