Desormeaux Nears Main Goal, Now It’s Time to Find Out How Good He Can Be

Maryland racing fans who have followed the career of Kent Desormeaux from the beginning will feel like proud parents when the 19-year-old makes history in the next few days. He has already ridden 537 winners this year, most of them at Laurel and Pimlico, and he needs 10 more to set an all-time record.

Desormeaux’s one goal in 1989 was to break the mark of 546 winners that Chris McCarron set in 1974, and he has worked single-mindedly to achieve it. But he hasn’t decided where he wants to go or what he wants to do thereafter. He has contemplated moving to New York, moving to California, or simply staying in the comfortable confines of Maryland.

Even though he doesn’t get to ride in as many rich stakes races in Maryland as he would in those racing centers, he will still earn more than $700,000 this year, so there is no pressing need for him to endure the stress and risks of trying to establish himself against tougher competition.

But just as parents must one day tell their young to leave home and face the world, so may Desormeaux’s admirers here say: Kent, get out of Maryland.

There is nothing left for him to accomplish here. And if he stays, he is unlikely to fulfill his enormous potential.

Jockeys rarely come along with the natural gifts that Desormeaux possesses. He has an uncanny sense of racing tactics and always seems to put his horse in the optimal position. Maryland bettors have come to assume that when there is little speed in a field, Desormeaux will be on or near the lead; when there is a hot early pace, Desmormeaux will be swooping past the leaders in the stretch.

And he somehow makes horses respond to his touch. On the day before the Breeders’ Cup at Gulfstream Park, Desormeaux found himself in the unfamiliar position of riding a 99-to-1 shot, a fainthearted creature who always weakened in sprint races and now was going a mile and one-sixteenth.

For just about any other jockey, such a horse would barrel to the front, open a big lead and collapse. For Desormeaux, the long shot immediately relaxed, settled down behind the leaders and rallied through the stretch to win--something he had never done in his life. Sometimes the kid seems to be endowed with magical powers as well as good judgment.

In early 1988, I wrote a series of columns rating all the jockeys in Maryland, and scrutinized the head-on films of every race over a six-week period to do it. I watched the nuances of Desormeaux’s day-to-day performance, and I was convinced he was ready to move into the jockey colony at Santa Anita or Belmont and compete with the best in the world. But as I watch his day-to-day performance in Maryland now, I haven’t see any appreciable improvement in his skills.

It is too easy for Desormeaux to dominate his rivals here. The Maryland jockey colony is better than it used to be, but this is still a place where cautious veterans like Mario Pino can rank in the top 10. In such an environment it would be easy, almost natural, for a rider of Desormeaux’s talent to grow complacent.

In those 1988 articles I noted that one of Desormeaux’s few weaknesses was his slowness to recognize track biases. On the first two days of the Laurel season last month, the rail was so disadvantageous that even dimwitted jockeys were avoiding it--but Desormeaux seemed oblivious to the conditions. He hasn’t improved in one area that clearly needed improving. He has been riding more recklessly than he used to, drawing six suspensions during the year; he is so accustomed to winning that he acts as if he expects his rivals to get out of the way when he is trying to bull his way through.

The Chris McCarron of 1974 felt as confident in his own skills and the inevitability of his own success as Desormeaux does now. But because purse money in Maryland was so poor in those days, he didn’t hesitate to leave the state and set out for California. And as he started to ride against rivals like Bill Shoemaker and Laffit Pincay Jr., he learned how much he didn’t know.

“I won all those races back in Maryland because I had the God-given talent to get horses to run for me,” McCarron said. “But it wasn’t till I came out here and had been riding for three years that I felt I had any finesse or knew the finer aspects of riding.”

That’s the only way Desormeaux will reach his potential--to ride on a day-to-day basis against jockeys like McCarron and Pincay in the West, or against Cordero and Santos in the East. He shouldn’t be content to amass an imposing set of statistics and put his name in the record books; he should set out to discover just how good a jockey he can be.