Word: jockeys
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...2/5sec.?just 2/5 sec. short of the track record despite the slow early running?and won, going away, by a neck. Steve Cauthen and Affirmed outwitted and outran their challengers for the $136,200 winner's share of the Preakness purse. It was a lesson in the jockey...
From the day he first dons silks, walks to the paddock and gets a leg up on a Thoroughbred race horse, the public knows him as a jockey. But around the track, he is called a boy. It is an odd inversion of status for these masterful men, a class cognomen left over from the days when jockeys were servants of the sporting aristocracy. Age does not matter. The rankest apprentice is a boy; Willie Shoemaker?at age 46, the winner of more horse races than any man in the sport's history?...
There is another track term for a jockey: race rider. The title is used sparingly so that, in a generation of boys, only a handful, the very best, will earn the honor. Arcaro, Atkinson, Longden were race riders. And Shoemaker, Hartack, Cordero, Pincay, Baeza, Turcotte, Velasquez. Now there is Steve Cauthen, only 18 and a race rider. A prodigy at 16, a fearless boy returning from an ugly spill at 17, and less than a month past his 18th birthday, winner of the Kentucky Derby and Preakness, the first two classics of the Triple Crown...
...shorter course (1/16 of a mile less than the Derby and 5/16 of a mile less than the Belmont Stakes) demands the hot speed that is the first hallmark of the breed. A topflight field hurtling around Pimlico's tight turns leaves no margin for error by a jockey: fail to find position by a few feet, miscalculate the pace by a tick of the clock, and the winner streaks to the wire before ground can be made...
...Jockeys are born into all kinds of backgrounds?Arcaro to the tough streets of ethnic Cincinnati, Jorge Velasquez to the barrios of Panama?but a handicapper of naturals would take odds on the Walton, Ky., home of Tex arid Myra Cauthen. Walton is small (pop. 2,200) and Bluegrass (60 miles north of Lexington). Horse country is one place where a kid could grow up small and not develop an inferiority complex. He could imagine himself a jockey. And when his father is a blacksmith and his mother a second-generation owner and a trainer, when he looks forward...