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“They’re off!” the trackside announcer called for the tenth time that day, a Wednesday in August, at the Saratoga Race Course. Starting next to each other on the far outside of the dirt track were Irad and Jose Ortiz, two Puerto Rican jockeys, age twenty-five and twenty-four, whose rides have been electrifying New York’s racetracks in recent years. They burst from the gate together, with Irad, who is eighteen months older, slightly ahead, and Jose on his brother’s flank. Within three strides, the pair led the field. They veered masterfully toward the rail, intimidating the other horses but not quite interfering with them.
As the horses hit top speed, about thirty-eight miles an hour, Irad, aboard a four-year-old filly named Fortunate Queen, held a two-length lead. His strategy was to get ahead, “save ground” by riding the rail, and hope to discourage Jose’s mount, a three-year-old named Fairybrook, by kicking dirt in her face. But Jose remained close, while also wide enough of Fortunate Queen’s hindquarters to avoid getting pelted, and settled into the space between the leader and the third-place horse, Miss Pearl, which, each brother knew from his research, was the only other horse with speed.
Everything about the brothers’ gear is designed to weigh as little as possible, including the flak jackets they wear under their brightly colored silks, their shiny black boots that look like patent leather but are made of vinyl and weigh about three ounces each, and their lightweight helmets. When the track is muddy, jockeys will wear up to five pairs of plastic riding goggles layered on top of one another, so that they can quickly peel away the outermost lenses as soon as they become encrusted with flying muck; losing visibility, even for a microsecond, can be disastrous. Today, sunny and dry, was a three-goggle day.
As the brothers raced side by side, the difference in their riding posture, or purchase, was clear. Irad was perched higher on his mount, his stirrups short, and his legs looked more severely chicken-winged than Jose’s at the knee. Jose rides lower and gets more leg on the horse.
The brothers were competing for the purse money, as all jockeys do. The New York Racing Association’s jockeys are guaranteed a mere hundred dollars per race for taking part in what is one of the most dangerous of professional sports. A kind of social Darwinism permeates the jockeys’ world, not unlike that of the robber barons who made the upstate New York spa town of Saratoga Springs the place to be during the summer meet. For first place, jockeys receive ten per cent of the owner’s share. At the N.Y.R.A.’s three venues—Saratoga; Aqueduct, in Queens; and Belmont, on Long Island—that is sixty per cent of the over-all purse. Second- and third-place jockeys get a smaller percentage of the share. Riders who consistently finish out of the money don’t stay around the N.Y.R.A. jockey colony long. The Ortizes’ winnings have piled up quickly. Jose has earned more than ninety-eight million dollars in purses since 2012 and Irad more than a hundred and fourteen million since 2011. But they still ride in the everyday races that a lot of the top jockeys skip. Also, as trainers note with approval, the brothers race as hard for fourth place, which earns owners purse money but gets the jockey no extra percentage, as they do for third place or higher.
The tenth was a “claiming” race, which means that the horses were all for sale, and their prospective new owners had put in offers before the race started. Neither the horses in the race nor the thirty-seven-thousand-dollar purse they were vying for came close to the million-dollar stakes races typically run on weekends, where the fields feature the top Thoroughbreds at the meeting, as graded by the American Graded Stakes Committee. The fillies in the tenth were all “maidens”: they had never won a race. They belonged to the much larger class of equally well-bred Thoroughbreds who end up costing their owners money. As the joke goes, owning racehorses is a great way to become a millionaire—if you start as a billionaire.
I was watching from a box in the clubhouse with Sean Clancy, a former steeplechase rider (jump jockeys belong to a different racing circuit entirely), who, with his brother Joe, puts out the Saratoga Special, a free daily newspaper. Features about upcoming races are interspersed with full-page ads for horse sales and stallion-breeding services, such as those of Tapit, a champion sire that earns his owner as much as three hundred thousand dollars per stud session.
