Munnings Tale led all the way and scored a 4¾-length victory over Camden High in Friday's sixth race, the Muckleshoot Casino Purse for older fillies and mares, at Emerald Downs. The victory gave Blaine Wright his 1,000th career training win.
“I want to say thank you to everyone who helped me in getting (to 1,000), mainly the owners,” Wright said in the Emerald Downs' winner's circle. “I'm very happy to do it at home.”
Born in Renton and a resident of Enumclaw, Wright operates successful stables in Washington and California, where he recorded career win 999 earlier in the day at Pleasanton. The 48-year-old trainer ranks No. 6 in all-time Emerald Downs wins with 451 and No. 3 in stakes wins with 53. His father, Richard Wright, was also a successful longtime trainer and jockey in the Northwest.
Under a hustling ride from Alexis Valdes, Munnings Tale covered one mile in 1:37.23 and paid $16.40 to his scattered backers in the crowd. A 5-year-old Kentucky-bred daughter of Munnings out of the Tale of the Cat mare Mambo Tale, Munnings Tale is a homebred campaigned by Dr. Rodney Orr of Silverton, Ore.
Dick Bahde was hoping he'd snagged a nice allowance horse when he claimed the filly Taxed last year out of a $50,000 maiden-claiming race upon trainer Randy Morse's recommendation.
The retired businessman from Kearney, Neb., has yet to run Taxed in an allowance race. Instead, the now-3-year-old gray filly has justified Morse's course of running only in stakes, with Taxed one of the favorites for Saturday's $200,000, Grade 3 Indiana Oaks after her impressive win in Pimlico's Grade 2 Black-Eyed Susan in her last start. It was Bahde's first graded-stakes victory and the latest former claim that Morse has developed into a stakes horse.
“I didn't figure it would ever happen in my lifetime,” Bahde said of winning a graded stakes. “I'm 73 years old, been doing it for over 30 years. And if it took me another 30 years, I might be too tired to attend the race.
“Actually, it was a fairly dominant victory. That's the part that shocked me the most. It wasn't that I didn't think she could win. But we were running against one horse considered the best 3-year-old filly in the country, and that was Faiza. And we were also running against the horse that as a 2-year-old filly was considered the best in the country. That was Hoosier Philly. So, to have our $50,000 claimer just run right by them, it was amazing. My wife and I were up on the observation platform. When I saw her make that move, I figured it would be a challenge and tough run to the finish. But it didn't go that way. She had so much run, full of run.
“It was an experience of a lifetime…. It was just sheer joy, just such exhilarating joy to witness something like that and know that you own that horse. That's why we do it: It's a feeling you can't buy.”
Taxed, who went off at double-digit odds in all her prior starts for Bahde and Morse, is the 2-1 second choice in the 1 1/16-mile Indiana Oaks. The favorite is 8-5 Defining Purpose, winner of Keeneland's Grade 1 Central Bank Ashland before finishing seventh in the Kentucky Oaks.
Despite finishing second in Oaklawn Park's Fantasy (G3) behind the highly regarded Wet Paint, Taxed did not make the Kentucky Oaks field under Churchill Downs' reconfigured qualifying-points system. Plan B was the Black-Eyed Susan the day before the Preakness, where she won by 3 1/2 lengths over multiple stakes-winner Hoosier Philly, with previously unbeaten Faiza third.
“Anybody who claims a horse for $50,000 and thinks she's going to become a graded-stakes winner, that's stretching it,” Morse said. “The stars aligned, and we were lucky enough to get her. Dick is very deserving. He's been in this game a long time. He doesn't go out and buy the $300,000, $400,000, $500,000 yearlings. But he'll claim a nice horse.”
In her first start for Bahde and Morse, Taxed had finished fourth in Oaklawn's Year's End Stakes won by Defining Purpose. She then was second in the Martha Washington won by Wet Paint. But after fading to ninth in the Honeybee (G3), Morse took off the blinkers, which Taxed had worn in all her prior races. The result was the big second in the Fantasy and then the Pimlico triumph.
“The blinkers are a part of it, sure,” Morse said of the equipment change. “But she's just matured. She's gotten bigger, stronger. She's really becoming a nice racehorse. She's just got 'it.' She's not that big. To me she doesn't look like a really true route horse, so to speak. But she just amazes me. In her works, she just gallops out phenomenal. I think she'd run a mile and a half.”
