Dreams at a Mexican Horse-Racing Track, and Disappointment After Belmont Stakes Joshua Partlow - The Washington Post
go to original June 8, 2014

Jockey Víctor Espinoza, a two-time Kentucky Derby champion, said he donates 10% of his winnings to City of Hope, a cancer research/treatment center outside the city of Los Angeles in the U.S. state of California. (Kevin C. Cox/AFP)

MEXICO CITY — The 64 years that Arturo Ruiz Garcia has spent with the horses at the Hippodrome of the Americas have been enough to teach him that disappointment is the safest bet.

All the pre-dawn training, the vitamins and corn-oil concoctions, the Sore No More liniment rubdowns, give no guarantees. “You don’t know what it’s like to be with a horse for a month, day and night, and then it wakes up colicky on race day,” the 76-year-old trainer said.

Then again, bad luck is no sure thing, either. There was the time in the early 1990s when Ruiz’s blazing pony won 40 races. “Still a record here,” he said. Or when his skinny teenage jockey, Victor Espinoza, won the first race he ran and kept on winning.

“It takes a year to go from apprentice to jockey, minimum,” Ruiz said. “Victor did it in six months.”

For his old colleagues at the Mexico City racetrack where he got his start, Espinoza’s victory atop California Chrome at the Belmont Stakes this weekend would have been a validation for them all — the first Triple Crown winner in 36 years, the first Mexican jockey to achieve the feat ever. But as they know it so often goes at the track, it was not to be.

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