When I was younger, working in the racing industry in Europe, the name Asmussen meant only one thing: Cash.
He was a superstar there for two decades, every bit as successful in France at that time as his compatriot Steve Cauthen was in Britain. Five times Cash was France’s champion jockey. He was an Arc winner, he won four French Derbys and every French Classic at least once, and more than 70 G1s worldwide. If there had been a TRC Global Rankings back then, he would have been a regular in the higher reaches of the world top ten.
After I arrived in the States in 2014, Cash Asmussen had disappeared from the public eye. I knew he had retired from race-riding in 2001 and had immediately departed France and returned to the States, so I wondered what he had been up to since then, and how now it was his younger brother, Steve, who was the family flag bearer.
I met up with Steve Asmussen at Fasig Tipton in Lexington recently to ask about their careers and to piece together the family dynamic. And that, naturally, led back to their dad …
Keith Asmussen Sr
“I was born into the horse business,” says Keith Asmussen Sr. “My dad, and my grandad were in the business. My dad trained five or six at a time, rode a little bit, raised horses. We were living in South Dakota, but my father ran them all over, from New England to Tijuana.
“I was riding match races by the age of 12. I rode Thoroughbreds first but got a bit heavy, so I rode Quarter Horse races for about 38 years.”
Asmussen Sr was leading rider in Albuquerque in New Mexico, South Texas and other places, and he made a pretty good living. “I had a bad knee most of the time. I got cow-kicked by a horse when I was about ten, and I have had to put up with that damn thing most of my life.
"I was breaking a lot of babies, but that’s a tough job seven or eight months of the year in South Dakota.
“I was riding first call for Wayne Lukas back then. I was riding for him before he was D. Wayne Lukas,” he says with a chuckle.”
Lukas sent him to South Texas to ride a futurity race one February. “It was 86 degrees, and it was about minus 2 degrees when I got back to South Dakota, so I asked my wife ‘are you ready to move one more time?’”
That was in 1967. Marilyn, his wife of 59 years, whom he has known since he was about five - two kids who both loved horses - said yes. “She’s about got me trained. She’s been working on it,” he says. “That’s how I ended up in Laredo [in Texas], for the weather.”
“I always knew how to work,” he says. “I broke horses, rode races, hauled trailers, shod horses.”
I ask him what he did in his spare time. He laughs, and without missing a beat says, “I rode more horses.”
“In 1979, we set up El Primero training center [in Laredo] with Cash. We have 400 stalls here now and 95 percent of the horses we start here will end up going to Steve. We have a bunch of Tapits [Tapit was broken in by Keith for the Winchell family, a family that has sent him horses for the past 41 years], Into Mischiefs, Uncle Mos, all of them. Cash is on one side of the track and I train on the other.”
It was around then that another branch of the family business began. “My dad was wearing my mom out dragging her around the country,” says Keith Asmussen. “So I set up a tack store [Asmussen Horse & Rider Equipment], which she ran for about 30 years. It’s still going.”
But back to his sons. “I’m real proud of those two boys, how they took off,” he says. “They grew up on the farm. Steve had a groom’s license when he was 12. There is a picture of him on the front of a magazine after we won a big race in New Mexico. Cash galloped his first Thoroughbred when he was nine.
“They were both good workers, although Steve liked to sneak off to the track kitchen sometimes. We have six grandchildren, and they all like to help on the farm too when they are home from university.”
I say how positive Steve and Cash seemed when I spoke to them. I asked if that came from his parents. “Well, we’re part of the same family you know,” he says with a laugh. I walked into that one.
Cash Asmussen
“We were fortunate to follow in the footsteps of our parents, great mentors, who gave us an opportunity to practice what was to be our profession, working side by side away from the racetrack,” he says. “We couldn’t have made up for that time later on. We were learning from when we could walk. I believe we owe a lot of our success to that. We are still learning every day and our greatest teacher is the horse.