Rafael Bejarano has ridden Taxed in each of her races for Morse.
“She's an amazing filly,” he said. “She's growing up day by day and getting more mature. I'm very excited for the race.”
So is Bahde, who was raised in Kearney, Neb., about 45 miles west of Fonner Park in Grand Island.
“My father said, 'We're going to the races today,' and I was 15 years old,” he recalled in a phone interview. “He said, 'Make sure you dress well, wear a sports coat. This is a special sport, and you need to respect it.' He let me drive – I didn't have my learner's permit yet, but back in Nebraska, that's OK. We weren't in the clubhouse; we were down on the apron with the railbirds, and we were one of them. We had our sports coats on. The thing that impressed me the most were the athletes, the horses, when they would come out in the post parade. I was fascinated with these animals. How fit they were. How beautiful they were.
“Back in those days, Fonner Park would draw 5,000 people and that was a full house. I've never seen people have more fun at an event. I thought, 'Gosh, this is something I'd like to be involved with my entire life.'”
It was quite a few years before Bahde could afford to become a horse owner. Around 1980, he bought half of his dad's one-seventh interest in a young horse purchased for $18,000.
Bahde said he was a middle manager for a Fortune 500 corporation.
“Then I bought a beer wholesaler, and I ran that for many years,” he said. “Somebody stopped by one day and told me he wanted it worse than I did. I sold it. Quite honestly, it's still a fixed-income situation. I'm retired so I have to make a lot of right decisions. I've got to have horses that win to be able to continue on in this business.”
Morse, who had watched the filly train, recommended claiming Taxed for the $50,000 price tag in her third career start. She won that day.
Once Morse got her in the barn, Bahde said: “Randy kept telling me, 'This filly doesn't train like normal fillies.' He said, 'There's just something special about her.' He loved her from the day we put a halter on her. The dialogue kept going like that until we decided we weren't going to start her in an allowance race, we were going to start her in a stakes race. It was that New Year's Eve stakes at Oaklawn Park, and she ran a respectable fourth. Which told us maybe we were on the right track.”
Bahde calls it “a privilege” to run in the Indiana Oaks.
“I'm thrilled to death,” he said. “She's young and she's smart and she's very talented. I think she has a very bright future. Randy has done everything right, and I have no doubt he'll continue to make very good decisions with her.”
Indiana Derby Day, the state's biggest day of horse racing, will be complemented by numerous activities, including a Virtual Reality Jockey Station, cigar rolling station to the first 500, $600 Indiana Derby Hat Contest, $2,500 Indiana Derby Legends Handicapping Contest, and a drawing for one $3,000 Megabet across the board on the Indiana Derby. A total of eight premier races are on the program featuring purses in excess of $1.1 million.
Doors open at 10:30 a.m. with ample seating both indoors and outside on a first come first serve basis. Free parking and free general admission offered to guests of all ages on the racing side. Reservations are still available in the Clubhouse by contacting Beth Litteral at (317) 421-8801. For more information, visit the website at www.caesars.com/horseshoe-indianapolis/racing-promotions or follow the track on Twitter @HSIndyRacing.
Indiana racing history started with the length of a horse's nose.
On the evening of Sept. 21, 1995, Iwazza Bad Boy was let loose to set a wide-open pace in a six-furlong allowance at Hoosier Park, leading every jump but the last one. By the slimmest of margins, jockey Rodney Prescott got Red Blaze ahead by a nose at the wire, and piloted him back to the winner's circle.
Hoosier Park was in the first month of its inaugural Thoroughbred season, the first pari-mutuel meet for the breed in the state's history. Indiana native Prescott was in his second year of riding professionally, and it was his first win in his home state.
From that point on, the individual stories of Prescott and horse racing in Indiana could not be told without one playing a major role in the other.
Nearly 28 years after willing Red Blaze to the wire, Prescott is Indiana's all-time leading rider by wins across all breeds, combining both Horseshoe Indianapolis and the now-shuttered Hoosier Park. He's the only jockey to have ridden in the state every year that Indiana has offered pari-mutuel racing.
