RIDE PAID OFF : Delahoussaye Came West for Daughter, but Move Also Has Benefited His Career

For Mandy Delahoussaye, a Sunday afternoon at the track a couple of weeks ago amounted to a long day. Up and down, up and down. First in her seat, then down to the winner’s circle, then back to her seat, then back to the winner’s circle again.

Gee, Dad, do you have to win so many races?

Eddie Delahoussaye, father of 12-year-old Mandy, was riding as though he had only one day left to reach 4,000 winners, a total gained by only 19 other jockeys.

Delahoussaye won the first race--No. 3,998 of his career--and there was Mandy, with her 10-year-old brother, Loren, and their mother, Juanita, in the winner’s circle.

Delahoussaye didn’t ride in the second race, giving the family a breather, but he won the third, and there was another gathering of the clan.

“Good, good!” Mandy yelled to her dad as he hurried from the winner’s circle back to the jockeys’ room, to change silks for a mount in the fourth race.

The fourth ended the countdown for the Delahoussayes. The jockey’s horse, a 2-year-old filly in her first race, won by seven lengths. Mandy and the others had barely returned to their seats after the third race when they had to turn around again, but nobody was complaining.

If anybody had grounds to complain, it would be Mandy Delahoussaye, who has had a learning disability since birth. It has been only recently that she has been able to dress herself.

She knows what Dad’s business is all about, though. She knows that when Loren occasionally gets to go out of town with Eddie and Juanita, her dad must be riding in a race that is pretty special. And it might even be a race that she can watch on television.

“It would be too much to try to take Mandy to a race like the (Kentucky) Derby,” Eddie Delahoussaye said. “A trip like that would just wear her out. It’s been hard for all of us, her as well as the rest of the family. But as long as she’s happy--which she seems to be most of the time--that’s about as much as we can expect.”

The other three Delahoussayes are indebted to Mandy, who was the most important factor in a move that was central to her father’s success in racing.

For the first 11 years that Eddie Delahoussaye rode, starting with his first race at Evangeline Downs in 1968, he was successful, but at tracks without much competition. He had the Fair Grounds, the track in New Orleans, in his pocket. He won 126 races there in 1975, breaking a record. Then broke his own record 3 years later with 141 victories.

During that time, he also was the top rider at Churchill Downs, he won titles at abbreviated semiannual meetings at Keeneland, and he was No. 1 at Arlington Park, when the suburban Chicago track was no longer the summer nesting place for the country’s great jockeys.

In 1978, Delahoussaye led the country in victories, getting 384 to beat Darrel McHargue and Sandy Hawley.

Stewards in Louisiana, horsemen in Kentucky and even Delahoussaye said that he would be just as successful in New York or California, where most of the top riders competed.

Economics might have eventually dictated Delahoussaye’s move to California.

Despite all the winning, his mounts didn’t earn $1 million in annual purses until 1975. He didn’t win his first $100,000 race until two years later. He always said that if he had the right stock, he could win races anywhere. His income would mushroom on the West Coast, because of the purses, if he could ride the way he did in the Midwest.

But the financial opportunity was not the driving force behind his move. Neither was the fact that Juanita Delahoussaye’s parents lived in the Los Angeles area.

Mandy, then 3, was the catalyst.

“She was the real reason we came out here,” Eddie Delahoussaye said of the 1979 move to California.

He and Juanita wanted to find the best schools for Mandy. For Eddie to win all those races in the Midwest, Juanita said the family once had to move seven times in one year.

The only moves for Delahoussaye since 1979 have been occasional trips back East.

But the trips East for Triple Crown races have been memorable. In the last seven years, he has Kentucky Derby victories with Gato Del Sol in 1982 and Sunny’s Halo in 1983, and this year won the Preakness and Belmont Stakes with Risen Star.

Since coming to California, Delahoussaye’s mounts have earned about $59 million, contrasted with $13 million in purses during his first 11 years. In ballpark terms, jockeys earn about 10% of their purses.

This year, Delahoussaye is battling Gary Stevens on two fronts--for the Del Mar riding championship and, more important, for the national title. Recent Daily Racing Form figures had Delahoussaye, with the benefit of the $1-million bonus Risen Star earned for being the point champion during the Triple Crown series, about $700,000 behind Stevens with a total of $7.5 million. Barring injury, Delahoussaye is a cinch to break his personal record, which came when he hit the $8.2-million mark in 1984.

It has been a career that almost ended at the start. When he was 11, Delahoussaye began riding quarter horses at bush tracks around New Iberia, his hometown about 130 miles from New Orleans in southern Louisiana.

In 1968, Delahoussaye started riding thoroughbreds at Evangeline Downs, but his first winner was a long time coming, not until early 1969. “I thought the people I was riding for were holding me back,” Delahoussaye said. “About a year went by, and I was fed up. The other guys I was riding with started out being very successful.”

It seems as though Austin Delahoussaye, Eddie’s father, has always been the street commissioner of New Iberia, a town of about 35,000.

Before Eddie Delahoussaye, New Iberia might have been known most for Austin Delahoussaye and a Tabasco plant.

“If I ever hear of you not riding a horse 100% to win, I’ll give you a good whipping,” Austin told Eddie Delahoussaye early on.

When the jockey’s spirits hit low ebb at Evangeline Downs, he talked to his father.

“I talked with my parents and some trainers about quitting,” Delahoussaye said. “They told me to take my time. They told me I was just learning.

“And I was. Riding thoroughbreds around turns was a whole lot different than getting on quarter horses. I had to learn a sense of pace, balance and a feel for a different kind of animal.

“When I finally started winning, I finally understood, and I was grateful to the people that had stuck with me. The other guys, the guys that started fast while I was struggling, they’re not even riding anymore.”

Unlike most jockeys, who want to keep riding until the competitive edge is dulled, or until injuries force the retirement issue, Delahoussaye is on a time table.

“I’d like to give it four more years,” he said the other day at Del Mar. “Then I’ll see if I’m going to ride anymore.”

In four years, Delahoussaye could be close to winning No. 5,000. And Mandy, who has had more than a small part in it all, might be up to making one of those Kentucky Derby trips that she has always had to miss.