The scene appears like something out of a screwball comedy from yesteryear, heavy on the slapstick.
Where? A provincial Italian racetrack in Varese, north of Milan. Who? A young apprentice called Umberto Rispoli, still wet behind the ears, and a trainer called Alduino Botti with a temper hotter than Mount Vesuvius. When? Oh, about 14 years ago, give or take.
The young Rispoli, no more than 18 at the time, had barely squeaked out a victory on a horse that should have won easy. In a rush of blood to the noggin, he had torn up Botti’s riding instructions, went hard and fast and passed the post with a rubber-legged horse — afterwards, however, regret set in. Fast.
A gazelle with a cheetah on his tail, Rispoli flees through the jock’s room, an irate trainer in hot pursuit. “I’m going to kill you! I’m going to kill you!” Just then, the young apprentice spies a restroom, locks himself inside. In an act of questionable efficacy, the cheetah gives the cornered gazelle an ultimatum: Open the door or he’ll kill him.
“But if I open the door you’re going to kill me, so I’m not going to open the door,” Rispoli responds, with admirable logic, given the circumstances.
After a time, all goes quiet. Rispoli pokes his head out the restroom cubicle. All clear. With furtive glances over each shoulder, the apprentice tiptoes back to his spot in the jock’s room to prepare for the next race, where he’s ambushed and cornered by the trainer — “like Rocky or Ivan Drago” — who’d been lying in wait.
The gazelle tried to beat the angry cheetah back with humor. “Alduino, you’re hurting me!” he laughs. “Stop it!” Eventually, the cheetah retreats. And while the story doesn’t end there, we’ll hit the pause button to let the reader catch up on a few housekeeping necessities before embarking on part two.
Rispoli, now 32, happily relayed this anecdote — with all the theatrical gioia di vivere of a handsomely paid after-dinner speaker, it should be noted — one recent afternoon outside a coffee shop in Monrovia, a quaint little town in the same humbling shadow of the San Gabriel Mountains as nearby Santa Anita racetrack, home for Rispoli, wife Kimberley and son Hayden for more than a year now.
The reason for the retelling wasn’t to elicit sympathy — a lop-sided Dickensian tale akin to Oliver versus Fagin, David Copperfield versus Mr Murdstone.
Rather, he wore it like a badge of honor to illustrate bruising lessons that would shape a riding career that has taken him around the world — France, England, Australia, Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong — and delivered success and frustration in equal dose.
His current stint in America, however, has landed firmly in the former camp. He’s quickly made a name for himself as a turf rider par excellence in Southern California, notching a growing list of Graded stakes victories showcasing shrewdness and not a little panache.
Notorious province
That’s not to say he’s too shabby on the dirt, either. Indeed, at the time of talking, Rispoli was sitting second in the wins column in the jockeys’ standings at the current Santa Anita meet, though a recent three-day whip suspension had taken the luster off that achievement somewhat. (More on that in a bit …)
But first, let’s stick with those formative years. “It’s all about where you come from,” Rispoli said — a sentiment he would repeat several times throughout the interview. And growing up in the Scampia suburb of Naples, it’s easy to see where any pluck and moxie was instilled.
“I shared the playground with friends, some of whom are now underground, some in jail,” he said of Scampia, a notorious province on the outskirts of the city riven by crime and gang activity, immortalized by the television series Gomorrah.
“I remember seeing someone overdosed on the stairs when I got back from school,” he said of the hulking, white-walled tenement building he lived in. “Growing up somewhere like that, you have two options: You can choose what they do. Or you could have the different option, going to school or go into sports.”
Indeed at 14, his schooling done, Rispoli followed in his father’s footsteps away from the Scampia suburbs and into the saddle, first at the Arc de Triomphe-winning stable of Luigi Camici (he of Tony Bin fame), and then, after a stint at the Italian racing school in Pisa, the stable of the aforementioned Alduino Botti, in partnership with his brother, Giuseppi.
Agile apprentice
Which brings us back to our opening anecdote, and the day after the ill-judged ride at Varese.
Rispoli responds to a summons to the office, unperturbed. “I thought, ‘well, he’d hit me yesterday, he’s not going to give me anything else today.’” But the minute the young apprentice walks through the door, the trainer “jumped out and grabbed me and said, ‘second round.’”
Luckily, the office window is trellised with bars — the agile apprentice clambers to the top, thumbs his nose at the trainer below.
“Come down!” the trainer demands.
“No, no,” says the apprentice. “I’m going to stay here all the morning. You’re not going to touch me.”
“Come down!”
“You make me a coffee and I’ll come down.”
“It was a relationship like dad and son,” said Rispoli, in explanation. And a fruitful relationship at that.
With the Botti family behind him, Rispoli’s career would erupt faster and brighter than a Zambelli firework. He became Italy’s champion jockey in 2009 (topping Gianfranco Dettori’s former record of winners in a season), before taking the crown home again the following year.
Next up came a stint in France — a successful enough time with G1 victories on the likes of Molly Malone in the 2012 Prix du Cadran for Mikel Delzangles and The Monarch for Roger Varian in the 2015 Criterium International. But always there was the gnaw of bigger riches, greater accolades.