Most jockeys become known as specialists in one or another part of the race. Speed riders break quickly from the gate and try to stay ahead; position riders are adept at saving ground and finding holes in the pack; closers ride best from behind. Some jockeys are better on dirt than on turf, some are better on faster horses, some are masters of a particular distance. The Ortiz brothers, Clancy said, excel in all areas, though each has his own style. Irad is the more aggressive rider of the two; tactically, he resembles John Velazquez, a forty-five-year-old Puerto Rican who is the leader of the N.Y.R.A. colony and is the top-earning jockey of all time, with three hundred and seventy-six million dollars in lifetime winnings. “When Johnny V. makes a move, you know it,” Clancy said. Jose, on the other hand, sidles into the pack, more like Wayne Gretzky, the hockey great. “Gretzky looked slow, because he was so fast,” Clancy went on. “He’d already made the move. Jose is the same way. He’s in the perfect spot, absolutely where he should be, and you have no idea how he got there.”
Horse racing was the first mass American sport, but its popularity has been steadily dwindling since the nineteen-sixties, when it effectively lost its near-monopoly on legal gambling. There is still national interest in the Triple Crown races (the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness Stakes, the Belmont Stakes). And, if the audiences aren’t what they used to be, the purses are bigger, including at the twelve-million-dollar Pegasus World Cup, first run at Gulfstream Park, in Florida, in January, 2017. NBC’s telecast of the recent Breeders’ Cup World Championships—a sort of playoff series of racing, which travels to a different élite track each November—had a strong N.F.L. vibe. The big race went off on a Saturday night, in prime time, and “Sunday Night Football” ’s Al Michaels and Cris Collinsworth made on-air picks. (Both backed the wrong horse.)
While emulating the N.F.L. might help in the short term, racing, like football (and boxing), faces difficulties in marketing to millennials a sport with significant health risks. And, unlike football and boxing, horse racing is hard to televise. The action is quickly over, like a boxing match scheduled to last for only one round, with long downtimes in between races, which NBC fills with B-roll footage, bios of trainers, and live shots of ladies in hats. It’s the opposite problem that baseball faces, with its three-hour-plus games.
Live, racing is much more exciting, and prestige racing venues like Saratoga continue to do well. This summer’s handle—the total amount wagered at the six-week meet—was $676.7 million, a record. Saratoga’s much shabbier sister racetrack, Aqueduct, is struggling, however, as are many regional tracks around the country. Gamblers prefer casinos to playing the ponies: slot machines are mindless; handicapping races takes study. New York State has accepted proposals to redevelop Belmont Park, the third of the New York Racing Association’s venues, and turn it into an entertainment destination, with a new on-site arena for pro sports (the Islanders and New York City F.C. are among the bidders) and concerts. Stuart Janney, the chairman of the Jockey Club, the breed registry for Thoroughbred horses in the U.S., characterized the state of the sport to me as “a tale of two cities—real success stories, and there’s also areas where racing is struggling.”
One reason often cited for the sport’s slow decline is that there is no Seabiscuit or Secretariat—a champion that the larger public can embrace. When, two years ago, American Pharoah won the Triple Crown, the first horse to do so since Affirmed, in 1978, the horse’s owner, the Egyptian-American entrepreneur Ahmed Zayat, of New Jersey, retired the three-year-old at the end of the season, and sold the breeding rights for a reported twenty million dollars, rather than allow the horse to continue racing. (Secretariat also retired as a three-year-old.) “The stars need to stick around longer,” Janney told me.
The performers who do stick around, year after year, are the jockeys. The N.Y.R.A. jockey colony, considered to be the Yankees of horse racing, already had two of the world’s top riders in John Velazquez and Javier Castellano before the Ortizes showed up. Now the colony has two young sporting phenoms, who, like the Williams sisters at their best, seem to compete on a different plane.
But, while jockeys are celebrated when they win, they are strangely invisible off the track in the Houyhnhnm-land of horse racing, where the animals are supposed to be the stars. When Velazquez won the 2017 ESPY Award for best jockey, the invitation to the ceremony from the sports network ESPN never got to him. “Shame no invite,” he tweeted the day after the awards show.
