Alumni of the renowned teacher’s ‘school’ are headed by Britain’s former champion apprentice David Egan, the Saudi Cup-winning jockey who describes his mentor as a ‘father figure’
There’s foresight and then there’s clairvoyance. Case in point … wait. Make that colossal, unbelievable, ‘you’re-sh**ting-me’ case in point. Veteran British-based jockey John Egan knew that if his one-year-old son David wanted to follow in his footsteps when he grew up, he would have Jose Corrales train him.
Sixteen years later, the 17-year-old David boarded a plane for America to Maryland to live with Corrales. For a week? Two weeks? Try eight months – a three-month stint one year, and five months the next.
I guess you’re not going to become the British champion apprentice in 2017 and win the Saudi Cup on Mishriff at the ripe old age of 21 in 2021 without immersion in what many might call the ‘Corrales College of Riding’.
Corrales both teaches those wanting to be jockeys as well as professionals who need a tune-up. That’s how he met John Egan, when both were riding in Macau. “He wanted to learn American-style riding,” explained Corrales.
A special school
When it came to tutoring his son, John Egan was aware of excellent jockey schools turning out entire classes of excellent riders. But he also knew of one special ‘school’ with a student/teacher ratio of one-to-one: Corrales’s.
A native of Panama, where he attended the nation’s jockey school, Corrales was a successful rider in New York, Washington State and Macau in the 1980s and early 1990s.
He had his close friend Wesley Ward – an Eclipse Award-winning apprentice in 1984 – to thank for buying him a plane ticket to Washington State after a serious injury.
After the cross-country move, in 1988 Corrales had purse earnings of $900,000-plus on the Washington circuit; he was one of the busiest jockeys in America with 1,376 mounts that year.
Why the story of Jose Corrales’ road to the Pegasus really is Something Awesome
Today, 63-year-old Corrales is a fixture on the Maryland/Mid-Atlantic circuit as a trainer – but also as a go-to for prospective jockeys. His most recent prodigy is apprentice Walter Rodriguez, a likely candidate for this year’s Eclipse Award for Outstanding Apprentice Jockey with purse earnings to date in 2023 are $3.5m.
Before Rodriguez, Corrales worked with his nephew Gerardo, who has finished in the top 100 in both earnings and wins in the US for the last three years.
Rodriguez had zero experience with Thoroughbreds before arriving at Corrales’s barn. “I like somebody who grew up riding horses because they know horsemanship,” explained Corrales. “But to be naïve with horses is sometimes better because they learn everything from scratch and learn how to communicate with horses. That’s what happened with Walter.”
An apparent gift
Teaching, for Corrales, is evidence of an apparent gift – but it’s not always that easy, as David Egan reported. “Good jockeys can’t always pass on their talents to other people,” he said. “Some can’t explain the mechanics of being a jockey. That’s something Jose does very, very well.”.
Corrales estimated Egan is one of at least 50 apprentice riders he has helped along the way. He begins training with a three-question ‘job interview’: How old you are? How much do you weigh? And how much do you want this? The answer to the last question will tell the tale and reveal itself in one word: discipline, according to Corrales.
“You need somebody who’s hungry and who loves the horses – discipline gets you everywhere,” he said.
An indication of this quality, said Corrales, is to see a young rider who needs race mounts in the afternoon getting on horses in early morning workouts – ten to as many as 20. “Even after they’ve proven themselves with trainers as a jockey, they must be willing to ride horses in the morning that they won’t be riding in a race,” he said. “Somebody will come along who will ride.”
Corrales’s’ first instruction is how to hold the reins. “Then I put them on an Equicizer or barrel to look at their form,” he explained.
Trademark training tool
Ah yes, the barrel, Corrales’s trademark training tool he keeps in the basement of his home in Laurel, Maryland. It rests on its side and requires continuous balancing effort to keep it from rolling to one side or the other. That is only the beginning, however.
