It’s a Close Shave, but Valenzuela’s Back

Pat Valenzuela, reinstated Wednesday by the California Horse Racing Board, has been named to ride six races -- two of them stakes -- Saturday at Santa Anita. It seems like only yesterday that he was riding.

Yesterday for Valenzuela was actually July 1, the day before he once more ran afoul of state racing authorities over drug testing.

He was taken off his horses on July 2, not to return for the rest of the year, and in August the stewards at Del Mar took their strongest stand, after struggling with Valenzuela, his drug problems and his attorneys for more than a decade.

At Del Mar, they came as close as they could to ending Valenzuela’s career when they recommended that he “not be considered for future licensing ... in any capacity.”

In other words, the stewards were so fed up with Valenzuela that they didn’t even want him grooming horses.

But that ban was issued after a three-day hearing and anyone who attended might have made book that this wasn’t going to be the end for Valenzuela. His latest attorney -- Neil Papiano, who didn’t come on board until after the jockey’s suspension in July -- seemed to have the upper hand all the way. He painted witnesses into a corner and left them there.

“What is a hair follicle?” Papiano asked Richard Guerrero, an investigator for the racing board. Valenzuela, in the opinion of Guerrero and a colleague, Mike Kilpack, had almost completely shaved his body -- and couldn’t be tested -- when he showed up on July 2 for a hair test for drugs.

“It’s not a hair strand,” Guerrero said, trying to describe a follicle.

“A follicle, meaning inside the head?” Papiano continued.

“Yes,” Guerrero said.

“And isn’t that what the order says, you’re to take a follicle?” Papiano said. “Nothing to do with the length of the hair, does it?”

“I never went by the order,” Guerrero said.

“Didn’t follow the order?”

“No.”

“You didn’t follow [racing board executive director] Roy Wood’s order, or the order of the judge?”

“No,” Guerrero said. “I followed the [hair-testing] training tape that came down from Sacramento.”

Then Papiano wanted to know more about that tape.

“You, of course, gave Pat Valenzuela the training tape to see, so he would know what he was supposed to do, right?”

“No, I didn’t,” Guerrero said.

H. Stuart Waxman, the administrative law judge who heard Valenzuela’s appeal in November, made reference to the tape as he delivered a pro-Valenzuela opinion.

“The training tape,” Waxman said, “was actually a CD/ROM produced by Quest Diagnostics.”

Last Friday, after the seven-member racing board, with little choice, had rubber-stamped Waxman’s opinion and in effect told Valenzuela he could ride again, Papiano was asked what Waxman meant in his description of the so-called training tape.

“It was a sales pitch by that company,” Papiano said. “It was anything but a training tape.”

Valenzuela has turned 42 since he last rode. One of his mounts Saturday, in the $200,000 San Fernando Stakes, is Mass Media. The 4-year-old colt is trained by Bobby Frankel, whose barn was No. 2 in the country in purses last year and No. 1 the three years before that.

Starting off with a Frankel horse indicates that Valenzuela will be embraced, as he has been so many times before, by most of the leading stables in California. They’re betting that he’ll quickly regain the form that carried him to a sweep of the five major-meet titles in these parts in 2003.

Years ago, when his substance-abuse problems were only beginning, Valenzuela subjected legendary trainer Charlie Whittingham to both halves of his psyche.

“Pat’s more than a gate rider,” Whittingham said as Valenzuela rode them to within one race of sweeping the 1989 Triple Crown with Sunday Silence. “He’s an excellent position rider -- getting horses in spots where they need to be to win.”

By the fall of the year, however, Valenzuela had tested positive for cocaine and Whittingham needed to replace him with Chris McCarron to win the Breeders’ Cup Classic. Came 1990, Valenzuela was back, and a forgiving Whittingham used him for the last two starts of Sunday Silence’s career.

“The fans, the owners and the trainers all love the guy,” trainer David Bernstein told Ed Golden, a columnist for Gaming Today, in December. “If Pat comes back, he’ll be leading rider.”

Not if some of the other riders in the jockeys’ room can help it. Eighteen of them, who didn’t want to risk riding against him, signed a letter last year, asking the racing board to keep Valenzuela out.

“This is not just about Valenzuela,” Ingrid Fermin, one of the Del Mar stewards and now the executive director of the racing board, said Wednesday. “This is about all of the riders. I want to have open communications with all of the jockeys in order to address their concerns.”

Last year, Corey Nakatani and Danny Sorenson spoke out against Valenzuela’s riding again, and Sorenson and Tyler Baze were racing-board witnesses during the Del Mar hearing.

At the same hearing, Valenzuela quoted Nakatani when he was asked about shaving his body.

“Corey said that it was a Japanese custom that was supposed to get rid of bad luck,” Valenzuela said.