by Joe Drape
Espinoza, however, was a different rider, a different man than he had been twelve years earlier when he and War Emblem staggered out of the gate, the colt scraping his knees and subsequently finishing nineteen lengths behind the 70-to-1 long shot Sarava. Then, Espinoza struggled with his English and was being pushed and pulled by the pressure of the Triple Crown and the demands of a tough boss in Bob Baffert. He never felt as alone as he did when he galloped War Emblem back to the front of the grandstand and was met by an angry, rather than heartbroken, silence coming from the more than 102,000 who had come there hoping to see something—at least a gallant try. Instead, the stumble at the gate had plummeted the crowd’s spirits. Then for the next 2:29.71 it took the field to circle the track with Espinoza and War Emblem trailing far, far behind, people seethed. What they were watching was just a horse race, one that could have been the fifth on any Wednesday at Aqueduct, that grind house of a track seventeen miles east of here, but definitely unfitting for a Triple Crown race.
Espinoza made his way back to the jockey’s room looking like a condemned man, pushing his way through the jubilant winner’s circle, playing back how the race had unfolded. Did he do all he could? New York tracks are tough and the railbirds were screaming and cussing at him as he made his way to the breezeway that led to the jockeys’ room. Once inside there, none of his fellow riders even looked at him. They all knew there was nothing to say. Gary Stevens had been crushed when he had lost here with Silver Charm. He started toward Espinoza, but thought better of it when he saw how dark and shell-shocked the rider looked.
“It was like somebody had died,” he said.
When his valet handed Espinoza an envelope, he was at first confused. It was a check for $85, the guaranteed saddle fee all riders receive for getting their horses around the track. His stomach turned; the previous five weeks had taken far more than that out of his hide: “I thought that was my shot, and worse, I didn’t even want another one.”
Espinoza lost more than a horse race that evening. He had lost his heart for riding. Espinoza grew up on a family farm north of Mexico with goals rather than dreams. He was the youngest of twelve children, and it took all of them to make ends meet. Espinoza was barely fourteen when he lifted an older brother’s driver’s license and got a job behind the wheel of a Greyhound-style bus that was overflowing with people like him working whatever jobs they could find in the bigger towns and cities and needed a way to get there. His brother, Jose, had moved to Cancun and found work on a farm where quarter horses were trained. When Victor was fifteen, he joined his older brother. At eighteen, Jose was now the head trainer and needed help. They worked long hours, but the brothers learned how to keep a horse healthy. Victor had saved his money and was attending jockey’s school. Soon he was riding Thoroughbreds at Mexico City’s premier track, Hipódromo de las Américas, even though he remained terrified of being on a horse’s back. He felt like he had no other choice.
“I wasn’t born to be a jockey,” Espinoza said. “I didn’t always want to be a jockey. I just wanted to survive and have a better life.”
He came to Northern California as a seventeen-year-old and picked up a few dollars and some valuable experience galloping horses in the morning. He talked a handful of trainers into letting him ride in the races in the afternoon and demonstrated enough talent to attract an agent and to enter the racetrack world as an apprentice jockey. It was an entry-level position that offered trainers the opportunity to ride a jockey anywhere from five to ten pounds lighter than his rivals, which can mean the difference between a third-place and first-place check. It also gave them an eager and free-of-charge exercise rider in the mornings. For a bug boy, as they are called, it put Espinoza in the proximity of seasoned horsemen and experienced riders. It was in Art Sherman’s interest to teach Espinoza how to read a horse and how to report back what it had done well and what it needed to work on.
It was vital as well for Russell Baze, North America’s winningest rider, to pass on the tools and etiquette of a dangerous trade. It is an interesting dynamic inside a jockeys’ room where, on one hand, no one wants to help a kid so much that he beats you, but on the other hand, you need to teach him how to ride safely and professionally because the lives of every jockey inside depend on it. It also is not easy losing race after race under the watchful eyes of colleagues and competitors in a room that is part claustrophobic frat house and part tense waiting room to the winner’s circle.
“You got to leave the last race in the room,” said Espinoza.