The Ortizes are superb athletes, and Jose told me that had he been bigger he would have tried to play baseball professionally. (Irad is five feet three inches, and Jose is five feet five, although he is listed as five-seven in the N.Y.R.A. program, and both weigh a hundred and fourteen pounds.) They have thickly muscled shoulders, knotty forearms, meaty hands (their hands are huge, in proportion to their size), absurdly slim waists, and slightly bowed legs. On horseback, they are imposing and haughty, until they turn on their matinée-idol smiles in the winner’s circle.
The adage is that racing is twenty per cent jockey and eighty per cent horse. If a horse wins by five lengths or more, it was the horse; the jockey only had to avoid mistakes, such as getting pinned on the rail or taking a turn too wide. But in close races the jockey’s tactics and riding skills can be decisive.
No horse can run flat out for a mile or more. (What makes the Churchill Downs track record that Secretariat set, at the 1973 Kentucky Derby, so remarkable is the fact that the champion ran each of the last four quarter miles in the race faster than the previous quarter.) The jockey’s main tactical decision is when to burn the horse’s energy and when to conserve it, by finding spaces inside the charging pack where his mount can settle in and switch off—that is, suppress the flight instinct that makes horses run in the first place, and relax in the security of the herd, saving fuel for the final turn and sprint. As Jose put it, “If they go slower, then I know they are going to have a little bit left. If you go fast early, then you slow down at the end. So, if I’m in the back of the pack and they’re going slower, I know I can ask for a little bit more. And if I have a really nice horse then I know I can be in the back and go slow and still win.”
In addition to tactical skills, jockeys must have a stopwatch in their heads. Riders can’t see a clock or hear the announcer’s call over the thundering hooves and the guttural grunts the horses make at full gallop, but, if the jockey’s internal clock can measure twelve seconds exactly, he can calculate how fast the race is going. Eddie Arcaro, a Hall of Fame jockey of the mid-twentieth century, who won the Kentucky Derby five times, would supposedly count to twelve wherever he was—the car, the kitchen, the bathroom—keeping his inner clock wound.
“You think about what these jockeys do,” the trainer Dale Romans said. “They’re in a squatted position, they’re going as fast as forty miles an hour, in a pack this far apart”—an inch separated his thumb and forefinger—“getting pelted with dirt, and they have to judge pace and look for holes.” They also have to think about the safety of the horses, in particular the delicate cannon bones, in their forelegs, which can shatter if they put a foot wrong.
Clancy, watching the live feed on the TV in our box at Saratoga, noted that the pace for the quarter mile was slow, and imagined what the brothers must be thinking: “There isn’t any other speed in the race that can beat them. So now they know it’s the two of them.”
Irad went to “the ask” as they started into the final turn, hitting Fortunate Queen on the right side of her sweat-slick neck with his whip. The standard jockey’s whip, a thirty-inch-long, leather-covered fibreglass shaft with a leather flap at the end, is used to override the animal’s nature, which is to remain in the safety of the pack, and ask it to go out front, where a predator could pick it off.
Irad hit Fortunate Queen again, and again—“strong urging” is the racing euphemism—signalling that, if he had any chance to win, now was the time. Jose, still in the hole between first and third, saw his brother go to the whip early, which told him that Irad was running out of horse, and he could keep Fairybrook switched off a little longer before asking for more. “Not every horse likes the whip,” Jose told me. “A lot of horses will run faster without it. You just show it to them and then”—he made a giddyap sound, like a loud kiss. “I couldn’t tell when I started, I just whipped them all, but now I can tell if he’s uncomfortable when I hit him. They tell you a lot with their ears. ” Both horses, being lesser mounts, did not respond to the whip with the burst that the brothers were used to from “live” horses, no matter how strong the urging.
“It’s Fairybrook and Fortunate Queen side by side!” Larry Collmus, the N.Y.R.A.’s announcer, called.
The waves of sound from excited spectators built in the towering wooden grandstand as the Ortiz brothers approached, racing flat out with only inches between their stirrup leathers. But Jose, having conserved more energy, had more horse at the end. As they came by us in the clubhouse, Jose glanced left at the infield mega-screen to see how far ahead he was, and moved Fairybrook over in front of Irad, who caught some of his brother’s dirt.