Prescott's win total in Indiana is a fair display of his talent in the saddle, but it's also part of a greater testament to his iron endurance. No jockey in North America took more mounts than Prescott each year from 2005 to 2007 – regularly riding two full cards in different Midwest states on the same day – and his high-water mark of 2,056 starts in 2005 is the most by any rider in a single year this side of the millennium. Second place isn't even close.
The 49-year-old remains one of the busiest riders at Horseshoe Indianapolis, but the time he once spent rushing to the next track to get on another horse is now spent at a different pace.
In 2021, Prescott purchased South Pointe Farm in Franklin, Ind., with his significant other Shannon McGovern, who also works as his jockey's agent. The farm is an easy 15-mile drive away from the track, through small towns and budding cornfields, and the long spring-to-fall meet that Horseshoe Indianapolis hosts means they don't need to travel any further than that to pay the bills, while the layups and boarded horses at the farm can keep the lights on during the off-season.
Prescott's not quite ready to begin life away from the jock's room, but whatever that looks like, the 32-acre farm will be a big part of it.
“I'm just getting older, and need something to do after I get done riding, and this place came up for sale,” Prescott said. “To tell you the truth, we were looking for something a little smaller, but this place came up for sale, and we ended up with it, and we love it. We have some broodmares here, and we own one ourselves. We have a few with partners, and we have a few layups and babies.”
From The Farm To The Track
The rural life is nothing new for Prescott, who grew up on a dairy farm in Portland, Ind., between Fort Wayne and Indianapolis, near the Ohio border.
Cows were the family business, but horses were their recreation, turning barrels and poles and even staging chariot races. Getting up at the crack of dawn to go fast on horses quickly became more appealing than doing it to milk cows, but pari-mutuel racing was still years away in Indiana.
Prescott had watched a few horse races at county fairs, but his exposure to a more organized product was limited. A conversation with a prominent Midwest Quarter Horse jockey, though, was enough for him to consider the racing life; even if it meant leaving home.
“I wanted to do something with horses, and I actually happened to be at the Hoosier Horse Fair, and they had a booth set up there promoting Quarter Horse racing in the state of Indiana,” Prescott said. “I started talking to Carter Riley, asking what you do to become a jockey, because I had no idea. I was a junior or senior in high school at the time.”
Prescott joined Riley at Pit Run Park, a non-pari-mutuel Quarter Horse track in Gibson City, Ill., that ran from 1982 to 1993. The veteran got the rookie work galloping horses in the mornings, and when the show moved to other tracks, Prescott followed.
Jockey Carter Riley at Mount Pleasant Meadows.
He ended up at Turfway Park in the early spring before crossing the Ohio River later in the season to work at River Downs (known today as Belterra Park), galloping horses and getting youngsters ready for the races. He took his first professional mounts in June 1994 at River Downs, with the occasional trip to Mountaineer in West Virginia, and his first win came in Cincinnati a month later.
The ranks of young jockeys are filled with men and women whose biology will force them into a new career before their talent level would have ever driven them out, and Prescott said he was realistic about his expectations in those early years.
“I've always been a little taller, and everybody told me I was going to get too big,” he said. “I was 19-20 then, and I thought I'd only do it for a few years, and then end up someplace breaking babies, training or whatever, but I've been riding for 30 years.”
While Prescott was cutting his teeth in the Ohio Valley, Hoosier Park was finishing construction in Anderson, Ind., and the track held the state's inaugural pari-mutuel Standardbred meet in the fall of 1994. The debut Thoroughbred meet came a year later.
This began a years-long cycle of galloping horses in the mornings at River Downs, riding the afternoon card in Cincinnati, driving 2 1/2 hours to ride the night card at Hoosier Park, then driving back in the dark to start the process over in southern Ohio the following day. When Indiana Downs (later named Indiana Grand and known today as Horseshoe Indianapolis) opened in 2009 and divided the state's racing calendar in two, the drive shortened to an hour and a half.
At the peak of his production, Prescott was regularly riding up to 17 races a day. Having business consistent enough to juggle mounts at two different tracks was both a luxury and a necessity in a time before casino-expanded purses had hit the Midwest tracks.
“I was a little younger, and I had two kids,” he said. “My daughter (Anna) was born in 2000, and my son (Austin) was born in 2003. I'd bought a little farm in Ohio, so I was just working, trying to pay for that and pay for them. It's kind of what I had to do. The purses weren't great at River Downs, so I couldn't make a living there, and even here, they weren't that great back then. I was trying to make a living and get things paid for.”
