European Exercise Riders in America | Trainer Magazine | European Trainer Article Index

Feb 5

Feb 5 European Exercise Riders in America

IVE me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses...” who can gallop Thoroughbreds in early morning darkness, breeze them in desired times over specified distances, break them from a starting gate... This amended version of the Statue of Liberty’s message might as well be at the gates to any backstretch in America – there are that many foreign exercise riders plying their trade in the United States. English, Irish, even Scandinavian riders, and an occasional South African constitute a modern-day melting pot on American racetracks. What has brought them to America is not too far from what has always led immigrants “across the pond.” The U.S. is still the “Golden Door,” to borrow again from the Statue of Liberty, or more precisely, the door to gold for “Euros” of the human variety. Gold as in pay, however, is actually a relative term. Exercise riders in the U.S. earn anywhere from $600 to $800 a week – comparable to what is paid in pounds or euros in, say, Newmarket or Kildare. But what is required to earn the wage is as different as a Newmarket training yard is from a shedrow at Aqueduct. In simplest terms, exercise riding in the U.S. is, well, riding. In Europe it’s riding plus work, and a lot of it. Speaking of her homeland, Leigh Hogben of Kent, England, said, “It’s more of a farm environment. You have three or four horses to look after, and they are your responsibility. You feed them. You muck their stalls. Then you ride and come back and groom them. You hold the horses for the blacksmith. You do everything – turn them out, bring them in, take the horses racing.” Hogben, who rides for Graham Motion at Fair Hills Training Center in Maryland and other U.S. locations where Motion stables, states the obvious: “It’s longer days.” In the U.S. exercise riders may be on as many as eight horses in a day, but be done by 11 a.m. – all without touching a rub rag, brush or pitchfork. In short, riders in the U.S. earn roughly double what their European counterparts do if a comparison is made on an hourly wage basis. “I gallop the horses here, and I work in a bar a couple of nights a week and do other stuff. You have a lot more free time,” said Hogben, who travels to the training facility at Palm Meadows in Florida in the winter. Exercise riding in Europe, on the other hand, according to Hogben, “occupies your whole life.” Brendan Walsh, assistant trainer and exercise rider for Eddie Kenneally at Churchill Downs, elaborated on how riding in the U.K. can occupy more time than in the U.S.: “In Newmarket, when you go out on a set you’re sitting on a horse for 45 minutes to an hour, and it’s a long walk to the exercise grounds and a long walk home.” Michael Snee, also an Irishman from Dublin in Kenneally’s barn, came to America in September of last year, and recalled times when riding one set might take two hours back home. “You stay on their back and you just keep walking them around.” A difference in the amount of work is not the sole reason for moving to America for many Europeans. There is the same pull westward across the Atlantic experienced by the European ancestors of the overwhelming majority of Americans. “As a young kid, I always wanted to come to America,” said Ken McCarthy, assistant trainer and exercise rider for Bill Mott at Churchill Downs and a native of Tipperary, Ireland. Michele Devilliers-Brookfield of Capetown, South Africa, who gallops for Kenny McPeek at Keeneland, shared McCarthy’s desire. Given a choice between college or travel abroad, she chose America. “I had always wanted to come here,” she said. A background in Thoroughbred breeding in France led to a natural curiosity in the American racing industry for Christophe Lorieul. “I was very interested in the farms in Kentucky and the stallions,” said Lorieul, who is an assistant trainer and exercise rider for Christophe Clement on the New York racing circuit. Others, like Hanne Jorgenson, a native of Nittedal, Norway, moved to America for a reason, perhaps understandable given her homeland’s weather. “It was about November 27th or so back home in 1999. I was reducing really hard to make weight [she was a jockey in Norway and Denmark], I was riding a couple of really bad horses, and it was snowing. You couldn't see the quarter pole from where I was on the track that day. I went in, packed up my tack, ordered myself a plane ticket to Miami, and never looked back.” She had, while still a resident of Norway, learned of the wonders of Miami in the winter when she would come over and gallop horses for the late Scotty Schulhofer at Hialeah. She has been an exercise rider for 10 years in the U.S., and has worked for Randy Morse, Helen Pitts-Blasi, Kenny McPeek and now Rusty Arnold at his Churchill Downs barn. A desire to live and work in the U.S. for whatever reason is, of course, only that – a desire – without a visa. Depending on European country of origin, that can be as simple as getting a green card through a lottery, like McCarthy did while in Ireland, or enduring a process that Julia Helbling of Kent, England, described as “very, very tough and very, very expensive.” Worse still, the process is one without guarantees. “Price is the biggest obstacle. Many people pick a lawyer who say they know what they’re doing and end up being strung up for it,” said Helbling, who has ridden at private farms in Virginia and racetracks in the Midwestern and Eastern U.S. for 13 years, So difficult is the process, at least for a native of England, Helbling said, that she was advised only half-jokingly by her immigration lawyer to get married as it would be the easiest way of staying legal in the U.S. It took her eight years to get her green card. Even marriage to an American is not the easy solution it once was as “green-card marriages” have come under scrutiny by immigration authorities. DevilIiersBrookfield, who is married to American Glen Brookfield – an assistant