TRIPLE DOUBLE

You can ask Kent Desormeaux almost anything, but a question he won’t touch is the one about the roller-coaster ride that defines his career.

“I won’t answer that,” Desormeaux said in a recent interview at Hollywood Park. “Not now. I want to dwell on the positives that I’m experiencing now. There’s too much jubilation going on around me for me to be talking about anything else.”

For the second time in three years, Desormeaux is looking at the possibility of riding a horse to a Triple Crown.

In 1998, Desormeaux rode Real Quiet to victory in the first two Triple Crown races, the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness, but they lost by a nose to Victory Gallop in the Belmont Stakes. Besides becoming the 12th Triple Crown champion, Real Quiet would have earned a $5-million bonus for the sweep, so that dirty nose cost Desormeaux the standard 10%, or $500,000.

This year, Desormeaux and his Kentucky Derby winner, Fusaichi Pegasus, are only one-third of the way to the promised land, and conjecture about the first Triple Crown champion since Affirmed, in 1978, may be premature. But Desormeaux’s big colt, who was a $4-million yearling purchase, will be heavily favored in Saturday’s Preakness at Pimlico, and if he doesn’t stumble, all that would remain is the Belmont Stakes on June 10.

Without predicting an outright victory, Desormeaux is nevertheless confident about the Preakness. In five races together, he and Fusaichi Pegasus have never been beaten. The only time Fusaichi Pegasus lost, in the first start of his career on Dec. 11 at Hollywood Park, he was ridden by Victor Espinoza. Desormeaux took over in the next race, when Fusaichi Pegasus broke his maiden at Santa Anita on Jan. 2, and they have gone on to victories that have included the San Felipe Stakes and the Wood Memorial, besides the Derby.

“It would take some kind of a misfortune to beat us in the Preakness,” Desormeaux said. “A bad break, something like that.”

Tony Matos, a high-powered agent who has been booking Desormeaux’s mounts since late 1997, said that the 30-year-old jockey’s career might not have sometimes waned if horses like Real Quiet and Fusaichi Pegasus had kept coming his way, but any analysis of Desormeaux in California, where he has ridden since 1990, is not as simple as that. Prominent trainers, such as Richard Mandella and Bob Baffert, the trainer of Real Quiet, have soured on using Desormeaux regularly, and even Neil Drysdale, the trainer of Fusaichi Pegasus, has had an off-and-on relationship with him.

“When Kent first started riding for me in 1998, he was very confident,” Drysdale said. “Then in 1999, there were some hiccups, but they resolved themselves. Now this year, he’s riding with a lot of confidence again.”

It was because of Matos that Drysdale turned to Desormeaux two years ago.

“Kent was in a bit of a down period but he seemed to have the desire to get going again,” Drysdale said. “Matos and I had had a long relationship, going back to the days when he was the agent for riders such as Angel Cordero and Laffit Pincay.”

Desormeaux hired Matos at a time when the jockey and his previous agent, Brian Beach, seemed to be riding a crest. With Beach, Desormeaux won the riding title at Del Mar in 1997, his first at the seaside track in four years, but by the fall--and before he won the Hollywood Futurity with Real Quiet--Beach was out and Matos was in.

“I don’t know any of the details,” Matos said. “All I know is that Kent called and asked me if I wanted to go to work for him, and I did.”

In 1998, Desormeaux won 28 graded stakes and his mounts earned $14.5 million as he ranked fourth nationally. It was the kind of a year he’d been having in 1992, before serious injuries in a spill that December stopped him with $14.1 million in purses. But for the spill, he would have had an outside shot to break the then-record $14.8 million that Jose Santos rang up in 1988.

In a $32,000-maiden claiming race at Hollywood Park that Dec. 11, Desormeaux’s mount, an apparent winner, ducked out as he approached the finish, dropping the jockey in front of four charging horses. The last of the four kicked Desormeaux in the head, causing 16 fractures of the skull, facial injuries and a broken blood vessel near the brain. In the hospital, Desormeaux was visited by friends who couldn’t tell that it was he.

“I was in a coma for 38 hours,” Desormeaux said. “When I came out of it, I didn’t have any hearing in my right ear.”

His hearing in that ear has never returned.

At the time of the spill, Sonia Desormeaux, the jockey’s wife, was near the end of a difficult first pregnancy. Desormeaux was released from his hospital and quickly joined his wife in the intensive-care unit of hers. Joshua Desormeaux, weighing barely more than four pounds, was delivered by caesarean section on Dec. 16, 1992, only five days after the accident that could have cost his father his life.

The Desormeauxs had their second child, another son, last year, and this year the joy over Fusaichi Pegasus’ win in the Wood Memorial, on April 15, was tempered a few days later when Kent and Sonia learned for certain that Jacob Desormeaux, at 14 months, is 100% deaf.

“It’s going to be a learning process for all of us,” a solemn Kent Desormeaux said. “We are putting Jacob in the hands of the people at the House of Ear Institute, which has a tremendous reputation. Eventually, we’ll have to make an educated decision about what to do.”

This winter at Santa Anita, Desormeaux was riding both Fusaichi Pegasus and War Chant, another Drysdale-trained colt who was also a Kentucky Derby prospect. In fact, when War Chant, with Desormeaux, won the San Rafael Stakes at Santa Anita on March 4, that colt was undefeated in his three starts.

Irv and Marjorie Cowan, who own War Chant, knew there would be an inevitable rider conflict if their horse and Fusaichi Pegasus went all the way to the Kentucky Derby, so they replaced Desormeaux with Jerry Bailey for the Santa Anita Derby on April 8. War Chant’s streak ended with a second-place finish behind The Deputy, and Bailey then rode him to a ninth-place finish in the Kentucky Derby. War Chant won’t run in the Preakness. He’s been sent back to California, where a future on the grass is a possibility.

Since 1987, eight jockeys have won the 14 runnings of the Derby. Gary Stevens has won three in this stretch, and Desormeaux has joined the list of double winners that includes Chris McCarron, Chris Antley and Bailey.

Desormeaux said that the big difference between the Derby wins by Real Quiet and Fusaichi Pegasus was in the celebrating.

“The thrill from one Derby to the next has been exactly the same,” Desormeaux said. “It’s been another adrenaline boost that takes you right through the roof. But this is not the showtime team [Baffert and Real Quiet’s fun-loving owner, Mike Pegram] that Real Quiet was. Neil Drysdale doesn’t react to victory that way.”

In watching a videotape of this year’s Derby, Drysdale noticed some things that he hadn’t discerned through his binoculars as the race unfolded at Churchill Downs.

“I was impressed by how totally relaxed the horse was on the last turn,” Drysdale said. “Kent had to steady him, but he responded so well. It struck me how comfortable our horse was running at all times. Kent is very athletic, and he gave this horse a very confident ride. He and the horse get along very well together.”

Desormeaux’s confidence in Fusaichi Pegasus swelled even before the Derby. The Wood was three weeks before the Kentucky race, and before the Aqueduct stake, Desormeaux knew that they had beaten The Deputy in California, and The Deputy had rebounded to beat a solid field in the Santa Anita Derby.

“That was a big confidence builder,” he said. “We had beaten The Deputy easily. Actually, handily was the word. Then it was just a matter of finding out how we fit with the Eastern horses. My horse has changed as he’s done more racing. The first time I rode him, he was awfully aggressive and in a hurry. But by the second time [six weeks later], I could ride him off my fingertips. It was phenomenal. He had gotten easy to ride, and he was as athletic as a cat.”