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By the early 2000s, Prescott was among the country's busiest jockeys, and he led the nation in starts for the first time in 2005 when he took 2,056 mounts (he was second by wins with 340). His nearest contemporary that year was Manoel Cruz with 1,678 starts, and no jockey has taken more mounts in a single season since 2000. At one point, he went 60 consecutive days with at least one mount, taking no days off.
“I thought, 'Man, I need to cut back,' and I did cut back,” he said. “It seemed like I was cutting back, and I was still riding more horses than anyone in the country.”
Prescott led the nation by starts again in 2006 (1,893) and he hit the three-peat in 2007 (1,634).
The jockey's physical durability was on full display in this timespan, but thriving in that grind is as much about mental durability. Necessity is a powerful motivator, but Prescott said his dairy farm upbringing helped instill the fortitude to get up each day and keep going. A cow's milking schedule is rigid, with no regard for weekends or sick days. The racing calendar can often look the same way.
It was often pushing midnight by the time the nightcap winner was being led to the winner's circle in Indiana and Prescott had to drive back to Ohio. For the most part, he made the drive by himself, using the dark interstate to rest his mind before resting his body.
“I listened to the radio a lot,” he said. “It was good thinking time, I guess, especially late at night.”
Staying Close To Home
With over 33,000 career starts under his belt between the Thoroughbreds and Quarter Horses, and over 4,200 wins, it's fair to say Prescott has had plenty of reps to hone his craft.
He's also had plenty of time to define his riding style. With all those trips around the track, though, the rider said his style is to not have a style; if he's on the best horse, he thinks he can get them to the wire first. It's that simple.
“I think it changes a little bit with age, and aches and pains,” he said. “I probably don't look as good on a horse as I did 20 years ago, but I still feel good on them, and I think I do a better job than I did 20 years ago, to tell you the truth.
“You just learn little things,” Prescott continued. “You've just been in every situation out there that you could possibly be in, and you learn not to panic. You learn how to read horses, and how much the horse next to you has, and you pretty much know the move the jock in front of you is going to make before he does. It's just routine, it's every day. That part of it, I think I've gotten better at.”
It's not uncommon for jockeys to move their tack to points around the country to climb the ladder or break a cold streak, but Prescott has rarely ventured outside of the Midwest and Kentucky over the course of nearly three decades.
Once again, necessity played a big role in that decision.
“I always had business here,” he said. “I've always done well. Once you start having kids, you want to be a little closer.
“I went to Ellis Park one year after my kids were born, and I spent two weeks there without coming home,” he continued. “It was the longest I was ever away from home once they were born. I remember coming home, and they grew while I was gone, and that was hard for me to take. That was the last year for Ellis.”
Prior to 2013, Hoosier Park and Horseshoe Indianapolis hosted multiple racing breeds, and they swapped meets at the halfway point of the year. When one hosted the under-saddle types, the other had harness racing. Then, the tracks became breed-exclusive, with Horseshoe Indianapolis taking over the Thoroughbreds and Quarter Horses and Hoosier Park sticking with the Standardbreds.
Prescott enjoyed the setup at Hoosier Park, a seven-eighths oval with banked turns, but he said he's been impressed with how Horseshoe Indianapolis has evolved since it became the full-time home of flat racing.
“The track's changed over the years,” he said. “We've had different managements and trackmen. When they first opened, it was a lot more speed-biased than it is now. There's always maintenance to a track, and the track changes a little bit. I think it's really good right now. This is probably the best I've seen both the main course and the turf course.”
Jockey Rodney Prescott was joined by his agent, Shannon McGovern and (from left) then clerk of scales Steve Cahill, the late Jon Schuster, vice president and general manager of racing at Indiana Grand, and former director of racing Kevin Greely
Staying in Indiana wasn't always a given for the hometown hero, though.
Prior to the state passing casino gaming for its racetracks in 2007, purses in Indiana were flagging, and even the strongest of body and will can't keep up the schedule Prescott was running forever. Without the additional purse funding, Prescott's life and career might have looked very different, along with the Indiana recordbook.
