R.A.C.E. Fund to Auction Hoff Racing Memorabilia Collection

The R.A.C.E. Fund, a 501 C 3 non-profit organization established in 2004 and TAA accredited, will begin auctioning the private racing memorabilia of Christopher Hoff on eBay beginning Oct. 25.

“As a Thoroughbred racing photographer, I had the opportunity to witness the performance of such equine athletes as Alysheba, Sunday Silence, Personal Ensign, Private Terms and

many others,” Hoff said. “However, I also saw the fate of the 'discarded' horses who were deemed unprofitable for their owners. These beautiful horses are too often forgotten and I am thrilled that my collection of racing memorabilia can help provide a well-deserved pleasant retirement or help with the rescue of these wonderful animals.”

R.A.C.E. Fund President Marlene Murray said, “We cannot thank Mr. Hoff enough for donating such a vast collection of racing memorabilia to our organization to help the horses.”

The auction will be conducted in phases, with the first phase on eBay from Oct. 25 at 8 p.m. (EST) and ending Oct. 28 at 8 p.m.

Featured items include: Breeders' Cup Programs from 1984 to 1992 in mint condition; Breeders' Cup Racing Forms; signed pictures of trainers Carl Nafzger, Jack Van Berg, Sonny Hine, D. Wayne Lukas and jockey Laffit Pincay; Share The Glory and Fly So Free saddlecloths; and a 1987 framed Washington, D.C. International program signed by jockeys.

Subsequent phases and auction dates are yet to be determined. Updates can be found at www.racefund.org.

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McCarron: Connect With The Horse and the Rest Will Follow

How to ride your way into the Hall of Fame? Impossible question. Nobody could reduce such a journey, the decades of endeavor and experience, to a single explanation, a single concept. In the case of Chris McCarron, however, you can actually reduce the answer to a single word, simply by asking a different question.

That question is: why did you make seven trips to Washington to lobby for the HISA bill? And the single word, answering both questions? Cooperation.

That's what he always sought from his mounts; and that's also the premise he commends for all our dealings, as an industry, with the Thoroughbred.

McCarron rode professionally for 28 years. If you combine 34,000 race rides with all those he breezed in the morning, you get past 50,000 mounts.

“And what a learning playground that was!” McCarron exclaims. “If I just showed up every day and my boss says, 'I want you to go five-eighths in a minute…' Well, yeah, that sounds simple enough. But I'd be paying attention to every little thing that horse was telling me. And then I would know what to tell it. And I developed a skill, an ability to communicate with Thoroughbreds, in such a fashion that I would get what I'm looking for. And that was cooperation. The most important thing I ever wanted was cooperation.”

McCarron has welcomed TDN to his Lexington home, the exemplary professionalism of that long riding career (along, no doubt, with all the golf he plays nowadays) plainly legible, at 68, in his spry posture and animated engagement. It was 21 years ago this week that McCarron quit the saddle, aptly concluding at Hollywood Park with Came Home (Gone West), his final Derby horse, as his 7,141st winner. His mounts had earned an unprecedented $264 million. But McCarron didn't just ride off into the sunset.

Rewind to another day at the same track, 12 years previously. McCarron is supposed to ride Sunday Silence on his 4-year-old debut. Earlier on the card, however, there's a pile-up. So while Pat

Valenzuela resumes a partnership sundered by a ban the previous year, McCarron is in hospital with a broken femur, fibula and ulna.

And he gets to asking: “What if this had been worse? What if I broke my back, my neck? I better start laying the groundwork for a second career.”

Having always tried to get inside a horse's head, he was intrigued by the idea of training. Methodical as ever, then, he started studying for a possible next vocation. After breezing, he would stick around the barn and see how things were done.

But then the people he was shadowing all started to say the same thing.

“Chris, I hope you're not thinking about getting your trainer's license?”

Why ever not?

“Well, we don't think you can do to a horse what's necessary to win races.”

“This is way before all our new medication changes,” McCarron emphasizes now. “Every barn has a horse that has a problem. Every barn has horses that turn up lame at any given time. I did it for a week and I couldn't stomach it.”

What he had seen was not his idea of working with the horse, of cooperation. That experience doubtless stayed with him, years later, when joining a team knocking one congressman's door after another. He testified. It took eight years to get the bill signed. But this is a man whose dedication to welfare of horse and rider has been unstinting. Indeed, during a stint as general manager at Santa Anita, he banned shockwave therapy.

