Word: tracked
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...into his stretch surge, Affirmed was rested and ready to run. Said Cauthen simply: "He came up and set his horse down in the lane and I set mine down. Mine won." Affirmed flashed across the finish in 1 min. 54 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...
Young, very young, Cauthen also accompanied his father on his smithing rounds at nearby race tracks. He began to help calm animals unnerved by shoeing or perturbed by a stranger's presence. He started to use his hands, and in his hands, horses relaxed. Whether coming from God, genes or good manners, this is the priceless gift for a jockey, the difference between wrestling a horse around a track, only to blunt his spirit for the run, and rating him kindly, handily, through the pace, while conserving enough of his energy for the stretch drive. Steve had the gift even...
Cauthen broke in when he was 16 at nearby little tracks like Kentucky's Latonia, where the horseflesh was less than prime and the riding more than a little rough. He handled that trial by guile and nerve and then moved on to New York's Aqueduct race track, the Big Apple. He was riding "bugboy light," a 5-lb.. weight allowance granted apprentice jockeys. But on the home turf of Angel Cordero Jr., Ron Turcotte 'and Jorge Velasquez, that was the only allowance...