THE KENTUCKY KID AT 60
HE BLAZED A TRAIL AS A JOCKEY ON BOTH SIDES OF THE ATLANTIC BEFORE EVENTUALLY SUCCUMBING TO A WEIGHT BATTLE BUT THE LEGEND FROM KENTUCKY HAS NO REGRETS
He blazed a trail on both sides of the Atlantic – Steve Cauthen looks back on a career less ordinary
THE Kentucky Kid is getting older now. “It feels pretty smooth,” says 60-year-old Steve Cauthen, speaking from the farm he calls ‘Dream Fields’. Seems apt, given the many dreams he fulfilled on countless patches of land throughout the globe. “Anyways, don’t they say 60 is the new 40?” The deep southern drawl of this blue-eyed boy still feels silky smooth, too.
Verona is home to Steve and Amy; here they have raised three girls.
“My wife got hold of them too young and they became dancers. They do love the horses as well. Katelyn takes an interest to some degree. They’re not totally out of touch. But they’re more into the arts than sports. It’s not all bad. This is a tough business and it doesn’t get any easier . . . ”
Say that again. He’s known it all his life, one way or another.
Four miles down the road in Walton is where he grew up, the son of a track blacksmith and a horse trainer. His mother was the horse trainer.
So too were his uncles; he first rode a pony aged two; a year later, he went to his first Kentucky Derby.
At the age of 18, in 1978, he would win it on Affirmed, before clinching US racing’s storied Triple Crown in a thrilling Belmont duel with Alydar.
You’d think it would be enough to be named Sports Illustrated Sportsperson of the Year. You’d think. But that came a year earlier.
Purses
For the year before, while still in high school, he won 487 times, bagging $6m dollars in purses. He was a coast-to-coast star on first-name terms with Johnny Carson. Everywhere he went he smashed records. He even cut an album. (Though it was a pity he also didn’t smash that record.)
Adversity spurred him; at 16, he’d taken such a bad fall few thought he could come back. A month later, he won first time out on Little Miracle. They didn’t need headline writers.
So much winning. Then so much losing. An improbable 110-race run at Santa Anita, boos greeting him each time he left the weigh-room and each time he returned. He was jocked off Affirmed; on the same day he snapped the streak, he had thought of getting in his car and heading back east.
“All those things are part of my make-up,” he says now. “I had two years when nothing went wrong,
I was walking on water and it was just amazing. Then I had a bad patch and all of a sudden you have to pick yourself off the ground.”
A life lived at just 18. Within a year, he would quit the States. Robert Sangster, whose involvement with John Magnier’s Coolmore would transform the sport, pulled him aside one day. “You’re going to end up in Europe anyway because of your weight.”
At 16, he’d been just five feet tall and needed to add 5lb of lead to his saddle; but by his 18th birthday, he had shot to 5’ 7” and was already struggling with more punitive Stateside weights.
“So I took the chance. I knew I could come back after a year if I didn’t like it.”
His feet hardly touched the ground but remained perched in familiar style in the stirrups, the long, low back delivering a winner on his first outing on Salisbury plains. A month later, he won the 1,000 Guineas aboard Tap On Wood. Not yet 20.
Her trainer, Barry Hills, and wife Penny, took Cauthen under their wing and the first of a series of beautiful friendships were formed on this side of the water.
“I had fun, I loved it. I loved the people, the way they trained the horses, they were good to the horses.
“And, after a while, I learned how to finagle my way all around the different courses. Barry got me fired up again, he wanted to get me back to the top. That’s his nature. He had fought from being a stable lad to being a top trainer which was its own tough slog.
“He really inspired me and I got going again. I always could ride. It’s not all about having talent and timing or whatever. Part of it comes down to the human nature of that desire to try to be the best. I’m not at all saying I was ever the best. But I wanted to win titles and Derbies and have fun. Luckily, I got to do all that.”
And more. Three times he was champion, including the thrilling ’87 duel with Pat Eddery. Ten classics in the UK, including all but one in 1985; he added a UK Triple Crown on the superb Oh So Sharp to add to his US version; he tacked on all the Derbies – French, Irish, English, even Italian.
He was truly one of the greatest sportsmen of the second half of the 20th century. ‘Stevie Wonder’ would finish in 1992 with nearly 3,000 winners, having amassed more than €50m on both sides of the Atlantic.