“I’ve always had ambition,” he said. “Since I was a kid, my dream was to be one of the best jockeys around the world.”
And, if that meant packing his bags once more, so be it. Next came Hong Kong, where Rispoli had ridden the winner of the 2012 QEII aboard Rulership. But, once again, what successes he enjoyed during these years were ultimately tempered with frustration, this time a result of bad injury, beginning with a fall near the end of 2016 that mangled his knee.
Telling are the ten-league strides he took to return, knee be damned.
The prognosis was 6-8 months off. After the operation, which Rispoli watched performed live under just local anesthetic on a TV monitor — “One of the greatest experiences of my life,” he said, with macabre delight — he was back on an Equicizer within two months, and on a horse’s back roughly three months later.
Mental aptitude
To win a race, that took infinitely longer. “I couldn’t buy a ride — when people saw me, they were running away.” And, just as he got his career back going again, he smashed his collarbone and broke multiple ribs not 16 months later from a barrier trial fall.
Rispoli has been candid about the pressures of riding in Hong Kong, telling the South China Morning Post before he left that he had wanted to remain there for another five or six years, “but unfortunately the only thing I could not find in this place is loyalty.”
As Rispoli puts it now, “Riding in Hong Kong, you have two options: You grow stronger or you get weaker.”
What helps Rispoli’s mental aptitude is that he’s clearly a student of the game, and something of an amateur historian, too.
He binges like others do Netflix series recordings of big races. Arcs. Derbies. Kentucky Derbys. Breeders’ Cups. He tosses out like pizza toppings the names of riders who he’s studied down the years: Piggott, Carson, Stevens, Asmussen, Gomez.
Before he came to the United States, he said he watched races from more than 50 different U.S. tracks. “How long is the stretch, if they have a chute, if they don’t have a chute, how big is the track,” he said. “I like to know, because that’s my job.”
Sharp decline of Italian racing
Not surprisingly, he’s similarly versed in the pedigreed history of Italian racing, and brings up the names of Nearco, Tesio, Ribot, Rakti and Falbrav to illustrate the sharp decline of the Italian racing industry in recent years, a trend that has seen the number of Italian breeders and the foal crop fall precipitously — a development that many see as hinging around the government assuming control of the industry some ten years ago.
“It’s sad,” Rispoli said. Indeed, as of 2019, no G1s have been run in the country. But the jockey, you might have noticed, doesn’t mince words. “I’m very direct,” he said. “I’m the kind of person who’s probably too straightforward. I like to put my head on the pillow and have no regrets.”
And he said that, as an apprentice, he had tried to poke and cajole his colleagues to strike and picket the regime change in Italy. “I said, ‘if we don’t face this problem now, in ten years, everything is going to be gone.’”
You can spot that same rabble-rousing spirit behind his antipathy towards the strict new whip rules in California, whereby jocks can use the crop no more than six times in a race — and no more than twice in succession without giving the horse the opportunity to respond — always in the underhand position.
A few days prior to the interview, the California stewards handed Rispoli a three-day ban which, when placed alongside an aborted trip to Riyadh for the Saudi Cup meeting, means that his proximity to the head of the jock’s standings at Santa Anita has a yawning look to it. (Indeed, as of publication, he had dropped to third in the table, 27 wins behind leader Flavien Prat)
Unforgiving circuit
A gut-punch? Sure. But it’s more the lack of what Rispoli sees as uniformity with which the California stewards dole out punishments that rankles the most, he said. That, and the way in which whip rules change from state to state. “We are doing exactly the same job all around the country,” he said. “Rules should be the same for everybody.”
While stewards aren’t exactly known for a maternal warmth and cozy congeniality, sometimes the SoCal circuit as a whole can be just as unforgiving.
“It’s not for everyone — there have been other successful jockeys come from Europe that have had a hard time getting into the winner’s circle here,” said Dan Blacker, trainer of Hit The Road, on whom Rispoli recently landed the G3 Thunder Road Stakes. “But Umberto has not found it an issue. Obviously, he fits it very well.”
Confidence is one reason for the quick assimilation, along with an inherent ability to put the horse “into the right spot”, Blacker added. “I’m fortunate to have him ride a few of mine, and he just seems to make the right decisions.”
Nice addition
Michael McCarthy agrees. “He’s been a nice addition to the Southern California jockey colony,” said the trainer, for whom Rispoli has won a handful of good prizes, including three Graded stakes aboard Smooth Like Strait.
“He also seems to be very good with people — the people on the front side, help on the backside. Those are the sorts of things I thought Gary Stevens was very good at,” said McCarthy.
It’s not just people. “I know when we got beat a nose in the [2020 G1] Hollywood Derby [on Smooth Like Strait], I thought it was telling that he jumped off the horse, grabbed his tack, and before he walked away from the horse, gave him a pat on the head. Thank you,” McCarthy said. “He has a passion for the equine athlete itself.”
Nature versus nurture. Innate versus environment. Sometimes it’s all about where you come from.
But not always.
Rispoli is currently #52 in the TRC Global Jockeys’ Rankings, which makes him the world’s second highest-ranked Italian rider - behind #1 Frankie Dettori.