They had to stand on hillsides to watch the races; huge crowds with no grandstands. And the rules were different, what rules there were, so the turns were murder: bodies flying, no stirrups or saddles, as many as 50 horses driving for the inside line at once. It didn’t matter if the jockey stayed on or even if he lived, riderless horses that crossed the line were honored, too. But that was 648 B.C. in Greece, and while horse racing might have been the most prestigious event in the Olympics, it wasn’t the most considered ’m thinking about that this morning, mostly about riderless horses wanting to win, and watching Thoroughbreds and riders move out onto the track at Santa Anita Park for exercise. In silhouette against the pre-dawn California sky, a rider and his horse look like a single animal, and I wonder how connected they really are. I arrived just after 6 and am on my first cup of coffee, but the trainers, exercise staff and others are already well into their workdays. Many get here at 4:30 or so, essentially every morning of the week. The horses, you see, like to get moving.
“Today? Oh man, you waited so long. I gave it away yesterday. I’d rather ride yours if I’d have known. [Pause] I’ll try. Let me see what I can do.” Scotty hangs up his phone and turns back to me. “Sorry ’bout that. Some days this thing rings like crazy, other times it just sits there.”
A jockey agent since he was 17, Scott McClellan—“Scotty” within seconds of meeting him—has been at Santa Anita for more than 40 years. He went to high school near the track, and used to come out in the mornings before class.
“My father was a jockey and an agent, that’s how I started,” he says. “I’d go to school from 11 to 2, then I’d run back here to the races.”
As a jockey agent, Scotty is responsible for putting his jockey—currently a sharp 24-year-old named Joseph Talamo—on horses. Specifically, he’s tasked with getting Joe on good horses, ones that have a chance to win. To do that, Scotty networks with trainers and owners, navigating a political field of knowing which hands to shake and which rides to take. A two-time Kentucky Derby winner (with Chris McCarron on Go for Gin in 1994 and on Alysheba in 1987), he knows the game.
“If it’s between two horses and [Joe’s] ridden them both, I’ll go to him and say ‘what about these two?’ If the horses are very close [in ability], maybe this client we ride a lot for, we’ve won a lot for, and the other guy we ride one for, I’ll say let’s go with the guy who puts us on a lot of horses. But big trainers and big owners, those guys don’t take it so well when you don’t ride their horse. If it’s close, you’re leaning their way most of the time. If it’s not close, you’re going to go with the best horse.”
With something like 10 races a day, eight horses or so per race and a crowd of jockeys trying to get rides, it’s a rough gig, especially considering that top jockeys ride in numerous races per day, taking a good share of the work.
“It’s very competitive. There are 40 guys like me, and they have other jocks and they’re trying to get under me, trying to get on my horse,” says Scotty.
Talamo, who’s listed as one of the country’s “star jocks” on Santa Anita’s website, shares the Southern California spotlight with top jockey Rafael Bejarano and Mike Smith, a National Museum and Racing Hall of Fame inductee who’s won more Breeders’ Cup races than anyone. (The Breeders’ Cup is a prestigious annual series of top-tier races that’s hosted at a different track each year.)
“Often, [trainers and owners] are going to go with Bejarano because he’s got the name and he wins,” says Scotty. “Smith doesn’t ride ’em unless they’re going to win. Trainers aren’t going to waste his time putting him on a lesser horse. We get on good horses, but we also ride a lot of what you might call lesser horses; they might be 20 or 30-to-1.”
“When you buy a two-year-old or a yearling, they don’t know anything,” says Julio Canani, a three-time Breeders’ Cup winner who’s something of a local legend at Santa Anita. “Like a kid who goes to school and they don’t know how to write, how to read, nothing.”
Canani built his reputation by seeing potential where others didn’t and training it up. In one case, he purchased a horse in France (Silic) for $30,000 that went on to win the mile race in the 1999 Breeders’ Cup, held at Gulfstream Park in Florida, and that’s just one story.
A native of Peru, his accent is strong even after 50 years in America, and he peppers his speech with colorful words that he uses almost like punctuation. Not surprisingly, he inspired a TV character: Turo Escalante in the short-lived HBO show “Luck” was based on Canani.
“I came out to America in 1963. I wanted to land in Florida but I took a wrong plane and I ended up in Hartford, Connecticut or $&#*,” he remembers. “In Peru I didn’t like school so I ran away from my house and I went to the racetrack when I was 13 years old. I used to walk horses.”
After working as a gardener and then as a dishwasher, Canani, a Puerto Rican boxer and a waiter from El Salvador all moved to California together.
“The waiter got a job in the Beverly Hilton and I got a job in a gas station. I wanted to be a movie star and *%#^ but nobody discovered me—oh *&%!”
