Word: hartack
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...When Hall of Fame jockey Bill Hartack won his first Kentucky Derby in 1957, he didn't get all the credit. The 23-year-old was the beneficiary of the most famous slipup in Derby history: opponent Bill Shoemaker's misjudging the finish line and slowing prematurely. Yet Hartack--who rode 4,272 winners in 21,535 mounts--proved it was no fluke by becoming one of only two jockeys (the other was Eddie Arcaro) to win the Derby five times. Luck, he later said, had nothing to do with it: "I rode the right horses, and I rode them...
There is another track term for a jockey: race rider. The title is used sparingly so that, in a generation of boys, only a handful, the very best, will earn the honor. Arcaro, Atkinson, Longden were race riders. And Shoemaker, Hartack, Cordero, Pincay, Baeza, Turcotte, Velasquez. Now there is Steve Cauthen, only 18 and a race rider. A prodigy at 16, a fearless boy returning from an ugly spill at 17, and less than a month past his 18th birthday, winner of the Kentucky Derby and Preakness, the first two classics of the Triple Crown...
...Virginia, it is a strange race this year. There is off-track betting on the race in New York, neither Hartack or Shoemaker have a mount, and possibly the best horse now in training-Good Behavior-was never nominated and cannot run. Also, the greatest horse to come along in twenty years, Hoist the Flag, must sit on the sidelines, remembered only by fourteen-year-old girls who write him letters at Belmont Park...
...psych worked. The Belmont got off to such a slow start that in the backstretch Dike loped to a five-length lead. With a half-mile to go, Jockey Braulio Baeza eased Arts and Letters through an opening and went to the front. Jockey Bill Hartack, apparently thrown off stride by the slow early pace, made his bid coming into the homestretch. It was too late. Driving for the wire, Arts and Letters held the lead and won going away by 51 lengths over Majestic Prince, with Dike third. The game little colt picked up first-prize money...
Majestic Prince and Arts and Letters were all alone at the last turn. The Prince with his high-kicking knee action came wheeling down the stretch constantly urged on by the left-handed whipping of Bill Hartack...