McCarron in retirement with his grandson Griffin | Katie Ritz

How did that go down on the backside? “Some of the trainers wanted to hang me.”

And that takes us back to this whole business of co-operation. Because just as a jockey can misuse the whip, the pharmaceutical trainers aren't asking a horse, but forcing it.

“Right,” McCarron says. “But I'm optimistic, I really am. There's a plethora of smart, dedicated, persevering individuals who are going to be enforcing these rules; a great group of people that have gotten together for one cause, for one end, and that's the safety of the horses. Being a jockey, that's paramount for me. Because if the horses are safer, automatically jockeys are safer.”

Significant to hear McCarron still describe himself as a jockey. Evidently the born rider never “stops,” any more than he ever really “starts.” Somewhere along the line, he just discovers what he is. Certainly there was nothing in McCarron's Massachusetts upbringing to explain his intuition for the horse. As a kid, his dream was to play for the Boston Bruins. But then his older brother Gregg, simply because he had a jockey's build, had the fortune to be introduced to Suffolk Downs trainer Odie Clelland.

“Turns out he was like our second dad,” McCarron recalls. “Just a class act. Odie was well known for bringing out young boys and girls to learn how to be jockeys, and he was an outstanding horseman as well. So Gregg started playing hooky from school. And a couple of months later during dinner he said, 'Mom, dad, I think I'm going to quit school and get a job on the racetrack.' Mom slams her fork down and says, 'Over my dead body! No son of mine's ever going to be involved with a bunch of derelicts and gamblers and degenerates.'”

She owed this image of the track to a couple of visits a year with the Knights of Columbus.

“And they'd see what we called the 'stoopers',” McCarron recalls. “These old guys with the stogie in their mouth, the hat, binoculars around their neck and an armful of racing information. And they'd walk around stooping down, 'Is this ticket any good? This ticket?' In the filth.”

Mrs. McCarron's opinion can scarcely have been improved after Gregg was given a leg-up for the first time.

“The colt took one step forward and Gregg landed behind the saddle,” McCarron recalls. “The colt bucked him off and then kicked him right in the face. Shattered the orbital bone, broke his nose, broke some teeth. Mom said, 'I'm praying that this will remove any desire Gregg might have to become a jockey.' But as soon as he was healed, he was back on the track. And he stayed there 25 years.”

If that wasn't enough to stop Gregg, who rode 2,403 winners, it certainly wasn't going to stop his brother. McCarron made his own start in 1971, before his senior year in high school, and was instantly besotted. And, actually, when the rest of the family saw the work ethic instilled by the brothers' hardboot mentor, they understood.

“Even when I was still an exercise boy, Odie taught us to pay really close attention to every horse we threw a leg over,” McCarron says. “Not just once, twice, but every time I scale a horse, I should be learning something. So that evolved into learning what makes a horse tick. The more familiar with a horse's desires and dislikes, the more successful I became-and the more part of that horse's performance I became.”

Hence this vital search for a wavelength, “whether it's a filly bouncing all over the place and I get her to settle down, or a big old lazy gelding that needs to be woken up.”

Obviously across 50,000 horses, there were plenty of recurring responses. But you could never make assumptions.

“John Henry was mean as a horse could be, in the stall,” McCarron recalls. “Even though he was a gelding, even at the ripe old age of nine, if you're not careful he'll hurt you. But in the afternoon, he was as straightforward as he could be. Seventeen different jockeys rode him and just about everybody won on him. So he was a very generous horse with his ability.

Tiznow training for the Breeders' Cup | Horsephotos

“Tiznow, the opposite. You could put your hand in his mouth, he wouldn't bite down. But you tell him to do something he doesn't want to do, morning or afternoon, he's going to flip you the bird. So I had to be really studious, on his back, to determine what exactly will end up in cooperation.”

Some horses were like bicycles. Alphabet Soup: keep asking, he'd keep giving. Hard work, but for predictable reward. Tiznow, you sense, was more satisfying precisely because more challenging.
McCarron largely resisted using the stick on the big horse.

“I could use it for encouragement,” he recalls. “But if he wasn't ready, he would let me know by pinning his ears. I actually learned that by watching his other riders, Alex Solis and then Victor Espinoza. I watched them and thought, 'I wonder if he's really okay with being hit.'”