“Hell, I would have ridden until I was 50 if I could have,” he smiles; instead, he quit the saddle in 1992, aged just 32.
Ostensibly because Sheikh Mohammed was cutting his £500,000-per-annum retainer. The truth was more grimly prosaic.
After beating a battle with the bottle, the constant fight to make the weight had literally emptied him.
“I just knew I couldn’t have put my mind and body through this for another 10 years,” he says, starkly. The way he sees it, better to quit at the top.
“I had a great time. There was nothing about the game that I didn’t really like apart from fighting my body. It just tired me out. Half the year you’re wasting every day and it comes to a point where you have to say enough is enough.” He was only 32 when he did.
C ***** HILDHOOD memories. A father cursing in his Cabra bookies’ shop. “200/1!” he’d puff; a reference to how much a punter could multiply his punts merely by backing the Texan in one season.
He was the photo-finish king but first burst into Clondalkin consciousness on a school day afternoon in 1985, streaking so far ahead of the field on Slip Anchor that he nearly arrived in Grange Hill.
Then that Saturday, a horse called Oh So Sharp, with an invisible exclamation mark, and those now gladly restored maroon and white silks, adding a second leg of what seemed then a mythical Triple Crown.
She would complete it, adding a swoosh to what was already a career of barely decelerating triumph in Cauthen’s career. A master on two continents. He’d just turned 25.
“The biggest differences were the tracks in the US were absolutely flat and left-handed, all on the dirt. Horses don’t hit little dips. As long as you stay balanced the horse will.
“In the UK and Ireland, I had to learn to get behind a horse and get hold of him or else pick them back up. I came over with the style of just having the ball of my foot in the stirrup. There’s no question but that gives you so much better balance on a horse. “And as people tried it, they found out that was the case. I remember teaching Walter Swinburn and for the
first couple of weeks the back of his legs were as sore as crap because it stretches you right out there. But once you sort it out, the balance is so much better and now everybody does it.
“Also I learned how to judge pace pretty well. Luckily, once I learned how to ride the different tracks, how to use the hill at Ascot for example. I could use the clock in my head.”
And so he could streak from the front – as he would again for Henry Cecil on Reference Point, the 1987 Derby winner a facsimile of ’85 – or else earn the judge’s call in a tight finish. Hands and heels – and the head – in sweet symphony, the body slung low; human and animal as one.
“People would bitch if you lost ’em,” he says of those two Epsom triumphs. “You gotta have faith in the horses. Certainly with Reference Point I did. I knew that was the only way he could win.
“He was hard work if you rode him behind. I knew he wouldn’t be acting that good and I didn’t want to be comin’ down Tattenham Corner pushing the ears off him, you know?
“It felt like I had to get him in front just to have any chance. Albeit there was no question he was the best horse in my mind. That was easy peasy for me because that’s the way I like to ride them. Slip Anchor was an amazing sight. I remember Lord Howard going crazy. He was either having a heart attack or jumping for joy when I was 15 lengths clear at the stretch!”
(Lord Howard de Walden was the owner; a man who once had an unfortunate car accident in Munich with an unwittingly unfortunate outcome; the man he knocked down, a Mr Adolf Hitler, survived the affray.)
Buddies
While the kid from Kentucky became friendly with royalty – he was a good buddy with noted racing nut, the Queen Mother – Ireland and its people hold special memories too.
“I was good buddies with Mick Kinane, Johnny Murtagh was a great guy. Christy Roche was still hanging around. I was lucky to get on a few good horses and pick up a few prizes.
“The Irish have a true sense of horsemanship and pride in their industry. It’s a special place in my heart. And this was the land of Vincent O’Brien. Robert Sangster was still involved, then you had Michael Tabor, Derrick Smith, Magnier. It felt like we
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“Although I edged him, it took me about two months to feel like a human being again. I was just haggard. That was the last title I was going to go for. It just completely wore me out. Physically I wasn’t able for that. If I’d done it again in ’88 I would have retired in ’88.”
Eddery, a man who had his own turmoil, would win the next four; by then Cauthen returned to the States, ostensibly because of Sheikh Mohammed cutting him but also, in the pre-Godolphin era of consolidation, Cauthen was struggling to make all the correct choices of the scattered steeds.
Amy was pregnant with their first and the timing seemed propitious. “It felt like a good time to walk away and get on the rest of my life.”