Espinoza, the reluctant jockey, learned early that if he was going to achieve his goals and have a better life, he needed to get stronger. One afternoon in a cheap race easily 20,000 mounts ago, he was atop a horse that he could not control. Espinoza held on for dear life and then was angry at himself for being so terrified. The next day he joined a gym and went about sculpting a body where his thighs and arms looked pulled through with cable.
“I needed to be able to dominate a horse,” he said. “To make him do what I wanted.”
At 112 pounds, Espinoza was a natural lightweight who preferred five-mile runs in the San Gabriel Mountains that sprayed a rouge halo around his home, the weight room, and eating when and whatever he wanted. He was able to bench press his body weight thirty-eight times and pop off endless pull-ups as if he were on a spring. Most riders are forced into the sauna and the flipping toilets that are standard issue for jockey rooms everywhere so they could sweat and throw up and shrink their natural 130-pound frames into the 118-pound package they needed to ride. It is a process that transforms the most mild-mannered riders into cranky and ill-tempered competitors.
“He doesn’t drink, and he’s not a partier,” Beach said. “He’s light and a good finisher. He gives an honest appraisal of the horse after he gets off. No sugarcoating it—you know where you stand with Victor. The guys who constantly fight their weight are snarly and grumpy. That life wears on them. Victor is one of the few who’s always happy.”
Espinoza’s loss aboard War Emblem in the Belmont continued to haunt him. He kept his head down and continued to grind out a living at the top of the national jockey standings, averaging more than 200 victories and more than $12 million in purses over the next five years by being what Art Sherman had wanted for California Chrome: a steady hand.
In 2010, as his thirty-eighth birthday approached, Espinoza took an honest appraisal of himself. He was receiving fewer mounts and winning less often. His annual earnings were half of what they had been. He was in a slump and decided it was his own fault. He was tired and bored.
“I wasn’t hungry and I wasn’t having any fun,” he said. “I was thinking of retiring.”
Espinoza also was beginning a personal relationship, one that made him consider abandoning his bachelor ways. Stephanie Kunkel was thirteen years younger than Espinoza and did not know much about horse racing or his career. Espinoza liked it that way. They would get in his Lamborghini and just drive the coast or pull into a shopping center to indulge his inner mall rat, buying a new suit, some Salvatore Ferragamo shoes, or a piece to set on the bureau in his bedroom. Stephanie was blond and eight inches taller than Victor and he was falling in love. They were nearly a year into the relationship when she found out he had won a Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes and was aboard one of those horses who had gone to the Belmont Stakes with a shot at sweeping the series.
“Have you ever thought about doing it again?” she asked him.
Espinoza explained to her that winning a single Derby was hard enough and that the odds were long that he would find a horse with the ability to win another one, let alone capture the Preakness and return to New York with a Triple Crown hanging in the balance. The conversation stuck with him, though.
“Now that I’m happy away from the track,” he told himself, “why can’t I be happier on it?”
There was no reason. Espinoza decided to look forward to the mornings when he would get on horses and try to drum up new business instead of dreading them. He cho
se to enjoy his time aboard the creatures who had taken him from a farm in Mexico to a big house at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains and another on the beach near Del Mar.
“I became more joyful,” he said, accompanied by a burst of laughter.
In fact, Espinoza laughed a lot. He smiled even more and looked the same way in the winner’s circle as he did walking alongside a trainer after a race explaining why his horse finished up the track. He was carefree.
Espinoza decided to win another Derby for his girlfriend, to win another one for himself. Now all he needed was the right horse. One year passed, then another, and another, and America’s most famous race went off without him.
Then last summer in Del Mar, California Chrome came along.
Then California Chrome lost in the Belmont.
At forty-two years old, with twelve years of racing under his belt, Espinoza understood that it was okay. He had done all he could to get the horse to the finish line first.
“It’s an animal,” Espinoza says. “He wakes up every day like you and I, but he decides, ‘I don’t want to run.’ Or he’s in a bad mood, or he’s tired. I’ve learned to remember that they are animals and I can’t always control them.”
