Goats, cows, donkeys — Espinoza has ridden them
But thoroughbred racehorses have proved to be his specialty
ARCADIA, Calif. — Picture a little lad on a goat farm in eastern Mexico, rising daily and miserably at a loathsome hour. He’s the 11th of 12 children and the last of six males, and he must help his brothers usher 2,000 goats up the mountain. After school, they usher them back down. Sometimes during mating season, a male goat might butt him to the ground. In evenings, he and his brothers play “racket ball” against a patio wall despite lacking rackets. They use their hands.
See the same guy in Southern California, on one of two easy chairs plopped curiously amid the well-kept jockeys’ room at sublime Santa Anita. He’s 43. He’s a mainstay. As jockeys come and go with an ongoing race card, all know him. Some kid him. All want to be him in late May 2015. All would like to be Victor Espinoza this weekend.
When he rode at the Hipodromo de las Americas in Mexico City in his late teens, he used to notice on the simulcast screen that, to him, the Santa Anita jockeys looked different from everywhere else. They just looked ... different. They looked ... and he’s trying to find the word ... “Elegant?” “Yes, right,” he said. “Different in style.” He knew little of the location of this magic Santa Anita save for a few generalities, but he said, “The way they were riding, I was like, ‘That’s the place I want to go.’” And: “‘Man, someday I want to ride like them.’”
Now he rides like them, or they ride like him, and his ride on American Pharoah has made him the first jockey ever to reach three Belmont Stakes with shots at Triple Crowns. On Saturday, he could become only the 11th jockey, and the first since Steve Cauthen in 1978, to win the elusive triple (Eddie Arcaro having won it twice), yet his heady path allows that he still can sit around and talk about goats.
“We used to have goats,” he said from the pinnacle, “so we used to take them out of the corral and take them up to the mountains, and then go back home, eat a little bit, then go to school. And finish at 2 or 3 o’clock, go home, eat something, go all the way to the mountain again to bring all the animals back to the house. And that was every day, every day. By 6 o’clock, they had to be inside the corral, because the sun goes down. And that was my daily routine when I was growing up. After all the animals are inside, we used to have dinner.”
He thinks the droves of the goats helped him ace math, a proficiency that showed up way back in kindergarten. They had to chronically count the goats, and so they held counting competitions, and soon, “I think my brain developed to count numbers very quick,” he said. The goats also lent a hand with his eventual profession, because they joined the array of animals he and his brothers could not help trying to ride.
“Oh, my gosh. Cows. Donkeys. Goats. Sheep,” he said. “And then horses.”
Foremost in memory stand the “little cows,” he said. “The small ones, we used to ride ’em. My brothers and I. So we used to try to stay up (on the calf) longer, because they always drop us, but we bet to see how long we stay. And we don’t have a watch. We just count it. And it was fun. I am really surprised, now I think back, and really surprised I never broke a bone when I was a kid, and ride all the crazy animals. And every day, they drop us. Every day. Four or five times, not just one. Every day.”
Come the late teens, as a serious sort who liked asking businessmen how they ran their businesses, he cobbled together a motley mix of jobs such as working for a company that made porcelain insulators, grooming horses and driving a bus. He also followed to a Cancun horse farm his brother, Jose, who would forge a successful U.S.-based riding career himself until a frightening accident in 2013 at Saratoga stemmed it. Roughly 20 years before that, the two brothers flew to San Francisco, where Victor joined Jose working at the late Bay Meadows track.
They landed in San Francisco, got a bus into town and froze. “I was like, ‘You want me to live here?’” Victor said. “He was like, ‘Yeah.’ I was like, ‘I’m miserable.’ I mean, like I can’t even talk. ... I went outside and I was shaking.”
They went for hot chocolate, and he did stay, live with Jose across the street from the track, become a top Northern California rider and make it all the way to some coveted winner’s circles, three at the Kentucky Derby (2002, 2014, 2015).