Pedroza Is Still King of Fairplex

When jockey Martin Pedroza and his agent, Richie Silverstein, looked at the start of the Fairplex Park meet a couple of weeks ago, Pedroza estimated that he might win 40 races during the 17-day stand at the Los Angeles County Fair.

“But then we set our goal at 50 wins,” said Silverstein, who reminded Pedroza that Ryan Fogelsonger and Tyler Baze wouldn’t be riding in Pomona this season. That pair combined for 33 wins, and finished second and third in the standings, when Pedroza won the meet title in 2003.

“Fogelsonger who?” Pedroza had said. The 39-year-old Panamanian-born rider is entitled to swagger at Fairplex, where he has won every riding title since 1999.

Pedroza won three races Thursday, bringing his meet total to 41, and with three days to go, he still feels the 50 mark is a realistic target. Forty-nine wins would break David Flores’ 1991 record at Fairplex, where they’ve been combining horses with Ferris-wheel rides since 1933. Flores’ record was set during a meet that ran two days longer than the current schedule.

By 1994, Flores had won or shared six straight riding titles at Fairplex, a record Pedroza is guaranteed to match this year. Riding in more than 100 races -- twice as many as any other rider -- Pedroza has been so dominant that his 2004 total is higher than the next six jockeys in the standings combined.

During the rest of the Southern California season -- Santa Anita, Hollywood Park and Del Mar -- Pedroza goes head to head with some of the best riders in the game, but he doesn’t necessarily disappear. At the Del Mar meet that ended Sept. 8, Pedroza finished sixth in wins. He had lost some momentum earlier in the year, when a broken collarbone at Santa Anita sent him to the sideline for five weeks.

Pedroza has come by his Fairplex success the hard way. When he first saw the track, in the 1980s, he blanched at the spills-and-chills configuration, which puts a premium on horses negotiating two treacherous bends.

“I said to myself, ‘Geez, what is this?’ ” Pedroza said. “In those days, it was even worse -- a half-mile around instead of the five-eighths the way it is now.”

Pedroza turns coy when asked why he has won a record 420 races in Pomona. Flores, a fixture at the major California tracks, no longer rides at Fairplex, where he’s a distant second with 291 wins.

“I’m sorry,” Pedroza said, “but I better not be giving away any of my secrets. Maybe I’m superstitious. I don’t want to be giving the other riders more of a chance. But what you basically have to do is ride the best horses and hope for the best.”

He would allow that one needs to know which jockeys to follow into the turns. If a rider is behind others who can corner well, there’s less chance that a horse will stagger or bolt in front.

Most of Pedroza’s Fairplex business is spread over seven to nine trainers, headed by Jack Carava, who saddled one of his winners Thursday.

“Jack rides us throughout the rest of the year,” Silverstein said, “so it makes sense that we’d look to his barn here.”

Dan Dunham, who hadn’t won a race this meet, used Pedroza on Thursday for a clear-cut win aboard This Wizard Rocks, a 2-year-old gelding, in the Gateway to Glory Stakes. Pedroza is fully booked for the closing-weekend stakes -- Tale Of A Dream in today’s Las Madrinas Handicap, Semi Lost in Saturday’s Pomona Derby and Kristine’s King in Sunday’s Ralph M. Hinds Pomona Handicap.

“I think I can break the [Flores] record,” Pedroza said. “I’m going to hang tough and try my best to do it.”

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A Pomona record was tied Thursday when trainer Doug O’Neill’s Smokin’ Vigor won the seventh race. That gave O’Neill 13 wins, the same total that Mel Stute achieved in 1986. O’Neill, who led or co-led Fairplex in 2002 and ‘03, has seven horses entered in five races today.