Longden Rode as Fast as Horse Would Run

They called him “the Pumper” because of the peculiar urging motion he used at the horse’s withers. He was the best there ever was at holding a horse’s run together on the front end. Rival rider Ray York said it all when he noted, “John is rough competition. You can get to him. You can’t get by him.”

He was such a magnificent judge of pace, you would have thought he had a dashboard across the horse’s back. His trick was, get a horse out there on a slow pace, make the others think he was running faster than he was, but still have something left when they closed up. No one did it better.

He was a good post boy, too. No one ever remembers a horse of his getting left at the gate. When the flag fell, he was out of there, usually on the head end.

He rode for 40 years. He won 6,032 races, and he led in almost all the 32,407 he rode. There were years when other riders didn’t know what he looked like from the front.

They honored Johnny Longden at Hollywood Park last Saturday on Belmont day. It was the 50th anniversary of the greatest race he had ever won, the 1943 Belmont Stakes.

John is now someplace between 80 and 90 years old, but he still walks with a spring in his step, can see without glasses and got married for the third time recently.

You’d probably still have trouble getting by him in the stretch.

It is an irony of history that a lot of great riders had no more than one victory in the game’s greatest race, the Kentucky Derby. Steve Cauthen won only one. Lafitt Pincay, Mack Garner, Steve Brooks, Eric Guerin won one. Sonny Workman never won any. Neither did Manny Ycaza, Ted Atkinson, Georgie Woolf.

Longden’s problem was geographic. He rode in California, where the breed seemed to want to stop running after a mile and a sixteenth. Movie moguls’ horses broke for lunch at the head of the stretch.

But 1943 was a time when a great horse and great rider came together. Longden did what only nine other riders in racing history have done. He won the Triple Crown.

It’s odd how, in any discussion of great race horses, particularly Kentucky Derby winners, the names of Citation, Secretariat, Affirmed and even War Admiral keep cropping up. Count Fleet is often overlooked. It’s as if he came from another era. With Sir Barton. Or Gallant Fox.

True, he ran during war time, when the nation’s interest was elsewhere. But John Longden, who looked at 40 years’ worth of them, thinks Count Fleet was the greatest race horse there ever was.

The record sustains him. Count Fleet won every race he ran as a 3-year-old. He not only won the Triple Crown but, between the Preakness and the Belmont, slipped out and added the Withers Mile to his resume.

He won the Belmont by 25 lengths. That was the largest winning margin to that time--Man o’ War won it by 20 in 1920--and until Secretariat’s sensational 31 lengths in 1973.

But Longden reveals that Count Fleet almost didn’t finish the race:

“He bowed (a tendon) in the middle of the Belmont. I started to pull him up, but he didn’t want no part of it. He wanted to run. That’s why I sat so still on him in the stretch. He just galloped home.”

No one knows better than Longden how hard it is to win a Triple Crown. To even survive one.

Longden is the only man ever to have ridden and trained a Kentucky Derby winner. And it is a matter of record that, in 1969, after Majestic Prince had won the Derby and the Preakness, Longden wanted to keep him out of the Belmont, but his ownership insisted on keeping him in.

Even suspected of being unsound, Majestic Prince should have won the race, Longden insists today. The rider, Bill Hartack, made serious mistakes.

“He took him in hand. He should have let him run,” trainer Longden complains. “I would have let him run,” jockey Longden says.

Longden let enough of them run. But he is not surprised at the attrition of the 1993 Triple Crown series, in which the toll is two dead and two injured in one five-week period. The Polish cavalry had a better record against Hitler’s tanks.

“Count Fleet never ran another race after the Belmont,” he says. “He had six races that year and won them by a total of 48 lengths, but that one got him.”

Horsemen, to a man, know that three races in the spring of the year is asking a lot of hardly mature animals. Thirteen horses have won the first two legs, Derby and Preakness, and faltered in the Belmont. Some of them like Tim Tam (and Count Fleet) finished on three legs.

It’s a grueling tournament, the Triple Crown, and a lot of great riders have never won one--Bill Shoemaker, Hartack, the poem-inspiring Earl Sande, Angel Cordero. The Belmont stakes is 125 years old, the Derby, 119, and the Preakness, 118, but there have been only 11 Triple Crown winners.

It’s a tough wheel to buck. Longden probably thought he would win several after his first in 1943. But only Eddie Arcaro ever won two.

On balance, John is glad he’s got the one. And that, as usual, he let the horse run. The Triple Crown is hard on horses. But it’s hard on men, too.