was too weak even to sit upright in a saddle. He gave someone else the mount, and retired soon afterward.
Greenberg escaped without permanent damage, but others, including Fitzsimmons, may not have been so lucky. Severe reducing was thought to be the culprit behind an epidemic of fatal lung diseases, such as pneumonia and tuberculosis, among jockeys.9 Other long-term health problems may also have stemmed from reducing practices. In a single day, to make weight on a horse, Fitzsimmons endured purgatives, an entire afternoon in a Turkish bath, heavy exercise on horseback and on foot while swaddled in several sweaters and a muffler, topped off with an hour standing inches from a roaring brick kiln. He lost
Finally, there was the mental toll. Stephens described his realization that he could no longer take the punishment of reducing as “the biggest disappointment of my life.”11 The legendary nineteenth- century European jockey Fred Archer understood the emotion. Falling into a severe depression attributed to his taking constant doses of purgatives to fight a weight problem he could not beat, he shot himself to death at age twenty-nine.
A Thoroughbred racehorse is one of God’s most impressive engines. Tipping the scales at up to 1,450 pounds, he can sustain speeds of forty miles per hour. Equipped with reflexes much faster than those of the most quick-wired man, he swoops over as much as twenty-eight feet of earth in a single stride, and corners on a dime. His body is a paradox of mass and lightness, crafted to slip through air with the ease of an arrow. His mind is impressed with a single command:
To pilot a racehorse is to ride a half-ton catapult. It is without question one of the most formidable feats in sport. The extraordinary athleticism of the jockey is unparalleled: A study of the elements of athleticism conducted by Los Angeles exercise physiologists and physicians found that of all major sports competitors, jockeys may be, pound for pound, the best overall athletes.12 They have to be. To begin with, there are the demands on balance, coordination, and reflex. A horse’s body is a constantly shifting topography, with a bobbing head and neck and roiling muscle over the shoulders, back, and rump. On a running horse, a jockey does not sit in the saddle, he crouches over it, leaning all of his weight on his toes, which rest on the thin metal bases of stirrups dangling about a foot from the horse’s topline. When a horse is in full stride, the only parts of the jockey that are in continuous contact with the animal are the insides of the feet and ankles—everything else is balanced in midair. In other words, jockeys squat on the pitching backs of their mounts, a task much like perching on the grille of a car while it speeds down a twisting, potholed freeway in traffic. The stance is, in the words of University of North Carolina researchers, “a situation of dynamic imbalance and ballistic opportunity.”13 The center of balance is so narrow that if jockeys shift only slightly rearward, they will flip right off the back. If they tip more than a few inches forward, a fall is almost inevitable. A Thoroughbred’s neck, while broad from top to bottom, is surprisingly narrow in width, like the body of a fish. Pitching up and down as the horse runs, it offers little for the jockey to grab to avoid plunging to the ground and under the horse’s hooves.
Race riding is exceptionally exhausting. It is common for aspiring jockeys to be so rubber-legged upon dismounting from their first circuit around the track that they are unable to walk back to the barn. Strength is not just a tool for winning, it is necessary for survival. Jockey Johnny Longden was once rammed in midrace, knocked from his stirrups and sent flying downward in front of a pack of horses. He was saved by a jockey riding alongside him, George Taniguchi, who was so powerful that he was able to catch Longden with one hand. Taniguchi didn’t know his own strength, and in attempting to push Longden back into the saddle he instead hurled him right over the back of his horse. Longden found himself in the same predicament on the other side of his mount until jockey Rogelio Trejos, whose horse was about to run Longden down, lunged forward, snagged the jockey with the ease of an outfielder and righted him in the saddle, also with one hand. Incredibly, Longden won the race. The
A jockey is no mere passenger on a racehorse. His role in bringing home winners is critical and demanding. First, jockeys must have an exquisitely fine sense of pace over each furlong, or eighth of a mile. Strategy is crucial. Front-runners have the best chance of winning if they set moderate or slow fractional times, leaving themselves the energy to fend off closers, while closers have the best chance of winning if they lag behind a brisk pace, then swoop around the exhausted front-runners in the homestretch. The difference between a fast fraction and a slow fraction is often less than a second, and a jockey must be able to discriminate between the two to place his horse optimally. Great jockeys have a freakish talent for gauging pace to within two or three fifths of a second of the actual time and, if asked, can reliably gallop a horse over a distance at precisely the clip requested.
Positioning relative to the field is also critical. A racehorse is an enormous creature who needs a wide berth, and as he weighs half a ton and carries one hundred–plus pounds on his back, he cannot afford to have his momentum stopped or acceleration wasted. Running wide around turns offers the best chance of clear sailing but exacts a high price in extra distance the horse has to cover. In a big field, jockeys who opt to go wide may have to swing as many as ten “paths” out, forcing their horses to run roughly ten lengths farther than horses on the rail.15 The best riders take the inside route whenever possible, but this is risky. Because everyone wants to be there, horses usually bunch up by the rail, so closely that hips and shoulders rub and stirrups clink off each other, making maneuvering difficult or impossible. Tiring pacesetters generally slow down right in front of the rail-running pack, compounding the traffic jams.
To judge whether or not he’s likely to get pocketed if he steers his horse to the rail, a jockey must be able to read the subtleties in the stances of horses and riders in front—the tautness in the reins, the height of the jockey over the saddle, the crispness and cadence of the stride—to gauge how much gas is left in the tank. Doing homework is imperative; some runners habitually drift in or out in the homestretch or on turns, and the jockey who can arm himself with this knowledge and position himself on the rail behind such a horse can ensure himself a clear path of escape. He must also have the instinct to judge whether or not a hole opening in front of him will stay open long enough to get through, if the space is wide enough, and if his horse has the acceleration to get to it before it slams shut. If he judges it correctly, he can save ground and win a race. If he misjudges it, he may end up fouling other horses and being disqualified, checking his horse sharply and sacrificing his momentum or even falling.
Requiring that its human competitors straddle erratic animals moving in dense groups at extremely high speed, race riding in the 1930s, as today, was fraught with extreme danger. Riders didn’t even have to leave the saddle to be badly hurt. Their hands and shins were smashed and their knee ligaments ripped when horses twisted beneath them or banged into rails and walls. Their ankles were crushed when their feet became caught in the starter’s webbing. With the advent of the first primitive, unpadded starting gates in the early thirties, some riders actually died in the saddle, speared into the exposed steel overhead bars by rearing horses. Riders suffered horrible injuries when dragged from their stirrups and under their horses’ legs or when thrown forward, ending up clinging to the underside of the horses’ necks while the animals’ front legs pummeled their chests and abdomens.
The only thing more dangerous than being on the back of a racehorse was being thrown from one. Some jockeys took two hundred or more falls in their careers.16 Some were shot into the air when horses
