Vasquez Tries Riding Out Boos and Suspicion

At the gap in the fence at Belmont Park, there’s a man assigned by the race track to identify the horses before they work out in the mornings.

The other day, jockey Jacinto Vasquez came to the gap with a horse and the man asked: “Who’s this?”

“Forego,” Vasquez deadpanned, using the name of the three-time Horse of the Year that he rode to some major victories in the mid-1970s.

Drollery has always been one of Vasquez’s calling cards.

Several years ago, a trainer named Bill Resseguet was hauled in by police at Lexington, Ky., for making off with an Eclipse Award statuette belonging to Brownell Combs, the president of Spendthrift Farm.

A few days later, a track cop was leaning against the large monument of Secretariat in the walking ring at Belmont when Vasquez came out of the jockeys’ room to get on a horse.

Noticing the tilted officer, Vasquez said: “Whatcha doing, making sure Resseguet doesn’t get that one, too?”

These are the days that Vasquez especially needs his sense of humor. On Feb. 25, the 41-year-old Panamanian ended a year’s suspension for his alleged role in a New York race-fixing scandal in 1974. And although Vasquez denies that he offered Eddie Maple, another jockey, or anybody else a bribe to manipulate horses, the whispers of suspicion won’t go away.

His first day back, at Aqueduct, Vasquez had two mounts and rode two winners but was still roundly booed by the New York fans.

He tried to dismiss the hoots with a quip: “They boo all the good riders in New York, not the bum riders.”

But the hurt and the pride sometimes rush from him like an angry rapids. The other day, after working a few horses for trainer Red Terrill, Vasquez sat on a fence at Belmont and talked about the toll his year in oblivion took and discussed his battle to rejuvenate a career marked by more than 4,000 winners and Kentucky Derby victories with Foolish Pleasure and the filly Genuine Risk.

“It’s behind me,” he said, switching his riding whip from hand to hand. “I came back mentally and physically fit, and business has been good. But after 24 years of hard work, now I’ve got this reputation. But if they wanted to make an example of somebody, they picked the wrong guy.”

Vasquez, who had a three-win day this week, ranks fifth in the jockey standings at Aqueduct, even though he has ridden far fewer horses than the riders ahead of him, and today he will ride Rhoman Rule, the morning-line favorite, in the Wood Memorial here. Rhoman Rule has the potential to give Vasquez his third Derby win, which would put him in an elite group currently occupied by only five jockeys who have won more than two Derbys.

After Vasquez rode Nany to victory recently in the Bed o’ Roses Handicap, Mike Watchmaker, a columnist for the Daily Racing Form, wrote this about the jockey’s performance: “It seems hard to believe that he ‘sat down’ for a year, because he has demonstrated fine riding form. Getting away with the slow fractions that he did and then taking as little as he did out of Nany to preserve the victory added up to a superb piece of horsemanship.”

When Rhoman Rule won the Everglades at Hialeah last month, it was Vasquez’s first stakes victory since his return. Trainer Angel Penna Jr., asked why he had chosen Vasquez to ride his colt, said:

“Jacinto knows how to ride this horse--he gets down so low in the saddle on him that horse and jockey are one when they head for home.”

Then Penna added a reason that may have superseded any other: “Jacinto is my friend.”

Vasquez has needed friends to help him orchestrate this comeback. “The guys I used to ride for have supported me 100%,” he said. “It’s more than a business between me and a lot of them. There are a lot of them that I can call friends.”

Remarkably, Vasquez came back at 110 pounds, four pounds less than he weighed a year ago.

“I cut back on a lot of liquids while I was out,” he said. “The first two weeks I was away, I drank some beer and got up to 118 pounds, so I knew I wasn’t going to be able to do that.”

Vasquez said he didn’t read even a single copy of the Racing Form during his year’s absence. He wasn’t allowed to visit tracks as a spectator and saw only a few major races on television. A comparatively new golfer at the start of his suspension, he played the game so often that now he shoots in the mid-80s.

Last September, he went to farms at Ocala, Fla., and Aitken, S.C., to break yearlings, but he says that he breezed only one horse during the entire year and that he hadn’t been on a horse for any reason for two weeks before his two-win return at Aqueduct.

His career may be back on track, but replacing the money he lost during the suspension is out of the question. He spent $200,000 in legal fees--”Every time I made an appeal, it was another $25,000”--and he estimates that his earnings would have been between $300,000 and $400,000.

Although their lockers are nearby in the Aqueduct jockeys’ room, Vasquez does not speak to Maple, who testified before a federal grand jury and the New York racing board that Vasquez had offered him a bribe before a race at Saratoga in 1974.

“Would you speak to a guy who got you a year’s suspension?” Vasquez said. “He made a deal when he testified, then he contradicted himself four or five times. If I was guilty, I’d be the first s.o.b. to admit it. I’ve never been connected with gamblers. Why would I go around offering bribes?”

Racing investigators say, however, that Vasquez was not a scapegoat. “There was so much smoke around him that there had to be some fire,” said one, asking that his name not be used.

Rhoman Rule’s rivals in the six-horse Wood include Proud Truth, Eternal Prince, Pancho Villa, El Basco and Cutlass Realty.

In the major Florida races for 3-year-olds, Proud Truth won the Florida Derby and finished second to Chief’s Crown in the Flamingo.

“Outside of Chief’s Crown, Proud Truth is the most consistent 3-year-old,” Vasquez said. “Young 3-year-olds are hard to judge. Sometimes they can make a fool out of you. But I like my horse. They say he beat nobody in his two races in Florida, but Creme Fraiche, the horse we beat bad in the Everglades, came right back and almost won the Louisiana Derby.”

Vasquez hasn’t had a Derby mount since he won with Genuine Risk in 1981. He says there’s no truth to backstretch gossip that some trainers shied away from him in recent years, leery of the imminent suspension.

“The day my suspension started, I had five mounts and other jockeys won with four of them,” Vasquez said. “I was second in the standings at Hialeah. I was doing real good.”

He is not jaded about a return to the Derby May 4. “No matter where you go, you get introduced as a jockey and people want to know if you won the Kentucky Derby,” he said.

A Derby victory this year would mean more to Vasquez than the others. It’s one of the ways he could cut into long shadow of suspicion that isn’t going away.