Feisty Vicky Aragon Will Ride On at Santa Anita : She’s Not Afraid to Go to the Whip When Other Jockeys Try Intimidation

The truth about female jockeys is that they have not come all that far since the late 1960s, when a Maryland court overruled the state racing commission and cleared the way for Kathy Kusner, an Olympic equestrian rider, to be licensed.

In 1968, when Penny Ann Early was named by a trainer to ride a horse at Churchill Downs, all of the other jockeys boycotted the race. The official track program, which shows Early listed next to her horse and has blanks where the rest of the jockeys’ names would be, is a collectors’ item. Early’s trainer waffled at the last minute, replacing her with a male jockey, and the race was run.

In January of 1969, teen-aged Barbara Jo Rubin tried to ride at Tropical Park in Florida, but her house trailer/dressing room was stoned and the male jockeys boycotted. In tears, Rubin took herself off the horse, and the uncooperative jockeys were fined $100 apiece by the stewards.

Emancipation day for female jockeys came on Feb. 7, 1969, when Diane Crump, a 20-year-old blonde, and a horse named Bridle ‘n Bit finished 10th against 11 male riders at Hialeah.

Fittingly, it was the same Barbara Jo Rubin who became the first female winner, riding home Cohesion, a 6-year-old gelding, at Charles Town, W. Va., on Feb. 22, 1969. She missed Lincoln’s birthday by 10 days, but at least she made George Washington’s. There were no stones this time, just verbal brickbats as Rubin made her way to the paddock. “What’s for dinner tonight, sweetie?” was one of the kinder remarks.

Vicky Aragon knows none of this lore. A Georgia-born Christmas baby, Aragon was 4 at the time Crump, Rubin and others were trying to invade the all-male sanctuary. In the 1970s, while Robyn Smith, Tuesdee Testa, Mary Bacon, Patti Barton, Pinky Smith and Denise Boudrot were riding for acceptance as much as winners, Aragon was accompanying her mother and her father, who was a Navy man, to posts in Italy, Greece and Scotland.

If there is a role model for Aragon, it would be P.J. (Patti) Cooksey, whom Aragon considers to be the best active female rider.

Cooksey, however, also symbolizes the frustrations that women riders have had in getting established. Cooksey has won more than 1,000 races, most of them at small tracks in the Midwest, but she and all of the other latter-day Kathy Kusners have been unable to break into the big leagues of racing. When Cooksey, aboard So Vague, a field horse who paid $35.80, won the Hollywood Prevue in 1983, she was only the fourth woman to win a race at Hollywood Park, and the first distaffer in Southern California to win a stake.

At the big tracks in the East, female jockeys fare no better. Karen Rogers, despite earning about $50,000 a year in New York, quit riding in 1984 at age 21, preferring marriage to a trainer to the year-round schedule of 12 hours a day at the track.

Vicky Aragon has tried marriage once, and she’ll probably try it again--sometime next year to jockey Joe Steiner--but there’s some pressing business before that. Aragon has quietly and unofficially tied the one-year record for riding wins by a woman, and she’ll be trying to break it starting on Friday at Santa Anita, where both youthful and veteran jockeys--most of them male--never find the winning easy. There are so many star riders on the premises that just getting in the jockeys’ room door is a struggle.

Kim Rice, riding mostly in West Virginia, set the record for a woman when she booted home 231 winners in 1975. The Daily Racing Form credits Aragon with 231 wins this year--179 of them at Longacres, near Seattle, where she won one out of every five races she rode and except for Gary Stevens became the most prolific winner in track history.

It was during this hallmark season that Aragon decided she would return to Santa Anita, where she’s ridden only one race before, finishing fourth with a 30-1 shot last February.

Aragon’s first race anywhere came at Yakima Meadows in Washington State during the summer of 1985. Three years before, having worked with show horses in England and seeing Shergar win the Epsom Derby, Aragon got a job with Quail Lake Farm in Riverside. She applied through an ad in a trade magazine and first met Dick Mulhall, then the general manager of the farm, with a resume in hand.

“That was my mother’s idea,” Aragon said the other day at Bay Meadows, where she’s been riding since Longacres closed. “I’ll bet Dick thought I was a real cornball.”

Aragon helped break young horses at the farm, then several months later, she was hired as an exercise rider by John Russell at Santa Anita.

“Sitting on a horse, she was as good as you could ask for,” Russell says. “She was going through some personal problems (a divorce) and didn’t always get along with others around the barn, but put her on a horse and you knew she could do the job.”