Then came a notorious morning, a week before his second Breeders' Cup. The instructions were to backtrack to the half-mile pole, turn with the pony, canter to the wire and breeze a circuit. The first bit goes to plan. Once turned, however, Tiznow plants himself.

“Okay, well, I'll just wait,” McCarron says. “I wait five minutes. Still doesn't want to go. Backtracked some more. Same result. Backtracked again. Now I'm over at the six-and-a-half pole and it's 30 minutes into this exercise.”

With trainer Jay Robbins way off in the grandstand, McCarron calls an audible: he hollers to the starting gate for some blinkers. But no, Tiznow, doesn't take to that suggestion either. Then, suddenly, with McCarron's feet out of the irons, he starts to jog. Quickly McCarron squeezes his toes back in-and Tiznow takes off. And, hell, now he's too strong.

Another audible: he'd break off at the half-mile pole. That's the kind of confidence that comes with the Hall of Fame. But one of the other things that got McCarron there was timing his own works. And, at the quarter pole, he glances at his wrist: 23-and-one. Too fast. But the more he tries restraint, the harder the horse goes. Another glimpse at his watch, passing the wire: 47 flat. Tiznow keeps rolling, works the mile in 1:36 3/5-and gallops out strong, too.

Everyone's asking what can be bugging the horse: he must be sore, in body or mind. But McCarron feels that Tiznow just wanted to show that he wouldn't be rushed. He loved to stand out on the track watching the other horses; and his usual work rider (good as he was) was a freelance with a living to earn, with other horses waiting. Besides, Tiznow actually put in a beautiful breeze.
Come the race, even so, McCarron can't know which Tiznow will come out of the gate.

“He broke running, check that box,” he recalls. “He's got a hold of me, check that box. Going down the backside, he's relaxed, check that box. I told Jay in the paddock, 'Don't be surprised if I don't hit him, because I don't want the Tiznow of today to be the Tiznow of last Saturday.' [But] Sakhee was full of run, and at the 16th pole he's a neck in front. Well, I got nothing to lose at this point. So I tapped him left-handed. Now, when a horse re-breaks at that stage of a mile-and-a-quarter race, it's not like the acceleration you get from a turf horse, when they drop down and come home in 23. But I felt the acceleration. And all of a sudden I was full of hope. And then Tom [Durkin] yelled, 'Tiznow wins it for America.' I was like, wow, this is big.”

Just one snapshot, this, of how a great rider ekes the best from a horse; and, yes, gets them to co-operate.

“I firmly believe that the horses most desirous to win carry that with them all the time,” McCarron says. “They definitely know when they win. I think that the breed has demonstrated a superiority-inferiority segregation, if you will, in the wild. And the Thoroughbred brings that to the table as well. There is a hierarchy. The ones that are followers, they're probably a bunch of losers. And the leaders are those that bring their game every time.”

Who does that remind you of? Because surely that's true of jockeys, too?

“I think so,” McCarron accepts. “No question, most of the jockeys I had the pleasure of riding with and against, they're multi-time champions because of their tremendous desire to do the very best they possibly can. I look back and have to pinch myself: what a classroom I had.”

Through the 1980s, in that Californian colony, he was riding against nine Hall of Famers.

“And I was always seeking answers,” McCarron says. “I see Laffit do something, I'll just watch and figure that out. A lot of times I could ask him. But when you get to the point where you're as competitive as they are, you didn't want to impose. I didn't want to go to Shoe and say, 'How did you get that filly to change leads like that? I couldn't when I rode her.'”

Instead he would listen intently as they all came in and stood watching the replay. Nonetheless McCarron is adamant. “I didn't fear any of them,” he says. “I had to go to work every day with the attitude that I'm better than anybody out there. It's a question of me getting on the right horse.”

He had powerful evidence behind him. “I rode my first race on January 24, 1974,” he recalls. “I broke my maiden on February 9, my 10th ride. By the end of March, riding at Bowie, I'm going to say I had 30 winners. Which is crazy. From April 1 to December 31, I rode another 510.

“How in the world could I have done this? There's only one answer. I am blessed with God-given talent to communicate with Thoroughbreds, bottom line. Then I have to go ahead and take that, capitalize on it, put it to good use every single time I throw my leg over a horse's back.”