“Take that, brother!” Clancy yelled.
The Ortizes are third-generation riders. The brothers’ grandfather, Irad Ortiz Adorno, was a jockey at Puerto Rico’s premier racetrack, El Nuevo Comandante, now called Hipódromo Camarero, which is situated in Canóvanas, about twenty miles east of San Juan. (The track was devastated by Hurricane Maria, leaving ninety per cent of the barns without roofs, and no clean water or hay for the horses, which had to stand in shin-deep filth for days afterward.) Irad the elder, who is seventy-one and now lives in Brooklyn, tried to make it as a jockey in the United States in the nineteen-eighties, riding in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Ohio. But he could never break into the N.Y.R.A. colony. Later, he worked at Belmont as a hot walker—one of the stable hands who cool the horses down after their workouts and races by leading them around in circles. He was instrumental in bringing the boys to New York.
The brothers spent their early years in Trujillo Alto, a suburb of San Juan, where their parents, Irad and Wilma, lived. Irad did not become a jockey (their uncle Ivan did), but he managed an off-track betting parlor where, Jose told me, “we would go with him on Saturdays and we could watch races all day.” At home on big race days, their father would turn on the TV, put the boys on the bed, and equip them with a helmet and a whip and a pillow for a saddle, and they would pretend that they were the jockeys.
When they were young boys, their dad got them a pony for Christmas, which they named Popeye and took turns riding in a nearby river while the pony swam under them. The thing that Jose says he loves most about what he does, “the connection between the man and the horse,” begins here; indeed, his lizard-on-a-rock racing posture resembles that of a bareback rider on a swimming horse.
In 2003, their grandfather brought the boys to New York, took them out to Belmont, and introduced them to an old friend from Puerto Rico, Efraim (Pito) Rosa, a longtime N.Y.R.A. security guard. “These are going to be my jockeys!” the grandfather exclaimed. Rosa put the boys on an Equicizer—a mechanical horse that jockeys use to practice technique and to warm up before races—and was amazed at their ability. “These kids are naturals!” he said.
At sixteen, Irad was one of eighteen boys chosen from more than a hundred applicants for the two-year program at Escuela Vocacional Hípica, the state-run jockey academy, which operates out of a basement at the Hipódromo track, where their uncle Ivan also studied, and which has produced many talented Puerto Rican riders, including John Velazquez. A female instructor, Emilia Salinas, a former jockey, became Irad’s mentor, “the one who would correct my mistakes,” he said. Jose followed in his brother’s footsteps the next year.
Velazquez described the curriculum for me: “The first three months, you don’t touch a horse. It’s all school,” mainly equine science and anatomy. “They send you to the barn, where you start cleaning the horses, grooming, bathing, putting on bandages, hot walking, and cleaning stalls. Simple things. Then you get on this thing, it’s basically a garbage can with springs, and you get your balance on it. And then you start riding horses.” Jockeys who struggled with their weight were once expelled (as happened to Uncle Ivan), in the hope of protecting the kids from a lifetime of bulimia, a disease many jockeys contend with. “When I was there,” Velazquez added, “if you were more than a hundred and eight pounds you were out.” (Today, jockeys are referred to a weight-loss program or trained as gallopers.)
In their second year, students take part in as many as twenty practice races a day. At eighteen, they graduate to become apprentices, who, in the U.S., are called “bug boys,” because the asterisk on the racing form indicating their apprentice status looks like a bug. Weight allowances are one of many conditions attached to any particular race. In a race with a hundred-and-twenty-four-pound weight allowance, a hundred-and-fourteen-pound jockey carries ten pounds of lead bars placed in pouches in the horse’s saddle pad. But apprentices are allowed to carry less weight than fully fledged, or “journeyman,” riders, which gives trainers an incentive to use them. In the U.S., a bug starts with a ten-pound advantage, which after five wins shrinks to seven pounds, then to five. His bug must end after a year, or forty races, whichever comes first. Irad began his Puerto Rican apprenticeship in January, 2011, and by April he had won seventy-six races, a remarkable number that caught the attention of, among others, Pito Rosa, in New York.
