Martin Garcia makes most of lucky break
For most young jockeys in America the winner’s enclosure at Pimlico after the Preakness is something they have been aiming for most of their lives.
To ride into that arena, after victory in one of America’s totemic races, and then watch as the winning colours are painted on the horse and jockey that sit atop of the track’s weather vane, is the moment that makes the years of hard graft, early mornings and slow horses seem worthwhile.
Martin Garcia took in his moment of the American dream, when he rode Lookin At Lucky to win the Preakness Stakes on Saturday, but admitted that seven years ago he had never even heard of the race. Then he was a 19-year-old from Veracruz, fresh over the Mexican border, and looking for work not a path to glory.
He pitched up in a small restaurant in Pleasanton, California. At just 5ft 1in and even shorter on English he did not seem the best prospect that the woman hiring, Terri Terry, had come across but Garcia was persistent and got the job. Now comes the bit that is usually reserved for Hollywood.
Terry owned a Thoroughbred mare called Finny. Garcia asked if he could ride her; Terry was not keen, but Garcia was and wore her down. “I put a bridle on Finny,” Terry explained. “He didn't want a saddle. He just reached up, grabbed her mane, walked up on the side of her and jumped on. Before I knew what happened he was on her back.
“He rode her for about an hour. When he was in the arena, someone brought in a baby that started rearing and he went to another horse and grabbed it and had it calm down immediately. He knows horses, I saw that, so I pointed him toward the track.”
The next connection to the Pimlico winner’s enclosure was former jockey Mark Hanna, who got Garcia started as an exercise rider at Golden Gate Fields. Six months later, in August 2005, Garcia took his first professional ride on Wild Daydreamer at the Bay Meadows and two rides later he was in a winner’s enclosure for the first time with the same horse.
He was still working two days a week for Terry but the dream of being a jockey had now taken hold and he was being noticed by trainers as a jockey who horses would run for. Less than a year later he beat local top dog Russell Baze, a man with more than 10,000 career victories to his cv, to be the leading jockey at Golden Gate Fields and tied with Baze for the title at Bay Meadows.
Garcia then switched to Southern California and made an immediate impact by claiming a place in the top five jockeys for the Hollywood Park meeting and finished 2006 with a nomination for the Eclipse Award as the Outstanding Apprentice Jockey of the year. He missed out on that title to Julien Leparoux but has been finding that winner’s enclosure with almost metronomic regularity ever since.
Even so the call up for the ride on Lookin at Lucky in the Preakness was something of a surprise for a Calfornia-based rider. Garcia had been on Bob Baffert’s radar for some time but replacing Garret Gomez, the current leading rider in America, with a young rider who had only ridden in his first Triple Crown race when he finished he 15th on the Baffert-trained Conveyance in the Kentucky Derby two weeks before was a big gamble. But how it paid off.
Garcia rode the ideal race on Lookin At Lucky, not letting the early pace get too far ahead of him, but not being drawn so close as to compromise his chances by chasing the opening fractions set by First Dude. Garcia knew that they were going to be too much to maintain, that the trick was picking the moment to attack and keeping enough horses in reserve to nail First Dude in the final furlong. Job done and Baffert looked that he had made the right call. Before the race he had said that the decision had been partly based on the need for a “change of luck” after Lookin At Lucky had not had the best of fortune in his last two races, which had included that nightmare run in the Derby when he had finished sixth.
It may also be the decision that marks the next change in Garcia’s career - from serving on restaurant tables to a place on racing’s top table. “He came out here today and he was so cool and calm,” Baffert said. “He rode a perfect race. Martin can get a horse to settle really well, and I could see he had the horse in a nice rhythm.”
The man himself seems happy enough to keep the rhythm of his life, and success, simple. “Even when I start riding, I don't even know what is Preakness? What is Kentucky? Any race," Garcia said, “I just know that I need to go and ride a horse and win. I didn't know anything about big races.”
He does now.
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