After 1,011 winners in his first two years, McCarron was invited to Hollywood Park for an all-star race.

“My agent wouldn't let me go, because he was fearful that if I see those swinging palm trees out there, I may not want to come home,” McCarron says. “He was right!”

McCarron did go when invited again the following year and, forget the palm trees, he knew he had to measure himself against the best. Every now and then, in the Bowie racing office, he had overheard the agents: “Yeah, he might be able to ride around here, but if he thinks he can go out to California and do the same, he's mistaken.”

So that desire, the same desire that set the best horses apart, where had that come from?

“My family,” McCarron says. “My mom and dad were incredibly hard workers. They raised nine of us. My mom had a little one in diapers for 20 years straight, between my eldest brother Joe and my youngest sister Colette. And we were all athletic, all competitive.”

Between nature and nurture, then, he had something special to work with. And he tried to share that by starting the first jockey school in America. Invited to address one in Japan, in 1988, he had been blown away. Why weren't American kids offered that kind of opportunity, when they'd had a school in South Africa as long ago as 1960 and others had meanwhile opened in Latin America, Europe, Australia? Having been dismayed by the way horses were trained, he resolved to train people instead.

To this day, then, he retains a vigilant interest in the role models available to young jockeys.

“The rider of today doesn't look anywhere near as good on a horse as the riders of yesteryear,” he says candidly. “I can't for the life of me figure out why jockeys across the pond, most notably England and Ireland, didn't emulate Frankie. They look terrible on a horse. Frankie learned his trade here. That's why he looks so good. And it's not the American style, it's the Panamanian style.”
He hates to see jockeys standing up down the back stretch, their butts way above the saddle.

“Where the heck's that coming from?” he asks. “Laziness. It's more strenuous to get down and stay down for a long period. Harder on your legs, quads, hamstrings. These guys that get way up off a horse's back have no idea how much drag they're increasing.”

He remembers Joe Allen's wife Rhonda taking a set of aerodynamic silks to NYU, back in the 1980s. The lab computed a gain, over a mile, of around 15 feet.

“Go down the road with the window down, at 40 miles an hour, and then just turn your hand,” he says. “Cyclists, runners, skiers, swimmers shave their bodies because the hair follicles have bubbles. If that creates drag, what is [riding] up here doing?”

His students could never shake McCarron off balance, when he modeled the equicizer for them. But there was always more than one kind of equilibrium involved in the fulfilment of his own talent. Getting onto Sunday Silence, after all, was just the result of one guy being the ultimate professional-and another, well, not so much.

Really all the key ingredients were already in place, the day he rode his first winner: not just the innate connection with the horse, but the seriousness of mind, the diligence of heart.

All that said, is there anything he would tell his younger self, that snowy day at Bowie?

“Boy,” he says, and pauses to think. “I'd say that you're getting ready to jump into a career that can be quite hazardous, and that you must always keep your wits about you.” But it's the next bit that's key. “And that if you learn to love the horse, and you're passionate about what you do, you'll be successful.”

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Jockey Avery Whisman Passes Away at 23

Jockey Avery Whisman, who rode in the Mid-Atlantic region after beginning his career in 2018, passed away Wednesday at the age of 23 after what his family described as a “prolonged illness.” He was at his parents' home in Versailles, Kentucky at the time of his passing. Whisman had not ridden since accepting mounts Aug. 23 at Presque Isle Downs.

Though Whisman had been ill, his mother, Salli, described his passing as “a sudden an unexcepted event.”

“He absolutely loved the sport,” Salli Whisman said. “He was an incredible horseman. If you talked to anybody in the industry who worked with him they will tell you he was always kind and gracious and polite and had an incredible smile on his face. When he was on a horse he was only thinking about that horse and he brought all the skills he learned as a youngster. He could settle any horse. Everyone loved how quietly he sat on a horse and how he could read what horse needed.”

“From the time I first met him, we just clicked,” said trainer Matthew Kintz. “We had a lot of success together last year. I was really looking forward to him having a bright future. I'm thankful I was able to enjoy the time I did have with him because he was a great guy.”

After learning of Whisman's death, Hall of Famer Mike Smith took to Twitter to pay tribute to the young jockey.

“R.I.P my little brother you will Always be so Loved,” read his tweet.