Rosa brought Irad to Brooklyn and took him out to Angel Cordero’s house, on Long Island. Cordero is the great Puerto Rican jockey who dominated the N.Y.R.A. colony in the seventies and eighties, until, in 1992, when he was forty-nine, his career ended with a life-threatening spill in which he ruptured his spleen. His success, built on that of pioneers like Manuel Ycaza and Braulio Baeza, opened the door for other Latino riders, who now make up the bulk of the N.Y.R.A. colony.
Cordero had an Equicizer in his garage, and he put the kid on it. Cordero liked what he saw, and promised to help him get established at Belmont. Irad got his first mount there as a five-pound bug in the spring of 2011. He was living with his grandfather in Brooklyn, and getting up at three in the morning to take a train to the track; later, Irad moved into a place near Belmont with Rosa. When Jose arrived in New York, the following year, and also passed the Equicizer test at Cordero’s house, Rosa found a two-bedroom apartment that was big enough for all three of them. The brothers shared a bed, and one of the first things that Irad bought when he began to make money from riding was a king-size mattress for the two of them.
Irad won his first race less than a month into his bug, and by early 2012 he was a journeyman rider. “Racing in Puerto Rico is different from here,” he said. “In Puerto Rico, once you exit the gate you are expected to race on the outside, whereas here people like horses to race on the inside.” Jose, not to be outdone, won the first race he rode as a bug, on March 21, 2012, on a horse named Corofin, at Aqueduct. On Saturday, January 20, 2013, Irad and Jose won three races each, and on Sunday the brothers won seven out of nine races. Jose called it “the greatest day of my life,” when the Daily Racing Form interviewed the brothers at home shortly afterward, back when Irad was still the top jock in the family. “I want to do what he does,” Jose says in the article:
Their rivalry has evolved since then. Irad was the first to win a Triple Crown race, the Belmont Stakes, in 2016; Jose won the race this year. Irad won his first riding title at Saratoga, in 2015, with fifty-seven winning trips, but the following year Jose beat Irad for the title, with sixty-five wins. Cordero, who presented the trophy, recalled asking Irad, “You coming?” (Irad doesn’t remember this exchange.) “And he said, ‘No! I didn’t win it.’ ‘Yeah, but your brother won it.’ ‘Well, that was him. I’m not going.’ He doesn’t like to lose. Jose takes it a little better.”
What makes the Ortizes so good has something to do with horsemanship, an ineffable equine intuitiveness that not all jockeys possess, and which is the key to getting the animals to relax. “I just love the horses,” Jose said. “Sometimes you ride horses that are very talented but you can’t figure them out. That’s the hard part.” Sean Clancy said, “Jose’s got this really natural touch—it’s almost empathetic. His gift is to get a horse to relax, and come off the bridle”—to stop straining and expending nervous energy by putting pressure on the bit—by keeping his hands low and the reins loose. “And Jose has the softest hands of any young rider I’ve seen,” he added.
Another reason for the brothers’ success may be that, in spite of their youth, they are both already family men, with small children of their own. (Jose has one daughter, and Irad’s girlfriend recently gave birth to their second daughter.) Instead of hitting the bar scene after the races, as some jockeys do, they go home to their families, eat dinner, play MLB: The Show on the PlayStation (always against each other), and go to bed. Their parents live in the U.S. now, in the lower level of Jose’s house, in Hempstead; Irad has a house nearby.
“What’s scary about these guys is that they still aren’t in their prime,” Kiaran McLaughlin, a top trainer, told me. Not until their early thirties do most jockeys gain the experience and the confidence necessary to make split-second decisions that can win close races. Age isn’t a limiting factor for jockeys. Mike Smith, one of the top riders in the Santa Anita colony, in Southern California, is fifty-two. He looks like Yoda on horseback.
