Word: rider
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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...
Saturday's Preakness victory on Affirmed is further proof, as much as any single race can be, of Cauthen's claim to be on the select list. At 1 3/16miles, the Preakness provides an honest test of the three-year-old Thoroughbred and an intense examination of the rider. The 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...
...fine ride, such as Cauthen's Preakness win, is composed of many parts, most of them beyond quantification. Horsemen sputter and maunder when asked to specify reasons for the success of the few truly great riders. Seat and balance, a clocklike sense of pace, strength, intelligence, courage, they say, and, most important, most mysterious of all, "the hands"?instinctive, intricately articulate, the medium of communication between horse and rider. Sometime, somehow, someone gets it all and then they say: "He's a natural...
...racing year was like none the horse world had ever known. His mounts won more than $6 million in purses, a record. He won 487 races. In one incredible week, he won 23 of 54 races, and people began betting not on the horses but on their rider. Cauthen was clearly something to tug at a horseman's heart, a manifestation of genius, present palpable and future prodigious, that occurs only rarely in any human endeavor. He was a born winner...
...becoming a man. All the gifts, the marvelous, balanced seat, the head filled with horse sense and a ticking clock, the wonderful, knowing hands of the bugboy had been fused with the courage of the race rider. In short order, the stakes horses started to come his way: Johnny D., last year's turf champion, and Affirmed, the best two-year-old colt and his Triple Crown mount this year...