He Travels Long Road to Derby : Horse racing: Earlier this year, jockey Ron Hansen was banned at Golden Gate Fields. Now he’s getting his first ride at Churchill Downs.

Wearing a two-day stubble on his chin, jockey Ron Hansen stood under the roof at the barn of Video Ranger on a rainy morning, answering questions about his Bohemian lifestyle and controversial riding career.

“You should have been with me last night,” Hansen said to a handful of reporters who are at Churchill Downs to cover Saturday’s Kentucky Derby.

There were a few chuckles.

“I’m just kidding,” Hansen said. “I’m very happily married now.”

And about that wedding, Ron . . .

Hansen proceeded to tell how he was married in a wedding chapel in Las Vegas Dec. 4, on his father’s birthday.

The bride and groom wore nothing, and the preacher was also in the nude. “Nobody else was there,” said Hansen, who was married once before.

Renee Hansen met her husband a few months before at Bay Meadows.

“She had come down (to the track) to spit on me (after a losing race),” Hansen said.

Later, Hansen said to his agent: “I’ve just got to meet that girl. Just make sure she’s over at the Hillside later.”

The Hillside is a bar near Bay Meadows that Hansen frequently patronizes. That’s where he and Renee met.

Hansen, 30, is riding in his first Derby and hoping that a victory with Video Ranger will scatter some of the clouds that have been hovering since Golden Gate Fields chased him off the track earlier this year. After five weeks on the shelf, Hansen was able to go back to work when an administrative law judge told the California Horse Racing Board that the Albany track failed to prove that Hansen had bribed jockeys to rig races.

“Since all this happened, things have gone real well for me,” Hansen said Tuesday, after he worked Video Ranger five furlongs in 1:01 1/5. Video Ranger, claimed from trainer Wayne Lukas for $40,000 at Santa Anita in January, is a lazy horse in the mornings and normally doesn’t exercise that fast.

Despite the time off, Hansen has won more than 70 races and ranks in the top 20 in the country, according to Daily Racing Form figures. Hansen has won 200 or more races every year since 1983, and last year his mounts earned $3 million in purses.

Hansen figures that he would have won 40 more races during the Golden Gate ban. He also said that he paid $25,000 in legal fees to fight the banishment. He plans no legal action against Golden Gate.

Hansen recently rode six winners on the same day at Golden Gate, where he was cheered by the crowd after a victory on his first day back.

“The papers and TV were covering the thing the whole time,” Hansen said. “I think people could read between the lines and see that I was innocent. It was a jealousy thing.”

Doug Schrick, another jockey, reportedly told a California Horse Racing Board investigator that Hansen had offered Schrick a bribe. Schrick has been suspended for 10 years in a bribe case involving another jockey.

“When I was riding at Longacres in 1985, some of the jockeys went on strike over the fee schedule,” Hansen said. “Schrick was the jock that took most of my mounts while I sat out. We also had dated the same girl for a while. He saw this as a chance to get even.”

Not only does Hansen still have a dislike for Schrick, he is also not fond of Peter Tunney, the general manager at Golden Gate.

“If I ran into him, I wouldn’t speak to him,” Hansen said.