Injury, not age, is the jockey’s greatest enemy. Sooner or later, every jockey has a bad spill. For those who aren’t permanently maimed—fifty-eight jockeys are currently supported by the Permanently Disabled Jockeys Fund—the test becomes whether they can ever ride with the same confidence they had before the injury. Jose punctured a lung in 2012, but so far the Ortizes have escaped serious harm. They don’t talk about it, but in the jockeys’ room, where their lockers are side by side, both with Bibles open on their dressing tables, the subject is ever-present. Jose told me, “I pray for safety, for good luck, and for my family, to keep us here and to keep everything the same.”
For the Saratoga meet, the brothers had rented a big house nearby with their parents. When I stopped by after the races, Wilma was making rice and beans and the boys were outside grilling pork chops, disagreeing about how best to cook them. Irad prefers to flip them more often than Jose does, and Irad had the spatula at the moment.
Sarai, Irad’s almost two-year-old daughter with his girlfriend, Meliza Betancourt, was playing with a toy car in the garage. Jose’s wife, Taylor Rice, came out with Leilani, their seven-week-old baby. Rice is a former jockey who met Jose at Aqueduct. Her father and aunt were jockeys, and another aunt is Linda Rice, one of the most successful N.Y.R.A. trainers; her mother manages a Thoroughbred farm in Ocala, Florida.
Her father wasn’t keen on her becoming a jockey, but she did anyway; Taylor was the only one of her generation who could make the weight.
Neither Ortiz wants his daughter to be a jockey.
“A son, yes,” Jose said.
“Dad says no,” Rice said, “but when I was twenty I wasn’t letting my dad tell me what to do.”
If the horse is four times more important to winning the race than the jockey is, then a jockey’s best tactical move should occur about a week before the race begins, when the riders are matched with their mounts in the racing office. The trainers and the owners, not the jockeys, decide who will ride their horses. It is the job of the jockey’s agent, a key player in the jockey’s life, to get the best possible rides for his client.
The most successful trainers—Chad Brown, of nearby Mechanicville, New York, and Todd Pletcher, of Dallas, were the top trainers at Saratoga this summer—bring to a meet dozens of racehorses, belonging to lots of different owners. In the big races, trainers often have a go-to jockey, like John Velazquez, who is Pletcher’s No. 1 rider, and whose agent is Angel Cordero. For the Triple Crown races, and for the Breeders’ Cup, the top horses and jockeys come from all over the world. This year, Velazquez got to ride Pletcher’s best horse, Always Dreaming, in the Kentucky Derby, and won; Jose was aboard Pletcher’s second best, Tapwrit—a son of Tapit—which ran sixth. (Irad didn’t ride in the race.) Pletcher kept Tapwrit out of the Preakness, the second leg of the Triple Crown, to freshen him for the Belmont Stakes, then pulled Always Dreaming from the Belmont, after a disappointing show at the Preakness. He stayed with Jose aboard Tapwrit, giving him his first Triple Crown win. (Irad, on the trainer Steve Asmussen’s horse, Lookin at Lee, finished out of the money.)
In the claiming races that fill up the weekday cards at tracks everywhere, the mounts are much more negotiable, and those negotiations are the agent’s job. The agent handicaps each of the day’s races (that is, he analyzes the many different factors that could determine its outcome) and decides on the horses that have the best shot at winning and also happen to be trained by barns with which he and his client have a relationship.
I met Steve Rushing, Irad’s agent, on the backstretch at Saratoga, the vast stable area across from the grandstands. Rushing is soft-spoken, shy, almost sorrowful-looking, reflecting the misfortunes that have befallen a couple of his previous clients. His sympathetic demeanor makes him good at “spinning,” perhaps the trickiest part of the job, where an agent really earns his commission of twenty-five per cent. To insure that his client gets a mount in a particular race, the agent often agrees to ride a lesser horse, while waiting for a better horse to become available. If the agent gets the better horse and cuts the lesser horse loose, he has to spin the lesser horse’s trainer in such a way that he won’t be angry the next time the agent comes asking about a horse. Rushing is widely acknowledged to be the best spinner on the circuit.
