Top jockey to miss Hastings opener
Knee surgery keeping 30-year veteran Hamel out of the saddle to start the season
When Hastings Racecourse opens this weekend, top jockey Richard Hamel won’t be on a mount — but not by choice. Hamel is recovering from arthroscopic knee surgery — his fifth — for arthritis.
“It’s going to be tough,” said Hamel, who hasn’t yet decided whether he’ll attend the opening day festivities on Saturday. He’d rather be on the track than in the grandstands.
“I don’t know if I’m going to be able to be down there without getting emotional,” he said over the phone.
Hamel, who won 77 races last year, was named top jockey for the third consecutive year at the 2017 B.C. Thoroughbred Awards, the fifth time he’s received the honour.
Although he’d love nothing more than to be racing this weekend, Hamel, 49, has grown wiser after three decades of racing thoroughbreds: “I’m old enough to know that these things take time, and if it takes another week, or another three weeks, so be it.”
Top jockeys like Hamel have to be as fit as Olympians to hold their seats on a 500-kilogram thoroughbred travelling up to 70 km/h, but if they can beat the injuries and survive death-defying falls, the experience maturity brings is invaluable on the track.
Three-time Kentucky Derby-winner Gary Stevens is still riding at age 55, and in Australia, Danny Miller is still riding in his 70s.
“I’ve had some serious crashes over the years that I’ve been lucky enough to walk away from,” says Hamel. “I’ve even had the helmet kicked clean off my head and land on the tarmac. I got lucky.”
It’s a precarious career, in a sport that Hamel says “tests your heart.”
Hamel, who grew up in Terrace, said he was a “soft, heavy kid” at age 15 when, to keep him out of trouble, his mother sent him to live with his sister on a small horse-breeding ranch in Aldergrove. He fell in love with the horses. At 5-foot-5, he was tall for a jockey, but after a year his brother-in-law agreed to let him start “working,” or exercising, the horses.
“I love the animal,” says Hamel. “A horse is one of the greatest creations God has ever given us.”
Although the giant, high-strung animals intimidated him at first, he wasn’t afraid to take a few falls: “You fall down, you get right back up. That’s how I was raised.”
Over the years, riding has become second nature, like walking, says Hamel, who first rode at Hastings in 1988.
Hamel started riding 30 years ago on B.C.’s once-popular B circuit.
“It was incredibly fun,” recalls Hamel. “We were a bunch of young kids riding paycheque to paycheque, riding on the weekends from win to win, and learning.”
Those days are long gone, but at Hastings, B.C.’s premier racetrack, the sport survives. At Hastings, Hamel says, “We’re like a family. A dysfunctional family, with all sorts of people from every walk of life, but when it comes down to it, we all want the best for horse racing, and whatever we can do to support that, we do.”
That also means giving back to the community.
In October, Hamel spontaneously donated a pair of riding boots to 17-year-old cancer survivor Casey Wright.
Wright, a tireless advocate for kids fighting cancer who has undergone nine surgeries since being diagnosed with a brain tumour at the age of six months, was visiting the jockey’s room last October when Hamel was moved to give him the handmade boots.
As Hamel recuperates from his surgery, he’s as anxious to get into a new home as he is to get back on a horse. On Jan. 4, a fire destroyed his house in Coquitlam.
An avid gardener, Hamel is hoping to start poking around in the soil again. Growing vegetables has become a passion, and a way to cope with the stresses of the industry.
“It’s good for the mind,” says Hamel. “You deal with a lot of traumas as a jockey ... your crashes, your losses, your connections with animals and then you lose them.”
Hamel has slowly been building another career doing stunts and working in films since earning his union card working as a stunt rider in the movie Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.
But he’s not ready to leave the jockey’s life behind.
“Every year, coming into the year, I wonder if I’ve still got it. Once I get on the horses and I feel the connection I have with the animal, and if I’m healthy, then I have no question. It all comes back.”