One night at a club, Canani says he met a woman who turned out to be a millionaire in the middle of a divorce.
“She had a beautiful house, and I ended up moving in with her. She said, ‘I don’t want you to work or nothing.’ She bought me a car and everything. For three years I’m like a pimp, then I got tired of that &^%$ and I said I didn’t come to this country for this. I want to go back to horses and be a trainer. She said ‘No! If you work, that’s it.’ So I packed my things, she drove me up here to Baldwin (Avenue, in front of Santa Anita Park), and she dropped me with my suitcase, and that’s it. I came to the racetrack.”
Among the many, many winner’s circle pictures on his office walls, there’s one of Canani 40 years ago in a thick coat, sunglasses on, looking good. Now 77, he says most of the owners he used to train for are dead, including Terrence Lanni, former CEO of MGM Mirage, with whom Canani won numerous times. The trainer’s barn is still buzzing though, and he recently got a new horse he thinks could go far. When an exercise boy—one of the guys who exercises horses—rides by at the end of a morning session and asks, “Like it, no like it?” Canani smiles and nods his head. “Yeah, me too,” says the rider.
The track at Santa Anita measures one mile, with many races run over one and one-eighth miles in less than two minutes. Like Churchill Downs, site of the Kentucky Derby, and the tracks that host the Belmont Stakes and the Preakness, which together make racing’s Triple Crown, Santa Anita is dirt. Some tracks opt for a synthetic or “poly” surface, which is a mix of rubber, polymers and other materials. Where dirt tends to kick up from a horse’s hooves, creating divots, material on poly tracks seems to settle back down. Logically, there are horses for courses, with some preferring one over the other. But track surface is only one variable. Others, like the horse’s training regimen, diet, maintenance and care, and a million other things all conspire to help a horse win or lose, and most of that is on the trainer.
“I must make 25, 30, 50 decisions a day, and I just hope half of them are right,” says James Cassidy, named 2010 Top Trainer in California by California Breeders. “You gotta do a lot of gut stuff.”
The native New Yorker left the Bronx and moved to California in 1980, and aside from his ubiquitous Yankees cap he hasn’t looked back. He acknowledges that when the training is done and the horse is in the gate, winning or losing is down to the horse and the jockey on it—and luck.
“That’s actually where I’m probably most relaxed, right when you get in the gate,” says Joe. “That’s from doing it so long.”
Talamo was born in Marrero, Louisiana, just outside of New Orleans, and he’s been on a horse since he was in diapers (he has the photo to prove it). In 2006, just 16 years old, he was the first apprentice jockey to win a riding title at New Orleans’ Fair Grounds Race Course, and his list of victories since then is impressive. The 5’ 3” jockey, who keeps his weight around 105lbs, is well liked around the track and respected for his strong work ethic, clean lifestyle and genial personality, not to mention his smarts on a horse.
“When I was 7, my dad took me out to the track and I fell in love with it,” he says. “My favorite car was a Chevy Corvette, and I saw one sitting there. My dad said, ‘Oh, jockeys always drive them.’ I’m like, oh that’s what I’m gonna be. Gonna get a Corvette!
“From the time I was 8 or 9, that’s all I really thought about and really worked toward. I never knew if I was going to be 5′ 10″, 140lbs. I’m lucky, very lucky.”
“This guy is very clean cut,” says Vladimir Cerin, a Breeders’ Cup-winning trainer. “I have a 5-year-old who thinks that Joe walks on water. He thinks he’s gonna be a jock, too. He’s gonna be 6′ 5″.”
The dream of any jockey, Joe’s been to the big show—the Kentucky Derby, in which he ran in 2010 on a horse named Sidney’s Candy. The year before, he was set to make his Derby debut on I Want Revenge, the favorite, but the horse scratched (bowed out) the morning of the race due to injury. Joe took the news in stride, telling several journalists that “you’re not in the Derby ’til the gates open.”
Getting a good break—coming out of the gate well—is important, Joe says, but if your horse is one that likes to come from behind late in a race, you don’t want him coming out of the gate too strong because then you have to drag him back. As for positioning, no one wants to be “on the rail,” with the inside lane, because it’s easy to get trapped.
“That’s very important for certain horses,” says Joe. “Most of the time you don’t want the ‘one hole,’ especially if you’re on a speed horse because you have no choice but to gun your horse outta there and go to the front. If you’re on the outside you have the option to go to the front and go over, or you can sit on him. If you’re on the inside you’re at a pretty big disadvantage unless you’re faster.”
During a race, Joe watches the other jockeys closely.
“I’m not going to say names, but a lot of guys do a lot of things over again,” he says. “Certain jockeys move a little earlier than others so you’ll know that horse might come back [because it tires]. Some jockeys wait too long, so you don’t want to be behind them because by the time they go your horse has lost a little momentum.”
