Legendary Jockey
Gary Stevens on How to Watch the Breeders' Cup

By Alan Breznick

As a Hall of Fame race jockey since 1997, Gary Stevens knows a thing or two about how to size up both a horse race and a racehorse.

The 43-year-old Stevens, now an analyst and color commentator for NBC and TVG Network after retiring from racing for good last fall, is widely considered one of the best jockeys of all time. During his illustrious 25-year racing career, interrupted by a brief, premature retirement from the track in 1999 because of injuries, he rode champion thoroughbreds to eight Triple Crown triumphs, including three victories in the Kentucky Derby, two wins in the Preakness Stakes and three wins in the Belmont Stakes. He also captured the prestigious Santa Anita Derby nine times, breaking the record set by legendary jockey Willie Shoemaker, and won such big-money races as the Japan Cup in 1991 and the Dubai World Cup in 1998.

Overall, Stevens and his horses crossed the finish line first in at least 5,000 races at hundreds of different racetracks around the world. With his success on the track, he generated several hundred millions of dollars in racing earnings, becoming the youngest rider to reach the $100 million earnings milestone back in 1993.

In the process, Stevens laid the groundwork for his budding TV career as well as a possible future in Hollywood when he played jockey George Woolf in the award-winning 2003 hit Seabiscuit.

"I'll do some more (movies) when time allows and the right opportunity comes along," he says. "It opened up a lot of doors for me… I'd like to try some other roles."
Stevens also knows a thing or two about the Breeders' Cup World Championships, the racing industry's year-end showcase of eight championship contests. Nowhere did he achieve more success than in the Breeders' Cup, where he won eight races over two decades.

Class by itself
Even with his Kentucky Derby, Preakness, Belmont wins and his Triple Crown victory (aboard Silver Charm in 1997), Stevens sees the Breeders' Cup in a class by itself. Launched in 1984 to promote the sport's biggest stars on the nation's most prestigious racetracks, the multi-million dollar extravaganza attracts the best horses, jockeys and trainers from around the world for a full slate of championship contests.

"It's a full day of Grade 1 races," Stevens says."If I rode five or six or seven mounts in a day, I could still come back if I lost."

This year when the Breeders' Cup field breaks from the gate at Churchill Downs on Nov. 4, Stevens will be watching the action from the grandstand for one of the few times in his professional life. But the famed jockey doesn't mind too much because he'll still be covering the day's full slate of competition close-up.

"I miss the competition," he admits. "But I still get a great adrenaline rush from being on live TV with 30 million people. I get to cover the biggest races in the U.S."

The famed jockey cautions he's an analyst, not a tipster. But Stevens does have a few general pointers about the sport of kings to share with casual racing fans who don't know an exacta from a trifecta or can't tell a gelding from a filly.

For starters, Stevens suggests racing neophytes gain a greater appreciation of the sport's essence by attending some races.

There's just something about seeing young thoroughbreds thunder by in the flesh, Stevens says: "The best thing they can do is go to a live race and experience that feeling of horses going by, enjoying the beauty of it… I've never taken a person to the races one time who didn't come back a second time."

Stevens advises casual fans not to get bogged down in all the racing statistics, track reports, weather information and other background data available. He believes that studying too much information about a race can spoil the viewer's enjoyment of the sport.

"Don't get overwhelmed with all the information," he says. "There's so much information that you could drown yourselves in."

In trying to size up the Breeders' Cup contenders, Stevens warns viewers against placing a great deal of stock in horses that have raced numerous times throughout the year, no matter how fast or talented they may seem.

As he sees it, a heavily raced horse is simply a tired horse by the time the lengthy thoroughbred racing season starts drawing to a close in the fall.

"A two-year-old that's raced eight or nine times before the Breeders' Cup — I'd say that's pushing the envelope," he says. "It's such a long year."

Instead, Stevens prefers lightly raced horses that have competed just a couple of times in January and February and then taken the spring off. He likes to see them return to the track in mid-summer for two or three more races before the Breeders' Cup competition in the fall.

"They can only keep that top form for so many races," he says. "A horse has only one superior race in him for the race season."

Stevens also advises fans to avoid drawing conclusions about one race from another. Unlike history, he says, racing never repeats itself, at least not exactly.

Expect the unexpected
"The one thing about horse racing is that you never see two races that are the same," he says. "In horse racing, you come to expect the unexpected."

An Idaho native whose father was a horse trainer and his mother a rodeo queen, Stevens has been around horses and racing his entire life. At the age of eight, he started grooming horses for his father. By the time he turned 14, he was riding winners in quarter horse races at bush tracks and county fairs.

So it pains and frustrates him to see suspicious sports fans put down horse racing as a fixed sport corrupted by its close association with betting. Noting that racing was the country's most popular pastime from the 1930s through the late 1960s, he argues that the sport should get a better break from the public.

"Horse racing gets a huge knock because of the gambling," he says. "But look at how much money is wagered on football, pro basketball and college basketball. There's probably more money involved in those other sports."

Unlike those other sports, he notes, the racing industry doesn't try to hide the fact that fans bet on the results. The gambling is also far more regulated than the often illegal betting on the other big sports. So, he contends, racing may actually deserve a cleaner reputation than its counterparts.

"At least with us, it's right upfront," he says. "We're the most policed professional sport out there because of pari-mutuel betting… Our sport is policed more than any other sport."

Watch the Breeders' Cup in HD on ESPN HD November 4.