Aragon stayed with Russell for eight months, then free-lanced for several other trainers. One of them, Vern Dinges, was a strong supporter and gave her that mount on the longshot at Santa Anita.

“I thought about starting in 1985 at Santa Anita as a bug (apprentice rider),” Aragon said. “But I didn’t want to be just another bug rider there.

I wanted to establish myself someplace else before I went back to try.”

Her first win, at Longacres on June 6, 1985, came with a gelding named Sir Jeppi, who was her ninth mount. Despite riding only six months that year, Aragon won 102 races, which ranked her sixth on the apprentice list. Losing her weight allowance this past July, she had 160 wins, which places her third this year among apprentices, behind Allen Stacy in Maryland and Californian Corey Black.

Freckle-faced, with coal-black hair at the top of her 5-foot, 100-pound frame, Aragon seemed to almost be hiding behind her coffee cup in the Bay Meadows track kitchen one morning. But her appearance is misleading. Witnesses, please; OK, start with jockeys Marty Wentz and Victor Mercado, and close out the testimony with the stewards at Longacres.

In the summer, Aragon drew a two-week suspension and was put on probation for a whipping incident involving Wentz. Then, during a race in September, her mount was carried out at the five-sixteenths pole by the horse that Mercado had positioned on the rail.

With the whip in her right hand, Aragon reached over and tried to whack Mercado. She missed. But the next two times, she didn’t. A claim of foul by Aragon against Mercado for interference was disallowed, and Aragon stormed out of the track, canceling six more mounts that she had on the card.

After reviewing the incident, and because Aragon was already on probation, the stewards handed her a severe 21-day suspension. Despite missing five weeks of action, then, Aragon still led the meet by almost doubling the win total of the next jockey in the standings, who happened to be fiance Steiner.

“Sometimes I wish I was like Joe,” Aragon said. “He’s mellow and cool. When something like that happens, I wind up gritting my teeth.”

At the time of the 21-day suspension, Aragon made a public apology to Mercado, but even in retrospect, she still feels the other jockey was culpable.

“I had trouble with the same person before,” Aragon said. “If I didn’t hit him, he would have hit me first. It was obvious what he was trying to do. He was trying to intimidate me, and thought he could get away with it because he didn’t think I would retaliate. These things happened because of jealousy. They didn’t want to admit to themselves that I could have won all those races.”

Aragon won six races in one day once at Longacres and also won six stakes, her favorite being the victory with Cruisin’ Too Su in the Betsy Ross. Cruisin’ Too Su was an $8,000 claim by trainer Junior Coffey, who had also put Aragon on the first winner of her career. After Cruisin’ Too Su was claimed, Aragon got the mount as the horse progressed into stakes company, and she said that it was Coffey’s first stakes win in about 10 years.

Aragon was the first woman to ride a stakes winner at Longacres since 1975. At Bay Meadows this fall, however, Aragon’s win percentage has dropped from .20 to about .06. Neither she nor her agent, Steve Steamer, characterizes this development as a slump.

“We got here two months after the meet started,” Steamer said. “And we told everybody right away that we were heading for Santa Anita at Christmas. That was the honest thing to do. So we wound up riding a lot of 30-1 and 40-1 shots. But she’s been hitting the board with a lot of them.”

Indeed, Aragon had 50 second- and third-place finishes at Bay Meadows out of about 160 mounts.

Not giving up on a horse might be the reason. If there is a generality trainers make about female riders, it is that they break horses well but have trouble finishing.

“I’m very fit and I don’t tire,” Aragon says. “I don’t let up, and down the stretch the other jockeys can hear me coming a mile away, because I think that gets the horse pumped up, too. Twice I’ve hooked Russell Baze’s horses coming to the wire and beat him.”

Aragon says she has learned the most about determination from watching Baze, who is in the process of winning his 13th straight riding title at Bay Meadows and Golden Gate Fields.

After Christmas--and a 22nd birthday party--with her parents, George and Winnie Meiser, in Van Nuys, Aragon will try to find the mount at Santa Anita that could break Kim Rice’s record. Santa Anita has five racing days before the end of the year.

Eighteen years after Diane Crump started it all, though, the open-door policy for female riders is limited.

“Vicky has beaten me at Bay Meadows,” trainer David LaCroix said at Hollywood Park recently. “But still, I don’t think she can do it. I’d rather use somebody else.”

Vicky Aragon has beaten a lot of people this year--with her whip and with the horses that she’s hustled to the finish line.