A more immediate sign of how things are going in a race are a horse’s ears, which are a sort of engine light that lets a jockey know how a horse is running.
“A lot of times when a horse’s ears are straight up that’s when they’re relaxed,” Joe says. “If they’re pinned all the way back, they’re giving you everything they have. So if I’m in front and their ears are straight up, that means they’re real relaxed and I still have a lot of horse left. As a jockey that’s a good sign. But then a lot of times I’ll come to a horse, I’m all alone, my horse’s ears are back and I’ll see that the other horse’s ears are up and I’ll think, ‘I’m screwed.’ Not all the time, but most of the time it’s a pretty good indication.”
“They’re doing most of the work,” says Joe. “To me, you mostly stay out of their way, let ’em do their own thing.”
Cerin basically agrees, but says it’s not always true. “The last race you won for us, you won the race,” he says to Joe. “You had a good horse, but you perfectly timed the run.”
Turning back to me, he explains: “You can’t move too early. You move too early you got nothing left, and in the last 50 yards the whole world caves in on you. Joe’s become very, very good at saving the right amount of energy.
“Some of the horses, Joe’s on for the first time. But he’s become so good at adapting to the individual that he might never have seen the horse before, never been introduced, but he looks at videos, picks up the horse’s running style, looks at the other horses in the race, what their running style is, and tries to adjust his horse to that.”
Smiling big after Cerin’s comments, Joe exclaims, “I’m buying you dinner tonight, Vladimir!”
So when it comes to which part of the team is most responsible for the win, can a good jockey win on a mediocre horse and can a bad jockey screw up a winner?
“I know a bad jockey can screw it up for sure,” says Joe. “As for a good one on a mediocre horse, I think so, to a certain degree. I try and watch replays and see if a horse is running second or third a lot of times, maybe see if the jockey is doing something wrong, moving too late, too early, keeping the horse too close or maybe too far back.
“In that degree maybe a better jockey can make the horse win. But in my opinion it’s 80 to 90 percent the horse and the rest is us.”
All modern Thoroughbreds can be traced back to three horses imported to England from the Middle East in the 17th and 18th centuries: The Byerley Turk, the Darley Arabian and the Godolphin Arabian. According to an oft-quoted genetic study, 95 percent of modern Thoroughbreds are descended from the Darley Arabian, which was purchased in Syria in 1704. Thoroughbreds, essentially hybrids of Middle Eastern stallions and European mares, are quite literally bred to race, and the best thing you can do, according to the trainers with whom I spoke, is to stay out of their way.
“You don’t want to teach them anything,” says Cassidy. “That’s in them. You don’t want to take it out. They race to beat other horses. Watch a herd: There’s always one or two in front.”
“They’re bred for it, they’re highly competitive,” says Cerin. “Ninety percent of them, if you load them in with no riders, they’ll race to the wire.
“I had one horse, we bet all our money on him, the rider fell off [early in the race]. The horse pulls into the turn three wide, running seventh. He stays there in his position, gets on the backside, starts moving up, circles the field and wins by 10.”
Unlike in the Ancient Greek Olympics, riderless horses can’t win today—running without the weight of a jockey is too great an advantage—but it does speak to the horses’ instincts.
“They like to run, even in morning workouts they compete,” Cerin says. “They want to get to the wire first. They know where the wire is after a while, and they know it’s important.”
In the fourth race, Joe’s on a horse named Nashoba’s Gold. They’re racing on turf (a grass course, which sits just inside the dirt course) and it’s a Maiden race, meaning none of the field has ever won.
Each year, close to 40,000 Thoroughbreds are born, with roughly half of those going on to become racehorses. Of that group, only 20 will make it to the Kentucky Derby, giving some idea of the odds of becoming a champion. All of them start with a Maiden win, and today’s is restricted to three-year-old fillies [a young female horse]. Joe’s horse is half-sister to a horse named Nashoba’s Key, a fantastic winner that died in a freak accident in 2008 when she kicked through the wall of her pen and fractured her hind leg.
Alyce and Warren Williamson, the owners, were reportedly devastated at the loss—“when that happens, it’s like losing your kid,” says Scotty—and so for them today’s race has a strong emotional component to it.
I’m sitting with Scotty in a boxed area of the stands. We have a video monitor in front of us, and Scotty has his binoculars.
The gate opens and they’re off. Just over a minute and 48 seconds later it’s over, and I realize that, although I was calm and even a little tired at the beginning of the race, now I’m shaking with excitement. Joe drew the rail but Nashoba’s Gold broke quickly and Joe was able to get her clear. With eight horses running, she came from second-to-last down the backside and started going, “leveling off nicely when able to lengthen her stride,” according to an account in the Thoroughbred Daily News, published after the race.