The backstretch comprises barns, paddocks, training facilities, and dormitories for eleven hundred or so workers who follow the horses and riders from meet to meet. Since the seventies, N.Y.R.A. backstretch workers have been mostly Latino men who earn not much more than minimum wage. Somewhat above the grooms and the hot walkers in the backstretch hierarchy are the exercise riders, many of them women. On the front side, there are very few female jockeys, in spite of the success of pioneering jockeys like Julie Krone and Rosie Napravnik. But on the backstretch you see a lot of women on horseback. There are also female trainers such as Linda Rice, who was the N.Y.R.A.’s third leading trainer at Saratoga this summer.
Irad, wearing his flak jacket, was sitting on the back seat of a golf cart that Rushing was driving, slapping his whip against his boot—a crisp popping sound. Rushing’s horse-crazy, fourteen-year-old daughter, Kylie, was next to Irad on the back seat, regarding him with awe while he lightly teased her. On Irad’s lap was a box of sandwiches for the trainer Bill Mott’s barn, because Irad had won a race on a Mott horse the day before. The sandwiches, Rushing explained, were “a little extra-special thank-you to the grooms and the hot walkers.”
Agents offer their jockeys to breeze—gallop just under race speed—certain horses in the mornings and give the trainers feedback on their abilities. Irad had already breezed three that morning. “In order to know a horse,” he later explained, “I just need to ride it and breeze it. That’s how I can figure out what the horse likes and dislikes.” His favorite of all mares is Lady Eli; he won two stakes races on her at Saratoga this summer. “I love her,” he said. “Not sure if she loves me, but I love her.”
Rushing, fifty-four, is a veteran of the backstretch of the Suffolk Downs track, on the east side of his native Boston, which is the last remaining Thoroughbred track in New England, kept alive today with money from the state’s casinos. Beginning in high school, “I did everything,” he said, as he drove Irad to his next breeze. “I was a hot walker, I was a groom, I was an exercise rider,” galloping horses in ten-degree winter weather. He didn’t plan to become an agent, but in the mid-eighties a young jockey named Gary Donahue persuaded him to “carry his book.” Three months later, Donahue went down in a bad spill at Suffolk.
“I’ll never forget it,” Rushing said. “They took him to Mass General. The doctor calls us into a room, and he says, ‘The best way I can explain it is, your spinal cord is like this’ ”—Rushing stopped the cart, and touched the straightened index finger of his left hand to his right. “ ‘And Gary’s is like this.’ ” He moved his fingers slightly out of line. “ ‘He’ll never walk again.’ ”
On the back seat, Irad and Kylie had stopped chattering.
Another of Rushing’s clients was a Venezuelan phenom named Ramon Dominguez. In 2012, the year Irad lost his bug, Dominguez, thirty-five, earned the nationwide jockey title in purse winnings. The following January, at Aqueduct, his horse clipped heels with another and unseated Dominguez, who was struck in the head by a trailing horse. “Traumatic brain injury,” Rushing said. “He had a massive fracture in the back of his head, and several microfractures to the skull around. On the way to the hospital, he became unresponsive, and they had to resuscitate him. They didn’t know if he’d make it through the night.” Dominguez underwent multiple operations, and although he recovered, his doctors told him that one more fall might kill him, so he retired.
Dominguez’s spill left the colony shorthanded—some of the regular jockeys prefer to race in Florida in the winter—and that gave the brothers opportunities they might not ordinarily have had. Irad had an agent, but he was looking to make a change, and called Rushing. Jose teamed up with a younger agent, James (Jimmy) Riccio, of Bayonne, New Jersey, who grew up around local tracks with his father, James, Sr., a small-time owner. He’s thirty-nine, though he’s quick to tell you that he looks older. Humility is at the core of his spinning style.
If he had both Ortiz brothers as clients, Rushing wouldn’t have to spin trainers at all: “I could just say, ‘I can’t give you Irad, but here’s Jose.’ ”
“No way!” Irad barked from the back seat, with a loud slap of his whip on his boot. Then Jose might win, “not because he beat me but because he had the better horse!”