Whisman met Smith when he moved to Southern California in the summer of 2018 where he went to prepare for his career. Smith took Whisman under his wing and gave him boots and the saddle he used win winning the GI Kentucky Derby in 2005 aboard Giacomo (Holy Bull). The same saddle was given to Smith by Laffit Pincay Jr. when he retired in 2003.

Salli Whisman said the entire family was involved in eventing and that her son had been around horses since he was a toddler.

“I wanted to have a career where I could ride,” Avery Whisman told the Laurel media relations department in 2019. “I love riding horses, I love working with them in the mornings and teaching them and trying to make them better and improve every single day. Just being around horses, it's what I love. I wanted to find a career where I could do that for the rest of my life. Unfortunately in the eventing and show world, there's not really any kind of money in it. You can't support yourself doing that, so when I started galloping and started making a little money and started getting a little taste of the racing industry, I loved it. It made the most sense.”

Whisman made his debut Dec. 18, 2018 at Turf Paradise. He would move to the Maryland circuit in 2019 and also rode winners at Presque Isle and at Colonial Downs.

“He was a bit of an adrenaline junky,” his mother said. “He loved the speed.”

Whisman had 90 career winners. His best year came in 2019 when he had 53 winners.

He is survived by his mother, his father Lyman, a former steeplechase jockey, and sisters Caitlin Pinkney-Atkinson, Emma Whisman and Clare McCabe. In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made to the The Permanently Disabled Jockeys Fund.

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NBC, NYRA TV Host Laffit Pincay Joins Writers’ Room

As one of the most recognizable television personalities in racing, Laffit Pincay has a front-row seat to some of the grandest spectacles in the sport, and as the son of one of the greatest jockeys who ever lived, he also has had first-hand experience with some of racing's most iconic moments from a very young age. Wednesday, the excellent broadcaster for NBC and the New York Racing Association joined the TDN Writers' Room presented by Keeneland as the Green Group Guest of the Week to preview next month's Breeders' Cup, relive some of his favorite memories from growing up in a household steeped in racing and talk about how his perspective has shifted as he has become one of the faces of the sport.

Asked about his upbringing and when he figured out that he wanted to work in racing, Pincay said, “I didn't grow up following [racing] all that closely. I was a huge baseball, football, basketball fan. I always knew I wanted to be involved in sports in some capacity. Riding was never an option. I was wearing my dad's suits to the track on the rare occasion when I would go when I was 12 or 13. Even if I wanted to ride, he wouldn't have allowed it. He said, 'If you do it, you'd better be really good, because it's a really difficult life.' It's not quite what it's made out to be. The way he had to starve himself. No offseason.

“It wasn't something, even if I was built to be a jockey, that he would have allowed. It wasn't until my teenage years that I took an interest in the sport and that was just father and son figuring out a way to bond. It was me taking an interest in his business. I found cabinets full of VHS tapes of big races he had won. I watched those over and over and over again. So I kind of taught myself the history of the sport in that way. When it came time to decide what I wanted to do for a living, as much as I love sports, I wasn't going to be an athlete. Television seemed like the right avenue. My first job was at News 12 in The Bronx. Covering high school sports and occasionally the Yankees. Then I fell into horse racing just looking for a job when I got back from New York, and it's gone on from there.”

Pincay also reflected on the importance of being able to broadcast racing last year during the COVID-induced shutdown, saying, “We were going through such a trying time and the anxiety that comes with that, with no other sports going on. So many people told us that was their escape on a day-to-day basis. To just check out. We didn't have to watch the news and worry about everything for those few hours during the course of an afternoon and what a difference that made to [people], it was special for us to hear that. If ever there was a sport designed to thrive during the course of the pandemic, it was horse racing, where you don't have a lot of human-to-human contact. We were fortunate to be distracted and be able to do our jobs. I can't tell you how many people I know in the media, in sports media specifically, who weren't able to work or who were laid off or lost jobs, adding more anxiety to an already anxious situation.”

Elsewhere on the show, which is also sponsored by Coolmore, West Point Thoroughbreds and Legacy Bloodstock, the writers appreciated the consistency of presumptive champion Letruska (Super Saver), debated the idea of penalizing trainers for equine fatalities and discussed the alleged Gulfstream betting coup that led to a jockey suspension. Click here to watch the podcast; click here for the audio-only version or find it on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

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