LOUISVILLE – In the days leading up to the biggest, most exciting spectacle in American thoroughbred racing-yesterday’s Kentucky Derby – HBO unleashed a documentary attempting to portray its key participants, the jockeys, as oppressed, deprived, exploited victims of the system.
It was 90 minutes of relentless one-sided propaganda, purporting to reveal racing’s underside, but ending up with a gross distortion of reality.
The show, titled “Jockey,” followed the lives of two famous jockeys, Randy Romero and Shane Sellers, and a teenaged apprentice, Chris Rosier, but it’s central theme and message was that jockeys are forced into unimaginable health tyrannies to keep their weight down and ride racehorses at their assigned weights.
The show’s simplistic answer: raise the weights so jockeys will not have to waste and diet so fiercely to ride their horses.
Jockey weights have been one of the longest-running, controversial issues in racing because jockeys have been going through this hard regimen almost from the beginning of thoroughbred racing.
Romero’s extraordinary career in the saddle, his brave comeback from life-threatening burns suffered in a fire in the jockeys’ room and his current struggle with liver and kidney illnesses is graphically portrayed.
Sellers’ story of his rise to the top of the profession, only to be sidelined for two years with knee injuries, then his comeback against great odds, including increasing weight, is insightful, poignant, even riveting.
The problem is that the film never diverges from the sickening retelling of the excesses of diets, diuretics, vomiting and poor nutrition heavyweight jockeys undergo to make light riding weights. It leaned hard into the sensational breakdown of Go for Wand (Romero’s mount) in the 1990 Breeders’ Cup Distaff.
Go for Wand’s fate had absolutely nothing to do with the weight of her jockey, but her breakdown was played and replayed, gratuitously exploiting a tragedy to shock.
It is a fact that many jockeys endure great hardship and torment trying to keep their weights in check. One of the greatest jockeys of all time, Laffit Pincay Jr., spent his whole life eating little more than a bird to make weight.
The practice of regurgitating food – known in the business as “flipping” – but referred to in the film as purging is so common that special stalls are found in some jockey rooms to accommodate the practice.
What “Jockey” did not show are the remarkable rewards that flow to many jockeys who go through the process. Dozens of jockeys every year earn $10,000 and more for winning a single race. Last year, Sellers’ mounts earned more than $6.5 million. His take, after expenses, probably amounted to 8 percent of the total. In a word, he made nearly half a million dollars.
Some people would kill for an income like that. But not once in this documentary was Sellers’ income mentioned, nor that of many jockeys who earn similar riding fees.
Not once was reality examined – namely that being a jockey is a small person’s job. It’s as simple as that. But if men and women who would naturally bloom into 130 pounds or more insist on torturing their bodies to become jockeys of 115 pounds, they must face the consequences.
Romero and Sellers want weights raised three or more pounds. I don’t see that is any great deal. In Europe, Australia and elsewhere, weights are much higher than in the U.S.
America’s fabled apprentice, Steve Cauthen, who won the Triple Crown on Affirmed, went off to ride in Europe to accommodate his burgeoning weight.
But in the end, raising weights a few pounds will not solve the problem. Top jockey Pat Day, a natural lightweight, said, “I sympathize with jockeys with weight problems, but raising weights would be little more than a Band-Aid.”
The harsh fact is that if young people are light, they can become jockeys, but if they are heavy, they must look elsewhere. “Jockey” didn’t even mention it.