In reality, the daily struggle with making weight was denuding not just his body, but his mind.
It is his profession’s pernicious peril. And timeless.
In 1851, 15-year-old George Fordham weighed just 3st 12lbs when he won the Cambridgeshire; his mount ended up in Newmarket main street because the jockey couldn’t control it. So few appreciate the private anguishes of the public performer. A constant war fought with a variety of weapons.
“It was a fine line,” he admits. “I might start the season in good shape but invariably that line would be crossed.
“One meal at the wrong time, then you end up with a light ride so you’re trying to sweat it off the next day and that starts the cycle of bringing it all up. It’s a vicious circle.
“Your body becomes like a sponge, you know? You wring it out in the morning and you drink a glass of water and just put six pounds on. I didn’t want to cause my body long-term damage by doing that.
“I’m 5’ 7” with a pretty solid bone structure and it was freaking night and day working for me to ride 8st 10lbs. Even now, I weigh about 160lbs. I’m not fat. I’m just normal for my height.
“So to get to 8st 10 or whatever, you’re basically trying to hit three stone below your natural weight. And then you still have to be retain your strength and remain focused. It’s tough.”
Tougher
And tougher over here where the off-track diversions were, shall one say, a tad more sociable than those he left.
“It’s more mental than physical a lot of the time. The weird thing is you go out and you win a huge race. And all these guys are not just owners, they’re friends of mine. It’s difficult not to have a glass in your hand.
“So you win a Grade One and they want you to head out but you can’t because it could mess up your whole life. You end up with a monastic existence. And I enjoyed life. And I got to doing that without drinking.”
One problem eclipsed another. “It’s being bulimic. It’s no big deal.”
What I feel he means is, quite starkly, that this process – flipping, heaving, whatever you call it – is something that comes with scarifying ease to so many in his game.
“Anybody who wants to do it badly enough can learn how to do it pretty quickly,” he says, before adding the crucial rider. “But that doesn’t mean it’s something that you want to do.
“It’s something when you’re that desperate, you get started. You eat briefly but you never feel fulfilled. You get full for a second and then you have to get rid of it to make your weight. No different from sweating or anything else, it becomes a cycle. You can’t ever get it right. You need three or four months to get back on a good diet.
“Then I’d be back on a good diet and everything would be going well for a while but it’s such a fine line as I said earlier. One little thing could screw up the whole operation.
“And then you have to make a decision. You have to do 8-9 and I’m 8-10 right now. You have to lose some weight. Do I get in the sauna? Running is no use because that builds muscle and muscle is even heavier.”
Davy Russell, just one of many, will relate that the psychology of the jockey remains unchanged; the supports have improved dramatically, however.
“Nowadays, with so many guru dieticians, I might have got somebody to help me. It’s not that I didn’t have willpower. It’s a hard thing to live a life where you’re travelling all the time.
“I’m not saying I was different to anyone else. Pat and Willie (Carson) were different obviously, they were the right size.
“They didn’t have the battle I had. But then I didn’t have the battles others had. Everyone has their own issues. I’m not complaining.”
That was the life, then. He was just happy to get out to this life, now. Still immersed in a sport which, this week in Kentucky, has returned to vivid action once more, as it slowly, blinkingly, does worldwide.
After taking just long enough to play golf so much that it began to bore him, he brought it all back home and now breeds close by the farm where he first rode out. He likes breeding winners and doesn’t pine for what he once used to do.
And yet despite his almost incredulous worldwide accumulation
of wealth and status, he carries it all with the same lightness of touch with which he used to gently tame horses weighing half a tonne to do his bidding.
“One of the best sayings I ever heard sums it up,” he says. “The outside of a horse is great for the inside of a man. I think that’s true.
“There’s something about the majesty, the intelligence of a horse. When they have guts and heart. When they are trying in a race or just going over a big-assed obstacle when you’re out chasing. That connection is pretty unique. I love all animals, I truly do. But I have always had a special affinity with horses. And when I was on their back, I could communicate in a good way with them.”
He struggles to split the 1978 Belmont with the 1985 Guineas in terms of career highlights. “Such excitement! In each of ’em, I felt like I couldn’t have done any more to win it and I wouldn’t have had to do much to lose it.
“I wanted to get horses to want to do what I wanted to do and not try to force them. And yeah, I was pretty lucky to get just a few of them to do that.”
Well, maybe more than just a few.