Secret to getting a ride in Kentucky Derby
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — For 72 hours after the major Kentucky Derby prep races were complete this month, the horse racing world was in limbo.
Mike Smith, the sport’s top big-money jockey, had just been aboard Omaha Beach during an impressive win in the Arkansas Derby. A week earlier, however, he’d ridden Roadster in the Santa Anita Derby for Bob Baffert. Given the fact they’d teamed up last year to win the Triple Crown with Justify, many in the industry assumed Omaha Beach trainer Richard Mandella might be in the market for a new rider.
“I didn’t know,” Mandella said. “Bob Baffert has had him on some great horses, more than I have.”
Doug Bredar, however, accurately predicted Smith’s decision would go the other way.
As the agent for jockey Florent Geroux, whose potential Derby mounts had all fizzled out, he was kind of counting on it.
“I think I was in the minority, but you get kind of an instinct from the people I talked to that (Smith) would take Omaha Beach,” Bredar said. “I made it clear to Bob that we would really, really like to ride Roadster.”
For Bredar, booking rides for Geroux is essentially a 365-day-a-year job, albeit one that has been made easier by his ascent as one of the nation’s top jockeys. But even for an in-demand rider like Geroux, the process of getting a Kentucky Derby mount can evolve over several months, take numerous twists and turns and often rests on the ability of an agent to position the client for unforeseen opportunities.
“There’s a lot of luck involved,” said Ron Anderson, who has won the Derby four times as an agent for Chris Antley, Gary Stevens and currently Joel Rosario, who won it with Orb in 2013. “And there’s a story involved in all of them.”
Unlike their counterparts in other sports, agents for jockeys don’t negotiate contracts or deal with salaries. Every rider is an independent contractor who collects a fixed percentage of their purse money, and the job of the agent is to put them on the horse with the best chance to win every race possible. It doesn’t matter whether that’s the Kentucky Derby or a $15,000 claiming race on a Thursday at Aqueduct in New York.
Doing that effectively requires an agent not only to manage relationships with dozens of trainers but have intimate knowledge of every horse in every barn at their home track, analyze races on a daily basis, filter through scuttlebutt about which jockeys are aligned with which horses and be aware of potential scheduling conflicts that might give their client an opportunity to ride a good horse that someone else had been on previously.
That is how Smith ended up on Omaha Beach after Flavien Prat had ridden him in his first five races. Prat had also been riding Galilean over the winter and committed to ride him in the Rebel Stakes before Mandella decided to send Omaha Beach to the same race, opening up the mount for Smith and thus the mount on Roadster for Geroux. Prat, meanwhile, appears to have lost that particular game of musical saddles as he’ll ride long-shot Country House in the Derby.
“The funny part is this occurs almost on a daily basis around the country at every track,” Bredar said. “That’s why my phone never leaves my side and it’s completely charged and ready to go for whatever unexpected event may occur. It’s nonstop.”
Those inherent conflicts, and the scarcity of true contenders for a race like the Derby, explain why agents are allowed by tracks to represent a maximum of two jockeys at a time and typically only one who is considered high profile.
That’s one reason jockeys’ agents can command 25% of their clients’ winnings, which would translate to about $46,500 for the agent of the Derby-winning jockey this year.
“You think an agent as like Jerry Maguire and that type of thing,” Bredar said. “If you have LeBron James or some major superstar and you’re in a position to just get them a long-term contract, you’re set. Our situation is very, very different. We are on almost a handshake agreement from race to race.”
But being in position to land a mount that could win the Derby is, in some ways, part of the day-to-day grind of being on the backstretch. For Anderson, that means every summer and fall trying to get Rosario on the back of as many promising 2-year-olds as possible, particularly from barns of trainers like Baffert or Todd Pletcher or Chad Brown, who typically have multiple Derby prospects.
That’s what happened in August when Rosario, who is primarily based in New York, flew cross-country to sub for injured Victor Espinoza on Accelerate in the Pacific Classic and just so happened to pick up the mount on Game Winner, who was making his debut in a maiden race that day. Two Grade 1 victories later, including the Breeders’ Cup Juvenile, and Rosario had his Derby mount.
“If I wasn’t involved with Game Winner, I’d have been trying to position myself when (Smith) made his decision,” Anderson said. “If he’d have made the call to go with Baffert’s horse, I’d have tried to be in a position to sit behind him on Dick Mandella’s horse because they both have a legitimate chance. There’s a lot of luck with the entire business, but lots of times the Derby has to do with the entities like the Bob Bafferts and guys who have more chances and more bodies to kind of be involved in these races.”
Anderson’s Derby history is a good example. In 1995, Anderson was in Hong Kong with Stevens, who had been offered a contract to ride there. Much like his predicament this year, Smith had ridden two horses to wins in big prep races and decided his Derby mount would be Talkin Man, opening up a mount on D. Wayne Lukas-trained Thunder Gulch.
Anderson got Stevens out of his Hong Kong contract and the jockey returned to the U.S. and ended up winning the Derby on him. He recalled a similar scenario two years later with Bafferttrained Silver Charm, who had been ridden by Chris McCarron in two California prep races. McCarron, however, didn’t fully commit to Silver Charm because he was also the regular rider for Ron McAnally-trained Hello, causing Baffert to replace him with Stevens before the Santa Anita Derby.
Though McCarron ultimately made the wrong decision as Silver Charm won the Derby and Preakness, it was an understandable one at the time because he was the first call for all of McAnally’s top horses. Part of the job of the agent, Anderson said, is to make sure picking a Derby mount doesn’t jeopardize those lucrative relationships that yield wins every other day of the year.
“It does get a little political when you’re riding for an entity at a lot of other spots and you’re going to (tick) them off by taking off their horse for that day,” Anderson said. “Sometimes when you have an option to ride a better horse, you know what, sometimes you just can’t make that move, so there’s all kinds of intricacies to what goes on.
“But the Derby, if you think one can win, the rules change a little bit.”