Just one more. That is all the Brazilian legend Jorge Ricardo needs to reach the scarcely conceivable landmark of 13,000 winners.
The world leader in career victories for much of the last decade, the extraordinary rider, affectionately known as as Ricardinho, has overcome serious illness – he had more than six months away from the sport suffering from lymphoma in 2009 – and a succession of career-threatening injuries to stand on the verge of a milestone that beggars reason.
Earlier this month, Ricardo (left) returned to his native Rio de Janeiro to seal the deal after 14 years based in Buenos Aires. A couple of weeks later, winner #12,999 duly arrived via Alibi Da Serra in a 1,400-metre contest on Monday’s card at his home racetrack, the historic Hipodromo da Gavea located in a picture-postcard city-centre setting in the shadow of the Christ the Redeemer statue that towers over Rio from the Corcovado mountain.
Now, just a few days ahead of his 59th birthday on September 30, Ricardo heads into Brazil’s biggest weekend of the season with 25 rides booked across the four-day stand from Friday to Monday, headlined by the G1 Grande Premio Brasil, the nation’s top race on Sunday.
Ricardo rides Olympic Ipswich in this Breeders’ Cup ‘Win and You’re In’ Challenge contest – and while it would be entirely appropriate for him to hit 13,000 in the signature race at the track where he was champion jockeys for 26 successive seasons before he moved to Argentina, it probably won’t happen. Doubtless he’ll already have hit the target on any one (or more) of a plethora of chances before then.
Citing dwindling opportunities in Argentina and a wish to spend more time with his family, Ricardo said he intended to stay in Rio for the GP Brasil card before considering his future in October.
His irresistible march to 13,000 stalled when he suffered a bad fall in May 2019, resulting in seven broken vertebrae, a collapsed lung, and facial fractures, then racing in Argentina suffered one of the longest shutdowns in the world amid the Covid-19 pandemic.
“The truth is that I stayed here waiting for the return of the racing but I never believed we would go so long without competing,” he told Turf Diario before his return to Rio.
“There will be more chances there and I’ll be closer to my family. My mother is 80 and misses me very much.”
As such, Ricardo has gone full circle, going back to the venue where he started riding as a 15-year-old apprentice in 1976, partnering his first winner on a horse called Taim, trained by his father Antonio – a former jockey, like two of Ricardo's uncles, in November that year.
Such are the jockey’s prolific exploits in the 44 years since then that my fellow TRC contributor Jay Hovdey was moved to describe himself as a “fanboy” in a recent NTRA/BloodHorse profile.
It is easy to understand why as Ricardo’s is a career properly demanding superlatives. The numbers are startling indeed: next best among active jockeys worldwide is Edgar Prado, who had 7,377 winners as of September 22 (according to the Paginadeturf website, where Carlos Taboas Boente keeps up-to-date stats). Even if Prado could ride 300 winners a year on an annual basis, it would take him nearly 19 years to get to Ricardo; the admirable Prado is 53, and hasn’t reached three figures since 2013.
Ricardo won his first jockeys’ championship in Brazil in 1982 – and thereafter the engraver responsible for putting the winner's name on the Rio jockeys’ championship trophy would have been taking no risk whatsoever if he had simply inscribed ‘J. Ricardo’ on the first day of the season, as he retained the title every season until he moved permanently to Argentina in June 2006.
His best season was 1992-93, when posted an incredible 477 winners; he reached the 400-mark on five occasions altogether. He won the title 26 years in a row, often riding more than 400 winners in a season, a multitude of G1s among them. He has won the continental championship, the Gran Premio Latinoamericano, five times.
Ricardo partnered South American champion Much Better to finish 14th to Carnegie in the 1994 Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe. Generally speaking, however, his prodigious feats largely slipped under the international racing radar until he moved to Buenos Aires, after which news of his staggering achievements finally reached a wider audience. Before returning to his native Brazil earlier this month, he had ridden more than 3,300 winners in Argentina; he was twice named jockey of the year.
International acclaim came his way in February 2006, when Ricardo broke the world record for career victories, riding his 9,591st winner to surpass his North American-based rival Russell Baze for the first time. “For me it was very important to get the world record because I had been thinking about it for many years, working hard to become the winningmost,” Ricardo told me at the time (via an interpreter).
“To achieve the world record was an unparalleled and enormous joy. The applause and cheers on the racecourse were something I will never forget. I also hoped that perhaps if I got the record then the world might recognise the importance of South American turf, which is so little taken into account elsewhere.”
Ding-dong struggle with Baze
The names Baze and Ricardo were to be intertwined for more than a decade as they set about a ding-dong struggle across two continents, trading winner-for-winner in a ceaseless quest to be the world number one. The lead was to change hands several times before U.S. Hall of Famer Baze retired in June 2016.
Ricardo was the first jockey in the world to reach 10,000 wins in January 2008, but Baze beat him to 11,000, which he reached in August 2010. The lead flip-flopped several times in the following months until Ricardo established a decent gap – only to forfeit his advantage owing to his cancer battle in 2009.
Serious injury also hampered the Brazilian. In September 2013, he was out for several months after suffering a fractured shoulder and broken jaw in a horror fall that forced him to scale back his riding following his return and slowed his remarkable output. He missed another ten months when he fractured his left femur in December 2016 in a fall at the Hipodromo Palermo; then there was last year’s accident.
Ricardo and Baze often spoke of their enormous respect for each other. They both rode at the Shergar Cup at Ascot in 2008 – ironically, neither had a winner – and they faced each other again in a special five-race points series (won by Ricardo) at the Hipodromo do Cristal in Porto Alegre in September 2014. “It’s like footballers Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo thrown together before our eyes,” suggested Airton Barnasque, racecaller at the Jockey Club Rio Grande do Sul.
Following Baze’s retirement, Ricardo regained first spot in the world all-time list on February 7, 2018, at San Isidro, when he scored on Hope Glory for the 12,845th winner of his career.
Yet, while Ricardo’s numbers are plainly utterly remarkable, his achievements are matched by his popularity. He is the most accessible of sporting icons, a byword for humility.
He is renowned as a class act both in and out of the saddle – witness his response in the aftermath of his 12,998th winner at Cidade Jardim in Sao Paulo on Saturday.
Although Ricardo’s quest for 13,000 has become the subject of daily news updates in South America, the rider’s own thoughts were elsewhere as he dedicated the Sao Paulo victory to Pat Smullen, the nine-time Irish champion jockey who died last week from pancreatic cancer in such tragic circumstances.
“There are races that we cannot win, but nobody can erase our achievements, our history,” said Ricardo in a moving tribute on his Twitter account.
Given Ricardo’s own history with illness, these were no empty platitudes. What is more, Ricardinho can rest assured: his own matchless achievements have long since gone down in racing history.
WORLD ALL-TIME TOP TEN
(as at Sept 22, 2020)
1 Jorge Ricardo 12,999
2 Russell Baze 12,844
3 Pablo Falero 9,580
4 Laffit Pincay 9,530
5 Bill Shoemaker 8,833
6 Pat Day 8,803
7 David Gall 7,396
8 Edgar Prado* 7,377
9 Fumio Matoba* 7,319
10 Takemi Sasaki 7,153
*still active