“I would have probably had to go somewhere else at some point, had they not,” he said. “I wouldn't be able to stay in one place now. If you look at the purses before the slots and after, there's no comparison. That helped a bunch. You wouldn't see half the people here if it wasn't for the slots.”
Not Your Average Jockey's Agent
Buying South Pointe Farm wasn't the first time that Prescott and McGovern have worked together.
McGovern has had Prescott's book at various points since 2017, when she first began representing him at Hawthorne Race Course about a year after they started dating.
An Illinois native, McGovern got her start as a groom at the former Fairmount Park (now FanDuel Sportsbook and Horse Racing), before learning how to gallop horses and getting out on the track. She hung her own shingle as a trainer in the Midwest in the mid-2000s, and then she began representing riders between stints as an assistant trainer for Larry Rivelli and Bernie Flint.
McGovern and Prescott first crossed paths in 2011 when she was running a pony horse business at the Indiana tracks, but they fell out of touch when she went to Florida to work for Rivelli. Their roads intersected again in 2017 when McGovern returned to Indiana to join Flint's staff.
When the 2017 racing season was over in Indiana, both Prescott and McGovern were at a crossroads with their next steps, so they decided to go in the same direction.
“Bernie goes to New Orleans after this, and he's got an assistant for there, so he didn't really need me for the winter,” McGovern said. “We were deciding what we wanted to do, because we had plans to go to Oaklawn, and I said 'Why don't you let me take your book and we'll go up to Chicago, because that's where I started and I had enough business there.' We had a pretty successful meet up there.”
Shannon McGovern and Rodney Prescott
McGovern became the first female jockey's agent to represent a meet-leading rider in Indiana's history when Prescott took the Horseshoe Indianapolis title in 2018.
Hustling mounts for jockeys is an overwhelmingly male-dominated profession, and McGovern described the atmosphere as “brutal” when she first started taking books, noting that agents she'd known and been friendly with for years quickly changed their tune once she became competition.
So, how did she persevere on such a difficult road?
“I'm not typically one to let someone walk over me,” she said. “I'm pretty vocal.”
Today, both McGovern and Prescott say their professional relationship is smooth sailing, but it wasn't without its bits of turbulence to get there.
In 2021, Prescott moved his book back to longtime agent John Herbstreit after a disagreement, while McGovern picked up Alex Achard and Samuel Bermudez. Prescott finished the Horseshoe Indianapolis meet as the third-leading rider by wins, while Bermudez racked up a career-best eight stakes victories.
When they got back on the same page, the two decided to race exclusively in Indiana, which they've done ever since. Though she's no longer juggling two riders and the drive is shorter, McGovern said managing Prescott's book is not without its own set of unique challenges.
“We like it because we're not traveling and there's a lot of racing opportunity here,” McGovern said. “That's a long meet. Where you run into the problem is a lot of the trainers you're riding for, eventually your horses will meet the same conditions, and then I've got to do what's best for my business and ride the best horse, but you also have to look out for the people that are loyal to you, too.”
It might be a lot of puzzle pieces to fit together, but McGovern was quick to say that having a jockey who merited it was a good problem to have.
“He's got a lot of patience,” McGovern said. “He doesn't really let things get to him. In this game, you're hired and fired, and re-hired. He just takes it all in stride. Nothing ever seems to get underneath his skin.
“He's my jock, but I'd probably have to say he's the best rider here.”
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From The Track To The Farm
After getting on horses at a breakneck pace for years, mornings look a bit different for Prescott these days.
On a day off from the races in mid-June when horses were still on their morning jogs at Horseshoe Indianapolis, he and McGovern were home getting their pool ready for the summer.
Prescott admitted that adjusting to a slower way of life has been an incremental process, from riding two tracks a day, to one, to cutting back his racetrack schedule to focus on other things.
“I remember getting a couple days off and thinking, 'Jiminy Christmas, what do I do with myself?'” he said. “It just didn't seem right.”
Prescott remains among Horseshoe Indianapolis' top 10 jockeys by starts, but the farm's got plenty to keep him busy when he's not riding.
The long driveway back to their house is surrounded by pastures with new fencing he and McGovern have put in over the past couple years. The property is well kept-up, and their barn is clean enough to mistake it for a recent build, with good circulation and plentiful stalls filled with mares, babies, and layups.