He had learned something else far more important away from the racetrack a decade earlier when a friend, a wealthy one, took him to a hospital in Los Angeles for cancer patients. Like Espinoza, his friend was a private man who had come from nothing and made a very comfortable life for him and his family. One day, they were having lunch and the friend felt Espinoza’s sadness, a feeling that the rider was feeling sorry for himself. Afterward, he took Espinoza on an unannounced trip to the pediatric floor at City of Hope Hospital. They walked in and Espinoza immediately had his breath taken away by the sight of toddlers, four- and five-year-olds, with sunken cheeks, without their hair, and moving as if they were in slow motion. Still, the kids smiled at him and laughed with each other. Espinoza lasted about five minutes inside. He returned to the car and waited. He did something else that he could never remember doing as an adult.
“I cried,” he said.
Soon after, Espinoza started donating 10 percent of his earnings to the hospital. He did it through his corporation and bookkeeper and sometimes sent it weekly, sometimes monthly or even quarterly. The money arrived in odd amounts wholly dictated by whether he was riding well and winning or not riding very well. He still couldn’t actually visit the children; even the thought of it broke him in pieces.
“Sometimes I forget to pay my bills, but I never forget about City of Hope,” he said.
No one would have ever known about his ties to the hospital if he had not lost his composure at a press conference immediately after winning his second Kentucky Derby aboard California Chrome. Steve Coburn, one of the colt’s co-owners and breeder, brought up the death of his sister, Brenda, and how divine intervention was at work.
“The colt was born on my sister Brenda’s birthday,” he said. “She died of cancer at age thirty-six. It will be thirty-six years this year since there was a Triple Crown winner.”
Espinoza, sitting next to him, turned and looked at Coburn. His shoulders started to shake, and then he began to sob, and out tumbled the story of his connection to the children of City of Hope and how his share of earnings—roughly $100,000—was bound for the hospital. Now Coburn was consoling Espinoza.
“Here we are, worrying about whether we can win a race and stressing about all the decisions we have to make,” Espinoza said, “and then you see these kids, and they’re happy.”
Espinoza had no choice but to choose joy over worry and to believe that California Chrome had carried him to the brink of glory because he had willed a chance to ride him. No wonder he chose to ignore the fact that he was the third or fourth choice to ride American Pharoah in the Del Mar Futurity. Espinoza didn’t need Baffert to be here. He and the colt would figure out if they were meant for each other.
In the paddock, Espinoza glanced at the tote board and saw that Skyway, the Mark Casse colt his agent could not get him on, was the favorite. American Pharoah was taking some money as well, though, and was the second choice at 3 to 1 despite his poor debut. Baffert had called earlier in the morning and told him, “Whatever you do, put him on the lead.”
Espinoza liked the looks of his colt. He stood tall and was balanced. He was cool and composed today, the cotton peeking out of his ears was doing its job. Head-to-toe bays were rare and the jockey thought it was almost as startling as the white flashes of California Chrome. Espinoza asked Baffert’s assistant Jimmy Barnes about American Pharoah’s sawed off tail.
“That’s the way he came to us,” Barnes said. “He’ll swat at a fly and come up short, but it doesn’t seem to make any difference in the way he runs.”
American Pharoah had drawn the Number 1 hole and would be breaking from the rail, which was often tricky for young horses at today’s distance of seven furlongs. It was a long run up the chute until the field actually hit the main track. Before giving Espinoza a leg up on American Pharoah, Barnes reminded him that the “rail was golden today.”
“Just break and bounce out of there,” he said.