“The luxury of a jockey, to be associated with horses, with great horses, is to manage the energy of your partners, and the best way to do that is by communicating with them, and the better your horsemanship, the better you communicate.
“I feel in any equine sport, when the horse and rider become one, it is poetry in motion.
“I was prepared by my father and mother, but I couldn’t have fathomed what was ahead of me.”
Cash Asmussen, born Brian Keith Asmussen (he changed his name to Cash in 1977), won on his first ride, in 1978, for his mother, at Sunland Park racetrack in New Mexico, and even now he says that was one of the three greatest wins of his life.
The second was winning a Grade 3 at Aqueduct on Valid Expectations in November 1996 for his brother.
Cash went on to ride over 900 winners in just over three years riding Stateside, picking up an Eclipse Award for leading apprentice in 1979.
“I moved to New York toward the end of 1978. McCarron was in the room, Cordero, Velasquez, Pincay, Vasquez. It was a great education, and you needed to bring you’re A game. If you didn’t, don’t bother showing up. Those guys could do things on a horse that most people couldn’t do on foot.”
It was the great Argentinian trainer Angel Penna who recommended Cash Asmussen to legendary French trainer Francois Boutin, who was looking for a rider for his owner Greek shipping billionaire Stavros Niarchos. Boutin acceded.
Asmussen says, “Penna told me in no uncertain terms that, if I wanted to see a beautiful part of the world from the backs of beautiful horses, I needed to think seriously about this opportunity. And how right he was.
“I was dropped into France on my head, but landed on my feet. And I came well armed - with Boutin and Niarchos behind me.
“It was still tough, though. I wasn’t that well received at first, so believe me it was no hardship to not be able to understand or read French! It was good for my weight, though, struggling to order food. But I think I gained their respect in the end, and I say that with pride. I learnt to speak fluent French also in the end - because I was getting hungry.”
He recalls one time he was in a car with Boutin. “I was returning home after racing with Francois. He was driving and smoking his Davidoff No.2. We were having a bit of a disagreement about one of the rides I gave his horse, and I was trying to explain it when he took his cigar out of his mouth, turned to me and said, ‘Cash, I think I preferred it when you couldn’t speak French’.
“But the backing and support of Francois Boutin and Mr Niarchos gave me confidence. I hope I left something for racing. I will never have given it as much as it gave me.”
It looked such a glamorous life, glamorous times, back then, Cash cutting a dash. Did it feel like that?
“It would be disrespectful to not say we led a glamorous life. Icons are hard or impossible to replace. Who replaces Francois Boutin? Who replaces Yves St Martin? Who replaces Henry Cecil? Who replaces Lester Piggott? Those were glamorous times and they made the game glamorous and, in turn, the game made them glamorous. Those superstars are hard, if not impossible, to replace.”
By the end of his time in Europe, Cash was well loved in France. He had won five riders’ titles, the only non-French jockey ever to have won one back then. “Allez Cash!” was the call at the Paris tracks for 20 years.
And of the places? “If Deauville was racing eight months a year, I might still be riding!”
But Cash Asmussen rode all over the world. G1 victories in seven countries on three continents - Japan, Hong Kong, Ireland, England, France, Canada and the USA.
“It was an education and a luxury you couldn’t pay for, to ride some of the greatest horses on some of the most beautiful racetracks in the world. Great horses take humans where we can’t go alone.”
I mention that the Middle East is missing from his resume. He says ‘yes’, laughing, “but my brother saw there was a bit of prize money to be picked up there so he went over and won the Dubai World Cup with Curlin!”
His brother had his back. Maybe he has to get over for the Melbourne Cup next? “I’ve been over for what I call the old timers’ race there. They call it the champions’ race. Melbourne was beautiful and great people.”
So many horses, but he says Suave Dancer has to come top of his list of greats.
“My dad bought him at Keeneland and he was broken at Laredo. I got to know him that winter, then he was sent to John Hammond in France for his owner, Monsieur Chalhoub, where I was reunited with him.”