They've got their hands in a lot of pots at South Pointe Farm, but it's all part of seeing what sticks for an undefined point in the future that goes beyond race riding.
“We've kind of slowed down a little bit riding this year compared to the last years, being a little more picky and choosy about what we do,” McGovern said. “Rodney's plans are to hopefully retire at 50, but it may come sooner, it may come later.
“Rodney broke 10 babies out here last year and kind of enjoyed it, except when it was real cold,” she continued.
Rodney Prescott with Hard to Get Even and her Shagaf colt.
Among the farm's residents is a Quarter Horse stallion, Strolinonafrghttrain, a son of graded stakes winner Freighttrain B, who the couple bred to the mare they own.
Indiana's Quarter Horse racing program is as robust as they come east of the Mississippi River, and Prescott has ridden plenty of winners among that breed over the years. If the ensuing foal reaches the track, competing aboard a horse he bred would certainly be a unique experience, but Prescott wasn't sure if the math would work out.
“It's pushing that date out there a little far,” he said with a chuckle. “We'll see what we're doing when that one gets to running. We're a long way from that.”
As long as Prescott keeps up a solid pace of winner's circle trips, which he's certainly been doing, his record as Indiana's winningest jockey is likely safe for as long as he's an active member of the Horseshoe Indianapolis colony.
It's a monumental achievement for a home-team rider whose career has grown with the state's industry, but Prescott maintains a remarkably zen outlook about his place within Indiana's racing history, and where it could go in the future as the stars of other jockeys rise.
“That's going to get broken, there's no doubt about it,” he said about the wins record. “There are probably others right behind me, but that is a lot of races to win in one spot. I've been here since day one, and it's always worked for me. There's never really been a reason for me to go anywhere else, and I've had a good career. Indiana's been good to me.”
Prescott was just as zen about what he wants out of the remainder of his career.
For all he's done in Indiana, Prescott has never booted home a winner in a graded stakes race, which means he's never won either of the state's signature heats: The Grade 3 Indiana Derby or the G3 Indiana Oaks.
Prescott has ridden in the Indiana Derby three times and the Oaks twice, with his best finish in either race being a fifth aboard Southern Africa in the 2007 Derby. He'll be plenty busy during Saturday's Indiana Derby card with seven mounts, four of them stakes races, but he was not booked for either of the day's graded races.
As Prescott walked through his barn and leaned against a door overlooking the pastures with a Thermos of coffee in his hand, graded stakes accolades weren't what was on his mind. His future was in front of him, and the road to get there looked a lot like the road he took.
“Just stay healthy, and win some more races. That's the goal,” he said. “It's kind of always been the goal, just win as many as you can, and do it again tomorrow.”
Rachel Slevinsky sighs at the recollection of her first career race.
The apprentice rider knew that winning her debut would be a tall order. It certainly wasn't out of the question as the six horses made their way to the starting gate for the sixth race at Century Mile in the early evening last July, but it would take a perfect trip and a little racing luck to see it come to fruition.
Slevinsky, aboard 19-1 Cuvee Tee, the longest shot on the tote board, had dreamt of this moment for years, hopeful it could produce the fairytale-type ending she had played out in her mind in the days leading up to the seven-furlong sprint over the Calgary oval's dirt track.
That isn't how it would play out.
The bay mare, then four, hopped at the start, causing Slevinsky to slip out of the irons.
At the wire, the Cuvee Tee was fifth of six, passing a tiring foe late, four lengths back of the fourth-place finisher.
“Most of the time, nothing goes to plan. Even if you've mapped out a race in your head, it never seems to play out that way the majority of the time. That's how it kind of went in my first race. Luckily, I had been on the horse in the mornings, and I knew her pretty well. She was known for being a little finicky in the gate, so when the gates opened, she took that hop.”
Slevinsky, however, found a silver lining in the off-board result.
“She took care of me. When I got back in the stirrups, she held her path. She could have ducked and dived or run off with me, but she took care of me. She tried her hardest and that's all I could have asked for.”
Two months to the day after her first race, the apprentice had a far more memorable outcome when she teamed with the dark bay mare Sophie McTrophy in the first race at Century Mile.
