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My Guy Barbaro
A Jockey's Journey Through Love, Triumph, and Heartbreak with America's Favorite Horse
Chapter One
"What a Beautiful Racehorse . . ."
The first time I laid eyes on Barbaro, I finished what seemed like half a mile behind him in the Laurel Futurity, a race for two-year-old thoroughbreds at Laurel Park in Maryland. The date was November 19, 2005, the weather sunny and warm. I was riding another horse, a colt named Creve Coeur. Barbaro had raced just once before and was still so unknown that the track announcer called him bar-BEAR-o. But boy, he was already a rocket. He finished so far ahead of Creve Coeur and the rest of the field that I didn't see much of him other than his rear getting smaller and smaller as he disappeared into the distance.
Almost 11,000 fans were watching in the stands, mostly drawn to the track by the day's featured race, a highly rated short "sprint" event that had brought speedy horses and top jockeys to Maryland from around the country. The Futurity was part of the undercard, the slate of races leading up to the sprint. It was a turf race, run on Laurel's luscious grass course, and it had an impressive history, having been won by superstars such as Secretariat and Affirmed when they were youngsters on the rise back in the 1970s. But no horse of that caliber had won the event in years, so no one expected to see a phenomenal performance. Many of the other twelve horses in the field with Barbaro hadn't raced much and still weren't sure what they were doing.
I had heard a little, very little, about Barbaro before the race. I'm always talking to other people in racing—jockeys andtheir agents, horse owners and trainers, grooms and exercise riders—to stay on top of which horses are running well, where they're running, and whether I might be able to ride them. I vaguely recalled someone somewhere saying that a two-year-old colt trained by Michael Matz had run extremely well in his first race at Delaware Park, a racetrack in Wilmington, Delaware, in early October. But if the horse's name was mentioned, I didn't remember it, and the news pretty much went in one ear and out the other.
It came back to me when I looked around the paddock at Laurel as the horses in the Futurity were being saddled before the race. Barbaro looked like a man among boys. A brown bay with a splash of white between his eyes, he was a towering 17 hands tall—almost six feet—and bulged with muscles through his chest and front shoulders. Most of the other horses in the race were up to a foot shorter and noticeably thinner; they were typical equine teenagers, all legs and painfully gawky. Barbaro was the same age but, with sturdy legs, a broad rear, and a bodybuilder's physique, naturally built to run hard. He wasn't a sleek and slender classic beauty. He was all jock, a toned heavyweight boxer just realizing how hard he could punch.
"My goodness, what a beautiful racehorse," I thought as I watched him from across the paddock.
My admiration only increased when we went out for the post parade, the eight-minute on-track warm-up that takes place before every race. This being my first time on Creve Coeur, I wanted to learn as much as I could about him before the race. Did he follow instructions? Were there moves he didn't like to make? Was he confident or nervous? Such knowledge can make all the difference in a race. I took Creve Coeur on a test drive—asked him to jog, veer to the left, veer to the right, stop suddenly. But while I focused on Creve Coeur, I couldn't help noticing Barbaro. He walked and jogged with a swagger, oozing confidence. Some handsome horses don't have a mind for racing, but he obviously did. Every horse is led through the post parade and up to the starting gate by another horse, a "lead pony," and nervous horses break out sweating before a race or lean against their pony for support because they're afraid. You can tell they would rather be anywhere else. Barbaro, clearly, was right where he wanted to be. His every move shouted, "I'm going to kick your butts!"
My friend Jose Caraballo, a Puerto Rican-born jockey who rides in Maryland and Delaware, was on him. Caraballo had also ridden him when he won his first race at Delaware Park by seven lengths a month earlier. That race had also been run on grass, as opposed to dirt, so I wasn't surprised to see Barbaro as one of the favorites in the Futurity at 3-1 odds. He had a track record, however brief. Several other horses, including a colt named Diabolical, also were being solidly backed, and Creve Coeur, a winner in his previous race, would leave the starting gate at 10-1. But Barbaro stood apart from them all.
At the end of the post parade he went into the starting gate like an experienced pro, unafraid of the tight quarters. When the gate opened and the horses burst out together, Barbaro quickly picked up speed, exhibiting impressive agility for a horse so large. Caraballo moved him up, settling him just behind and to the outside of the hard-charging early leader, a 45-1 shot named Capo dei Capi. I made a similar move on Creve Coeur and ended up two lengths behind Barbaro, off his inside shoulder.
The race was 11/16 miles long, around two turns. We held our positions around the first turn and all the way up the backstretch, a period lasting about forty seconds, and then, as we approached the second turn, Diabolical passed to the inside of me and went for the lead. From where I sat, just behind the frontrunners, I had a perfect view of what happened next.
Capo dei Capi, as expected, reached his limit and slowed down. Caraballo maneuvered Barbaro around him and into the lead, but Barbaro clearly sensed Diabolical creeping up. The big horse accepted the challenge like a hungry bear at feeding time. Caraballo didn't whip him or hit him with the harder stick handle, and didn't even wave the stick in front of him—all tactics a jockey uses to get a horse to run faster. Caraballo just puckered his lips and made a smooching sound. That told Barbaro it was time to go. And did he ever.
My Guy Barbaro
A Jockey's Journey Through Love, Triumph, and Heartbreak with America's Favorite Horse. Copyright © by Edgar Prado. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