trainer to Albert Stall – attested to how things have changed. “I still have to apply for my green card. I still have to wait, and I have to go for interviews.” U.S. immigration officials, according to DevilIiers-Brookfield, want to see more than just a marriage license. “We have to prove we have a house together; Returning from morning exercise in England Leigh Hogben and her husband Xavier Aizpuru ride out for fellow expatriate Graham Motion I they want to see bank statements – anything we have with both our names on it. It’s a pain in the behind, it really is.” Taking on the challenges and expense of visas and green cards might be necessary, however, for reasons beyond a desire for easier work, travel or better weather. The European racing industry produces, in comparison to the U.S., a ready-made field of trained exercise riders thanks to wellestablished and highly proficient apprentice schools in places like Kildare, Chantilly and Newmarket. By contrast, the U.S. offers Chris McCarron’s North American Racing Academy in Kentucky, which was established in 2005, and a few, much smaller, programs for aspiring riders. The result is ready-to-ride Europeans with, perhaps, too few places to work...unless the U.S. is considered. Not just the training but the age for matriculation at European apprentice schools might seem to also prepare Europeans for emigration to America. Christophe Lorieul left his native Mayenne in northwest France for Chantilly at age 14, and Michael Snee departed Dublin for Kildare at 15. Maturity comes quicker to Europeans, in essence, readying them, perhaps, for a transatlantic move. Snee, who is 20 and has been away from hearth and home for a full five years, said without hesitation that he isn’t homesick in the U.S. The European racing industry, too, offers fewer opportunities for well-trained riders seeking career advancement or positions as assistant trainers and trainers. “It’s a lot more difficult back home for a young guy like me to get started,” said Walsh, who has galloped horses and been an assistant to countryman Kenneally for two years. “If you don’t have a strong training background, it’s very hard. It’s not like here, where you have a dozen horses, you get the stalls at the track, you train at the track. Over there [Europe] you have to have your own facility, in most places. If you don’t have your own facility you can train at one of the major training centers, but you pay huge fees. And then prize money is so much better [in the U.S.] and the whole system in making horses pay here is better. It is so much harder to make horses pay over there.” Walsh, who learned riding at the apprentice school in Kildare, Ireland, and who, for three years, was an assistant trainer/rider in Newmarket, touched on age-old prejudices and realities peculiar to Irish/English relations. “Especially in England, it is tough for Irish guys. They won’t put you up the ladder too quick. There’s a bit of that there still, you know. A lot of big English trainers are a little bit still from the old gentry.” Lorieul, who left France to work with Queen Elizabeth’s horses in West Isley, 34 TRAINERMAGAZINE.com ISSUE 15 TRAINING England, before coming to America, said opportunities extend beyond the ability to move up the ladder in a training operation. “I’ve learned a lot as far as my personal horsemanship regarding every aspect of the horse – more leg-wise than anything else because we train on harder surfaces than Europe, so you encounter a lot more problems than you do back in Europe.” In his 15-year stint working for Christophe Clement, Lorieul has traveled to Japan and Dubai, opportunities he believes he wouldn’t have experienced had he stayed in France. As well, his travels throughout the U.S. have given him a unique perspective on differences between racing in the U.S. versus Europe. “You can learn a lot in Europe, but here you learn in a different way because of different training methods. You see and meet different people and the way they do things. In Europe, if you stay in France, whether you’re going to the south of France or the middle of France, people do things the same. You go to different parts of the U.S., you’re going to see different methods. Brendan Walsh and Michael Snee, employees of Irishman Eddie Kenneally, at Gulfstream Park I’m talking about East Coast versus West Coast when you go out to California.” It is the very length and breadth of the U.S. that captivates Julia Helbling. “The horizons are further away. The sky’s bigger. Everything’s bigger.” There is for Helbling a sense of a different culture or feel to the U.S. “In England you buy your house at a certain age. You have children at a certain age. It’s not so nomadic. “Over here, you can be nomadic and it’s acceptable. I’m very much a free spirit and I like that over here.” With a laugh, she acknowledged that her parents back home wonder when she is going to “leave the ‘circus,’ return home to England and get a ‘proper job.’” Returning to their native land is, of course, a thing always in the back of any expatriate’s mind, but rarely “top-of-mind” for any number of reasons. Hogben’s husband, Xavier Aizpuru, also a native of England, has been the top steeplechase rider here in the U.S. in two of the last three years. Success, obviously, will prolong a stay in the U.S. for some time if not permanently. Lorieul, who visits France annually during the December holidays but who has bought a house in New York and has an American-born daughter, doesn’t think he will ever return for good. One thing is probably certain, though, and that is that scores of Europeans like Lorieul, Helbling and many others, will, if not searching for “liberty,” probably always leave home for America. “It’s a choice you make in life,” said Lorieul. “The U.S., because it’s such a large country, really is the land of opportunity.” ■

CLICK ON IMAGE TO READ ARTICLE

Ken Snyder (05 February 2010 - Issue Number: 15)

Feb 5 Economics of Feeding Horses in Training

Feb 5 If Lasix is the answer...what is the question?