SHOWING THEIR COLORS
SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. » Every jockey is a winner in a new outdoor display at the National Museum of Racing, along Union Avenue.
Thirty-seven, 165-pound lawn jockeys are lined up in a long row, each one bearing their respective stable’s silks colors.
Owners throughout the U.S. paid $10,000 apiece, over five years, to sponsor one of the figures to benefit the museum’s endowment fund.
“I kind of get attached to them before they leave,” said Spa City artist Paula Salmiery, who painted the jockeys. “My favorite is Tracy Farmer’s. I gave him red hair and blue eyes, just like my grandson.”
The project is the brainchild of museum Communications Director Brien Bouyea and Theresa Behrendt, a long-time museum supporter and 2014 Museum Ball chair. Bouyea said he got the idea from a similar display at the famous 21 Club in New York City, which has 33 cast-iron jockeys above the front entrance and two more inside.
So the Racing Museum’s exhibit is slightly larger and arguably more impressive, as each concrete figure is uniformly spaced on its own landscaped pedestal. They stand like silent sentinels, holding solar-powered lanterns that glow at night.
“The colors of racing are absolutely part of the sport’s Thirty-seven colorful lawn jockeys with solar-powered lanterns are lined up outside the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame. pageantry,” Bouyea said.
The stables represented have produced numerous winners of racing’s most prestigious races such as Triple Crown and Breeders’ Cup contests.
Salmiery bought the figures in Kentucky and brought them home with her husband, Steve, in a moving van. Their three children helped out by sanding rough edges off the molds. Figures required a layer of prime, plus multiple coats of paint before doing the colorful surface.
Salmiery began working on the project in March and reached the finish line on July 18, two days before the formal unveiling. The last one she worked on was Payson Stud’s, which is white with a blue square on front.
“This endeavor is intended to pay homage to the great tradition and elegance of the sport, and recognize some of the most iconic racing stables of yesteryear and today,” said John Hendrickson, museum board vice president.
His wife’s Marylou Whitney Stables lawn jockey is Tiffany blue. The Whitney family has a separate, similarly-colored figure.
The likes of Clairborne and Godolphin are also represented as well as more modern stables such as West Point Thoroughbreds.
Salmiery, owner of P Kaye Designs, said she was asked to do the project by museum Development Director Cate Johnson, who admired a lawn jockey she’d done at Mama Mia’s Restaurant in Saratoga Springs.
“I learned a lot by doing it and I enjoyed meeting all the different owners at the unveiling,” she said. “Some people, like Mrs. Behrendt, wore their stable’s colors. She had a polka dot dress, just like her lawn jockey’s polka dot silks.”
Bouyea said two more stables have already signed up to sponsor about a halfdozen more lawn jockeys planned for the museum’s inner courtyard, where a statue of Secretariat is located. “I’m not aware of a bigger display like this anywhere,” he said.