“You want all the horses to yourself!” Kylie said, laughing.
“You’re right,” Irad said.
In turning a royal pastime into a profitable business, the founders of tracks like Saratoga and Churchill Downs democratized the sport, but they also planted the seeds of horse racing’s slow demise. Many of the ills of racing in this country can be blamed on the overcommercialization of the sport, beginning with the dirt surfaces themselves. Kings’ races took place on turf—that is, grass—which is the animal’s natural running surface, and most big European races are still run on turf (as are some U.S. races). But you can’t run ten races a day, six days a week, as tracks here often do, on turf—it turns to dirt quickly. Besides, the developers of the sport in the U.S. didn’t have the grassy pastures of the royal estates to work with: they hewed the tracks out of the forests.
Running in deep dirt puts additional strain on the horses’ hearts, lungs, and limbs, especially when it’s muddy. That’s one reason that far more horses suffer catastrophic breakdowns on American tracks than on European ones, which drives casual fans away from the sport. Fifteen horses died at the Saratoga meet this summer, eight in races and seven while training. Some attributed this dismal statistic to the dirt track’s being too deep.
Another reason is that some U.S. owners push young horses before they are ready to race, to gain an early return on their investment, and, for a few, to increase the breeding potential of the winners. Owners as a rule don’t make money at the track, from winning purses. The bigger potential payoff is in owning a top mare or stallion, which gives owners an incentive to retire the graded horses early.
There is a pharmacopoeia of legal drugs in the U.S. that Thoroughbreds receive to treat the effects of the wear and tear of racing, such as phenylbutazone, an anti-inflammatory, and furosemide, a diuretic used for pulmonary bleeding. Then, there are illegal drugs, which have become harder to detect. There is no central racing commissioner’s office, and as a result there is no way to set testing standards for drugs, or to effectively penalize doping; state racing commissions make their own rules, and often doping goes unpunished. The Horse Racing Integrity and Safety Act, a bill that would grant the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency the power to regulate drugs in American horse racing as it does in other sports, has been before the House since 2013. “Racing has to come to grips with the fact that, like every sport, we have integrity issues,” Stuart Janney, of the Jockey Club, told me. “Drugs do get into our sport, they are more sophisticated, they are harder to detect, and they are more effective than they were in the past, and our method of policing our sport is out of date.”
For a sport looking to broaden its appeal to a new generation, the optics of “strong urging” are not very helpful, either. Janney pointed out that most people “are a long way from living on a farm, and most of their experience with animals is as a pet, not an agricultural commodity.”
But for jockeys, as well as for the backstretch workers, these animals are not pets. The Ortizes love horses, and care for them, and depend on them, but they are also pragmatic about the sport and its demands, both on the animals and on the jockeys. They accept the hazards of racing as part of the job that both the animal and the rider were born to do. And there’s a beauty even in the lowliest claiming race, a grace that reminds us of humanity’s long relationship with horses.
Jose clinched the Saratoga riding title on the final day of the meet, in the sixth race, with another classic Ortiz duel down the stretch. Irad said later, “If someone is going to beat me, I’d rather that it be my brother. His is a victory for the family.” Irad won the next race, however, to show that their rivalry was far from settled.
The colony returned to Belmont after Labor Day, and the fall meet began. Two weeks into it, in the ninth race of the day, Jose was aboard a three-year-old filly named Submit. After rounding the final turn, in perfect position to make a move, Jose went to the ask and moved Submit slightly outside. Suddenly, she stumbled, and put her head down, and Jose went over her neck head first, landing awkwardly on the turf. He lay there on the ground, not moving, as the race went on to the finish line. Submit, finding herself alone on the track, tried to join the herd, but her left cannon bone was broken. She was euthanized on the track.
Jose was taken away by the trackside ambulance, but soon the announcer informed the crowd that he was up and about. An MRI on his knee showed no ligament damage.
Was the spill on Jose’s mind in his first race back, the following week?
The younger Ortiz smiled before answering. “The day I am afraid to get on a horse is the day I retire from racing,” he said. ♦