Espinoza let American Pharoah tell him how he wanted to warm up. He had about ten minutes or so to make a new friend of the colt, and just like first dates, he thought that being a good listener made for a better impression. American Pharoah was well within himself as they loosened up, and Espinoza thought the colt carried his power lightly. They were first to load into the starting gate, and American Pharoah remained poised as the other eight horses banged their way into their posts. When the field was still enough, the gates clanged and the race was on. American Pharoah was caught flat-footed and was slow to get out, so Espinoza shook up his reins, gently asking him to run on. He felt the colt accelerate beneath him and within two strides he was in the bit. It was like tapping the accelerator of a sports car and being surprised by how quickly and powerfully it showed its colors. Espinoza made the lead before they hit the quarter pole and was a length ahead of the other Baffert horse, Holiday Camp, at the half-mile mark. He could feel that American Pharoah possessed a high cruising speed, a characteristic of a nice horse. As they rounded the far turn, Espinoza knew that he and American Pharoah were going to end up in the winner’s circle. They were two lengths ahead as they hit the quarter pole and Espinoza so far was just along for the ride. It was time to give the colt an education. He crossed his reins and felt American Pharoah’s stride start to lengthen. He had his whip in his left hand and thumped the colt twice on the saddle cloth, and then twice more. Yep, there was another gear. In mid-stretch, Espinoza brandished the whip once more but just waved it in front of his eyes. The colt was flying. As they hit the wire, four and three-quarter lengths in front, Espinoza ever so slightly pumped his right arm.
“American Pharoah, son of Pioneerof the Nile, has absolutely annihilated them today in the Del Mar Futurity,” he heard track announcer Trevor Denham say.
He knew they went fast, but when he saw the final time of 1:21.48, he was surprised by how fast. It was the second-fastest running of the race at the seven-furlong distance. It was Espinoza’s third Futurity victory and a record twelfth for Baffert. In the sixty-seven runnings of the race, American Pharoah was only the second maiden to win the Del Mar Futurity and the last since Go West Young Man won in 1977. All in all, it was a satisfying finish to the Del Mar meet. After the race, Espinoza was subdued in his appraisal of American Pharoah.
“He looks like a nice horse and he feels like one,” he told reporters. “He could be a good one.”
On his way home, however, Espinoza was pumped up. For the second year in a row, he had landed on a big, fast colt. Espinoza knew American Pharoah was potentially another life-changing horse. Fate again had interceded.
He had run into Baffert shortly after riding California Chrome to victory in the Derby and now remembered their brief conversation.
“Congratulations, Victor,” Baffert said. “Tha
t was amazing.”
“Thanks, Bob,” Espinoza said.
“Next year,” said Baffert, pointing at the jockey, “you and me.”
Espinoza usually waited until the following morning to speak with Beach, but today he could not wait and called him from his car.
“Man, that’s a rocket ship!” Espinoza told his agent. “This is our Derby horse right here if we keep the mount.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
TWO TURNS?
September 27, 2014, Santa Anita Park
Despite its global reach, despite the hundreds of races run simultaneously daily, horse racing is a very small world and the community that bets on it is even more compact. News of American Pharoah’s performance in the Del Mar Futurity ignited the first spark of Kentucky Derby fever, a malady that usually is dormant throughout the fall as the two-year-olds get a race or two to hint at what’s to come. It was not just felt in the Bob Baffert barn. The speed figures American Pharoah put up were too huge to go unnoticed. The Beyer Speed Figure, for example, was a numerical representation of a horse’s performance, based on the final time and the inherent speed over the track on which the race was run. The 101 Beyer Speed Figure American Pharoah had earned was the top figure of the year for a two-year-old and was among the strongest numbers in history for a juvenile this early in a career. It also validated the big figure Om earned the previous month when he beat American Pharoah, Calculator, and Iron Fist. In fact, those two horses had finished second and third in the Futurity, and as Baffert expected, Om suffered for going so fast, injuring a leg and getting sidelined for the year.
In the Blue Grass, Frances Relihan experienced a rush as if she owned American Pharoah herself. Much had changed since the little colt had left the farm. It was under new ownership for one. The previous year the Thoroughbred breeding arm of one of Chile’s largest conglomerates—Don Alberto Corp—paid $13.82 million for the property. It operated a 500-acre farm in Los Ángeles, Chile, which was home to about 180 mares, and the Solari family who owned it were certainly horse people. They had retained Frances and then went on a shopping spree, spending millions on royally bred mares in Kentucky and England, including ten that were bred to Frankel, who was unbeaten in fourteen races in Europe and now stood at stud in Suffolk, England. They were shipped to Kentucky and were among the first Frankel foals born on Southern Hemisphere time. It meant juggling two foaling seasons.