In the end, Joe and Nashoba’s Gold reeled in a horse named Star Act right in front of the grandstands, then won by half a length, sending Scotty to his feet with me not far behind. We rush down the stairs from the stands to meet Joe in the winner’s circle, with Scotty so excited he almost pulls me into the post-race picture.
Alyce Williamson is in tears, and as we move around her she turns to Scotty and says, “Oh! This was so special, because… well, you know,” clearly thinking of Nashoba’s Key. Joe stays on Nashoba’s Gold for the picture, casts a quick glance skyward, then dismounts. Alyce hugs him, then hugs him again. The Williamson family is crying and smiling, then everyone clears the circle and the track readies for the fifth race.
“A lot worse,” says Canani, when asked how horse racing is doing. Cassidy sings a similar tune, pointing to people not understanding the sport like they used to, and to technology being a problem, even if it’s helped in some ways.
“We tried to tell [race organizers] back [when races started being televised and run online], that this was going to cannibalize the business, and that’s exactly what happened. People don’t come out anymore; they can watch it on TV and bet at home.”
“We missed a whole generation of players, guys [in their 20s to early 40s],” says Cerin. “There are very few of them here. We didn’t teach them how to gamble, and really, if you like wagering, this is the intelligent person’s form of wagering. A football game is just flipping a coin. This takes a little bit of studying, but that’s what intelligent people like to do.
“But you can bet at home, you can bet on your phone, you can bet on your iPad… You don’t have to come here. When people stopped coming, the atmosphere is not as electric as it was. We used to average 32,000, 40,000, 40-45,000 every Saturday and Sunday. It would take you an hour to get out of the parking lot. Now it takes you five minutes.
Joe: “Yeah, you’re lucky to get 30 on a huge day.”
Cerin: “Oh on a huge day, on the biggest days we don’t get 30, and that was our average: 32,000 in 1983.”
One recent indicator of changes in racing is the closing of Hollywood Park, a track that shut its doors at the end of last season. The venue ran for 75 years and used to attract the likes of Fred Astaire, Jimmy Stewart, Cary Grant and others. Closing day in December drew a large crowd as fans turned up to say goodbye. Joe and Cerin were both there.
“I hate to say it,” Joe offers, “but one of the funnest days recently, the closing day of Hollywood.”
Cerin: “I won the last race.”
Joe: “You beat me! How fun and electric. It felt almost like a Breeders’ Cup day. Oh! I mean, the crowd…”
Cerin: “They ran out of programs, they let everybody in for free. It was the biggest crowd at Hollywood in 20 years.”
Joe: “Unbelievable. But I won two races that day, and when you came back everybody was cheering, hollering, I mean, it was… Oh man!”
Cerin: “But it used to be like that on a Thursday afternoon here. Thursday was a big day.”
Lotta Beach is an exercise rider and former show jumper who arrives at 4:30a.m. nearly every day of the week at Santa Anita to work with horses.
“I’m very emotional,” she says, telling me that she often grows quite close to the animals with which she works. One, specifically, has a special place in her heart: Calidoscopio. Near and dear to fans as well, Calidoscopio capped his career at the age of 10 with an astounding come-from-behind performance at the 2013 Brooklyn Handicap at Belmont, making up 22 lengths in the last half mile of the muddy race to win. The feat made ESPN’s daily Top Ten and was followed quickly by a well-deserved retirement to his owners’ farm in South America.
“I was there at 1:30 in the morning to put him in the van,” Beach says. “That one was special.”
Asked whether horse racing is exploitive, as some animal rights groups and others believe, Beach appears perplexed.
“You have to respect the horse,” she says. “Having them stand around is not respecting them, not taking care of them. They want to do something, whether it’s herding cows or show jumping or racing.”
The degree to which the next generation of potential racing fans is able to embrace that perspective will depend on a host of factors, shaped in part by media and in part by their generation’s personality. After all, we’re living in a time when there’s mainstream talk of abolishing football for safety reasons, something that would have seemed ridiculous not too many years ago.
Whatever the future holds for racing, however it is regarded, for as long as possible it will continue to deliver its straightforward and compelling realities, just as it has for centuries: a rider and horse working together, victory and defeat, and even life and death. Whether or not the next generation can handle that, much less appreciate or celebrate it, only time will tell. At least some in the racing world aren’t worried.
Thomas Proctor—the son of a storied trainer and an accomplished trainer in his own right—puts it simply:
“People change,” he tells me. “But we still run in a circle.”
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Volutpat lectus leo in eu sagittis
Follow Us On