Cash’s parents were there, in Paris, at Longchamp racecourse, when Cash Asmussen and Suave Dancer won the 1991 Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe (see video above).
Those were heady days, and, at El Primero training center, he is planning more with the help of his partner, Erica.
“She rides them, buys the shampoo, does just about everything, and puts up with me as well.” he says. He also has his three daughters’ assistance when they are home from university.
“We’ve got horses here, a full brother to a Derby winner, Uncle Mos, Tapits, Gun Runners - and they are a great-looking bunch too. I couldn’t wait to get on them. If some people didn’t like Steve Asmussen last year, they’re going to hate him next year!
“I think what keeps me fresh is that, if a horse is capable of doing something and he’s not doing it for me, because I’m not explaining it properly, then I’ve got to look at the man in the mirror.
“I’m a good guy. I just want to kick ass, show what I can do, and complement the horse!”
Steve Asmussen
Steve Asmussen has just trained his 9,000th winner. His son, Keith, was race riding for him during the summer.
“It was beyond describable to go through the process with him. He ended up winning a $100k stakes on a horse part-owned by my parents and a long-time client, and to see him succeed and feel good about himself was such a reward from a sport that has given us so much.
“My father is just an animal lover of the umpteenth degree. To come from a true Ma-and-Pa operation to where we are now, what it means to me, what we have achieved, is hard to describe.
“It was like watching my son ride and wanting him so hard to succeed. I had wanted to be a jockey, but I grew to six feet, and my son is similarly vertically challenged at five ten.”
Steve, who has been a TRC world top-ten trainer for much of the year, did follow in his elder brother’s footsteps and became a jockey for a while, but he was too tall and weight defeated him. Perhaps that track kitchen had been his undoing.
Talking about his riding career, though, Steve says, “The thing about Cash is he never understood why everyone couldn’t do what he could.”
“Now to stand here at 55, I am just at the center of a perfect storm. I love the input from all my family, their help, everyone is involved. And the long-time assistants I have are well known.
“The success we have achieved thanks to the horses, the feelings they have given us, makes us want more. I am still more surprised at our defeats than our successes. There are still huge things left to do. In fact, the urgency feels more now than ever before.”
I mention how unlikely it was for two brothers to achieve two Eclipse awards in different spheres in the sport. “We keep very good company if nothing else,” he smiles. “Maybe there’s something in the water down there in Laredo!
“One of the great pleasures of my life is people who know my parents, and my parents’ example, how they go about doing their best every day, not some days - every day. It’s not a situation of measuring where you are at, you just work on getting better. In fact, it is alarming sometimes when you look back and realize how ignorant you were previously.
“All the family is heavily involved in our business. I love their input. My boys are much smarter than me. Growing up in a racing family, nothing you are doing is alone. My wife, Julie, the boys, Keith, Darren, and Eric, my parents, my brother, his family all involved. There might be just one name wrote down, but it is everyone and I love that. Horseracing is the vocabulary of the Asmussen family.”
Finally I ask him, when he set out, did he ever think he would scale these heights? Soon to be the winning-most racehorse trainer ever in North America. “Frankly,” he says, “I can’t believe it took me so long to get here!”
So, when the Asmussens sit down at the dinner table to celebrate the holiday, we know the talk shall be of horses. There will be Cash with his Cashisms, the boys Keith, Darren and Eric chipping in, Cash’s girls, Catherine, Carolyn and Christine, too. Grandad will be cracking jokes, the wives, mothers, partners, all a part of it. And Steve Asmussen sat right in the middle of his perfect storm.
But make no mistake, although Cash and Steve Asmussen are the spectacular fireworks, Keith Asmussen Sr has been the constant flame, the father, the husband, the horseman.
The man who broke in Tapit and Suave Dancer, and thousands more, the man who rode races for 38 years, even with that damn knee! He loves his family and his horses. And I loved talking with them.