“The barrel had a saddle with stirrups but sometimes just two stirrups tied together with a string,” recalled Egan. ”If you leaned to one side more than the other, the stringed stirrups or saddle would fall off.”
Balance alone was only one objective; stamina was another – and Corrales put Egan through the ‘teacher leaving the room’ test. “I put David on that barrel and then I put a glass of water on top of his back,” recalled Corrales. “I said, ‘Listen I need to go upstairs and get some things. Don’t drop my water.’ When I came back, it was still there.”
“He would expect you to keep going,” added Egan, saying that Corrales had a sixth sense and would know somehow if you took a break while he was gone.
Egan, it is a safe assumption, will never forget one second astride the barrel. “Jose would almost have you doing yoga on the back of it,” he grinned.
“You’d have little five-pound weights, or three-pound weights and you’d be holding the weight like at the reins and pushing with your hands.”
Building core strength, stamina, and balance took care of the body, becoming a horseman was another.
Corrales tested Egan’s with tasks that might discourage a career in racing. “I had the kid pick up hay and do the shedrow,” he said. “But whatever I did to get him out of the business, he beat me.”
Egan recalls hauling a horse with an assistant trainer for Corrales from Laurel Racetrack to the Fair Grounds in New Orleans, a one-way journey of 1,100 miles. “I was the groom with the horse. We dropped it off and picked up another one,” Egan said with a laugh.
Talking to horses
A true horseman, Corrales said, learns how to communicate with a horse. That begins with mucking stalls; learning how to be safe with a horse in the stall to defend against bites, kicks, and squeezes against stall walls; and a practice, according to Corrales, that now seems passé: simply talking to horses.
“A horse who knows your voice will respond to you,” he said. “It’s always about connecting with the horse.”
Corrales is skeptical of most negative assessments of horses. “You will hear someone say a horse is stupid or crazy but that person needs to look at themselves,” he said. “To me, it’s not the horse, it’s the person.”
Egan also learned techniques that he said he “wouldn’t have even thought about while on the back of a horse”.
Controlling and conserving a free-running horse for a stretch run was one example. “If you’re fighting with him and he’s fighting with you, you’re not going to get anywhere,” he said.
“Jose would have me gallop a horse who’s maybe a bit free and go on a mile, mile-and-a-quarter gallop. But he’d tell me to jump off on a nice long rein and let the horse go for the first eighth of a mile. The further you went, you’d play with the reins a little bit – he had different techniques for different horses.
“It would get the horse to obey your commands better. Rather than being forceful, it was more of a question to the horse to ease up rather than telling the horse.”
Learning the clock
Many of Corrales’s methods were learned under Hall of Fame jockey Braulio Baeza who trained Thoroughbreds after retirement from riding. The most important thing, said Corrales, was learning the clock and pace.
“Baeza used to tell me the horses only have a good three-eighths run in them,” he said. “They can go 11, 11, 11 [for each eighth of a mile]. You gotta learn how to use the time and where. The horses in the front, you have to learn how fast you think they’re going. By that, you can calculate your horse coming from behind and catching them at the end.”
The rest of jockey training is style with Corrales. He compares it to learning proper steps in hitting a golf ball – the small things that make the difference. Is the jockey’s seat too far back or forward? Is the rider too upright? Are the hands correct on the reins? It’s numerous things that are finishing touches.
Obviously, there’s more to being a jockey than just simply getting on the back of a horse and riding them around an oval.
Egan might be Corrales’s biggest fan. “I had ridden winners before I went out to Jose,” he said. “I came back to the UK from spending three months with him and I went from having five or six wins my first year to going back and winning the apprentice award.
“He was tough but tough in the right way,” he went on. “He was a father figure to me. He’s so passionate and he loves teaching.
“I wouldn’t be the rider I am today or even the person without him. He teaches you to be kind, and he’s just got an aura of kindness.”
Egan said he’s still learning every day from every horse. “That’s something I learned from Jose,” he said. Hardly surprising, really.
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