Norwegian roots shape Banca’s harness racing career

Monica Banca didn’t grow up around harness racing. She grew up around a father, Tor Eriksen, who happened to be good friends with a standardbred trainer in Norway, and that was enough to hook her on the athletic animals that would end up shaping her whole career.

Norway has a longer harness racing history than most fans outside Scandinavia realise. The sport is governed there by the Norwegian Trotting Association and covers both trotting and galloping races, with dedicated tracks and breeding programs built up over decades. The country has produced its own share of major names, trainer and driver Gunnar Eggen among them, who dominated Norwegian trotting through the late 20th century, and trainer Trygve Diskerud, widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in the sport’s history there before he hung up his colours.

It was into that world that Banca got her start, working for Norwegian trainer Jomar Blekkan. Blekkan gave a young girl real opportunities and real trust rather than just odd jobs around the barn, and taught her the fundamentals that carried her career from there. She still credits him as the reason she ended up chasing a career in the sport at all.

In 1991 she relocated to the United States and landed with a fellow Norwegian who’d already made the same trip a few years earlier: Trond Smedshammer. Smedshammer, born in Gjovik, is one of only 12 trainers to win both the Hambletonian and the Hambletonian Oaks, and Banca spent four years in his stable learning from one of the sport’s most respected teachers before moving on to work for trainers Thomas Maibashka and Robert Silverman, among others.

She married, had two children, Emily and Richard, and stayed active driving amateur races from 2013 through 2023. That stretch took her straight through 2020, when COVID brought the sport, and most everything else, to a standstill. Banca kept building through it regardless, putting together the stable she trains and drives out of today.

She now trains, owns and, when the drive is hers to take, drives a string of five horses out of Monticello, four of them hers and the fifth raced by her daughter. It’s a genuine one-woman operation: she’s the trainer, the groom and the owner, and the driver whenever the assignment calls for it.

“My favorite and fastest horse is American Primetime. From 2014 through 2019 I took care of  him and traveled around the country. He was a great horse who earned almost $900,000 and  took a lifetime mark of 1:49,”

Banca said in a recent interview with Harness Racing Update.  Banca singles out Lauren Tritton as the driver she admires most in the sport, calling her tough, fearless and an amazing horsewoman who takes on the top drivers in the business without hesitation. It’s the kind of respect one self-made operator tends to reserve for another.

From a Norwegian barn aisle to a five-horse stable of her own at Monticello, Banca’s path has run almost entirely on the work she’s put in herself, one horse, one client, one opportunity at a time. Three decades on from her first job with Blekkan, she’s still doing every part of it herself, and still building.

 

by Harnesslink Media