It’s Like Riding a Bike for Them

The influx of jockeys to Southern California started with a trickle when Chris McCarron retired, then turned into a flash flood after injuries forced fellow Hall of Famers Eddie Delahoussaye and Laffit Pincay to quit.

At the Del Mar meet that opened Wednesday, even 53-year-old Frank Olivares, forsaking a 12-year career as a trainer, is hustling mounts again.

While there would seem to be more opportunity for lesser known jockeys or relative newcomers to make names for themselves on the Southern California circuit, the reality is that breaking into the upper echelon is difficult because top riders such as Pat Valenzuela and Julie Krone are still around. Valenzuela is 40, Krone just turned 40 on Thursday, and despite some detours -- drug relapses for Valenzuela, a premature retirement and injuries for Krone -- they are back with trumpets, riding the hides off their horses.

Valenzuela, after eight interruptions due to off-the-track difficulties, made yet another comeback at the end of 2001 and has ridden almost 400 winners since then. He won 81 races at the recently completed Hollywood Park meet, leading the standings, and was also No. 1 at the Santa Anita meet that preceded. Hoping to duplicate the successive titles that he won here in 1990-91, Valenzuela rode two winners on opening day, one of them a longshot gelding that paid $53.80.

Krone, who was elected into the Racing Hall of Fame in 2000, has won more than 3,600 races and, having returned from a 3 1/2-year retirement, was fifth in this winter’s Santa Anita standings when she broke two bones in her lower back in a spill on March 8. She returned four months later, winning six races during closing week at Hollywood Park and two more at Canterbury Downs near Minneapolis, and she won races on both of Del Mar’s first two cards, including a division of the Oceanside Stakes with the longshot Devious Boy.

“There’s still a lot of [back] pain,” Krone said, “but it feels the best when I get on a horse. It’s when I’m sitting on an airplane, or riding in a car, that I feel the pain the most. Del Mar is so cool, and I’m really looking forward to riding here this year.”

Valenzuela and Krone will be prominent in Del Mar stake races this weekend.

Valenzuela is riding Beau’s Town, a well-traveled shipper from Louisiana Downs, in today’s Bing Crosby Handicap, and he also has the call on Tate’s Creek, the probable favorite, in the star-studded John C. Mabee Handicap. Valenzuela’s Sunday engagements include Pocketfullofpesos in the Fleet Treat Stakes and Fateful Dream in the Eddie Read Handicap.

Krone’s stake book numbers Voz de Colegiala, a Chilean filly, in the Mabee; Wind Dancer in the Fleet Treat; and Irish Warrior in the Read. The Mabee -- formerly known as the Ramona Handicap -- and the Read are the first two Grade I races of the Del Mar season.

This is Krone’s first summer at Del Mar; Valenzuela, despite all his career interruptions, has won 49 stakes here, the first as a teenager 23 years ago.