Sent on her way at 6-1, the daughter of Declassify dueled with another rival early, put that one away, then moved clear of her five rivals ahead of the stretch run and coasted home to an easy four-length score in the 6 ½-furlong main track race.
“It was a great moment. You always wonder what that feeling will be like and it was even better than I imagined.”
The native of St. Albert, a city in Alberta on the Sturgeon River northwest of the City of Edmonton, spent countless hours on her grandparents' farm in Bonnyville, a two-and-a-half hour's drive northeast of her home, during her childhood days, a place where her riding horses stay throughout the year.
Slevinsky's introduction to racetrack life began at 16 when she started out as a groom for trainer Jerri Robertson before going on to gallop for various barns.
She wasn't expecting her part-time gig to turn into a riding career, at least early on.
“It was a summer job, which helped pay for my riding horse and other things,” she recalled. “But then I fell in love with it.”
Months later, she was on the path to earning her riding license.
Upon graduation from the jockey training program at Olds College in Alberta, Slevinsky was mentored by Nancy Jumpsen, who won the Sovereign Award as Canada's champion apprentice in 1985.
“It was a fun journey to get to the point where I could ride in my first race.”
After competing in her native Alberta, Slevinsky, just a little over a year after her debut, moved her tack east where she will look to make her mark in Ontario, competing at both Woodbine and Fort Erie.
Part of a crowded and competitive Woodbine jockey colony has meant stepping up her game and showing trainers she's capable of keeping pace against her more seasoned contemporaries.
“It was tough because to them, I am just another face, just another helmet. There are a lot of riders and a lot of big riders here at Woodbine. It's not an easy job to start with and it's even tougher when you are an apprentice. Back home, I was galloping for people that I had already established relationships with. Here, I needed to create those relationships. I had to show everyone I galloped for what I was capable of doing with each horse.”
That persistence and perseverance, coupled with her personable nature, has paid off.
“You start to earn trust, to have people see my strengths and give me a chance. I'm also left-handed, and there aren't as many bugs or journeyman who are left-handed by nature. I'm always a happy person, so I have never had an issue with anyone. They have all been kind to me. I think that helps as well.”
As do her performances on the racetrack.
So far, her efforts, both in the mornings and afternoons, have yielded a successful campaign to date.
Slevinsky won her first Woodbine race with 11-1 A Gal For T J, trained by Tedston Holder, to a front-running score in a 1 1/16 mile turf race on June 15.
The victory came on her 24th birthday.
“She took off and she was awesome. That was a great feeling to draw away. And to win it on my birthday was extra special. And it was also my only ride of the day. I couldn't have asked for a better moment.”
On July 5, she posted a two-win day at Fort Erie.
“I got the early double… also, the only races I rode that day. So, that was my first daily double. It was pretty cool.”
Hard work remains the foundation of the five-pound apprentice's approach to her craft.
So too does maintaining a healthy work-life balance.
On Thursday, after getting on seven horses on a hot, humid July 5 morning at the Toronto oval, Slevinsky was happy to remain outdoors, albeit in a more laid-back setting ahead of a late Thursday afternoon card at Woodbine.
“I do like to unwind a little bit, to reset for the day. Usually, I'll take my dog out for a walk or during the summer, I like to sit outside in the sun. I have a couple books that I like to read every now and again.”
No need to guess the theme of her reading material.
“They're horse books,” she said with a laugh. “For the most part, I like to sit out in the sun and read the program. Riding can be very stressful, but I love what I do, so I am just really grateful to all the people and for all the opportunities that have come my way. Everyone has been very kind and I've enjoyed riding every horse that I've been on.”
Even the ones with unmistakable eccentricities and peculiarities.
Slevinsky welcomes the challenge.
“I just get along with those crazy horses. I don't know what it is about them, but I can get them to calm down. I think I'm able to understand them in ways maybe some other riders can't. The tougher, older horses, and the babies, when they are happy and they know they are safe, they run a lot harder for you.”
As of July 5, she has eight wins from 46 mounts, along with 20 top-three finishes.
Although it's over a four-hour flight from Toronto back to St. Albert, Slevinsky is feeling right at home at Canada's Showplace of Racing.
“I want to keep going, win races, and win the big races. This is just the beginning. I haven't really broken the surface yet. It's been incredible so far and I can't wait to see where my career takes me.”
