Alan Balch - Remembering where we come from

Victor Espinoza photo

Like so many of us in racing, I’ve been horse crazy my entire life.

Some of my earliest memories are being on my dad’s shoulders, going through the livestock barns at the San Diego County Fair, and then lighting up when we got to the horse show . . . which, back then, was located just outside the turn at Del Mar into the backstretch, at the old 6-furlong start, long before the chute was extended to 7/8. All their horse barns back then were the original adobe, open to the public during the fair, and we could walk down the shed rows talking to the horses, petting those noses and loving the stable smells.

At least I did. My mom was appalled, of course.

She assumed, I’m certain, that I would grow out of my weird fixation. But the way those things go at certain ages, the more I was discouraged, the more obsessed I became. The fact that our family was decidedly not elite in any respect, certainly not educationally or financially, became a great opportunity for me to work at what I loved the most: taking care of the horses, to begin with, and camping at the barn whenever possible. At first, I wasn’t getting paid at all—except in getting to learn to ride by watching and listening and then riding my favorite horses without having to rent them. Lessons were out of the question.

I gradually learned that the people who owned and showed and raced horses had to have the money to do it, and being able to do that myself was beyond my imagination. I don’t remember ever caring. Nor do I remember ever being mistreated because of my lowly station. In fact, it was a great bonus for me to get out of school at times to travel to shows and live in a tack room in the stables. And, as I grew older, to start getting paid actual wages for my work.

Making it through college and graduate school without having to wash dishes in the dining hall led to my loving equestrian sport in a different way and at a much different level—especially when I met Robert Strub at the Forum International Horse Show in Los Angeles (which I was managing while attending school). He offered me a position at Santa Anita. 

Elite equestrian sport, racing and non-racing alike, became the rest of my distinctly non-elite life. And, I venture to say, my fellow non-elites in these sports vastly outnumber the elites. 

Almost all trainers, jockeys and racing labor on the backstretch, who make the game go from hour to hour, day to day, month to month, and year to year, weren’t elite when they started out, at least by any definition except the one that counts: their merit, their specialized skills, and their commitment to horses and the sport. I remember how moved I was a decade ago when one of international racing’s most elite trainers got choked up when describing how it felt to be appointed a director of an esteemed racing association. “I’m just a trainer,” he said, as though his accomplishments and expertise didn’t qualify him to rub shoulders and contribute to deliberations alongside wealthy and powerful elite decision-makers. They did. And they do.

In this greatest of all sports . . . where the interdependence of all its critical components is its essence . . . elites of accomplishment and merit, like him, comfortably perform alongside all the other elites, including those of birth, inherited or self-made wealth and royalty.

Horses have brought us all together, and many of us have been lucky enough to know—and be appreciated by—some of the world’s most famous personages.

So it was when Victor Espinoza, the self-proclaimed “luckiest Mexican on Earth,” won the Triple Crown, and later had occasion to meet and joke with Queen Elizabeth II at Royal Ascot. Doesn’t his story sum it up? And remind most of us where we came from?

The eleventh of twelve children, born on a dairy farm in Tulancingo, Hidalgo, growing up to work in a manufacturing plant and the stables, Victor drove a bus to pay for jockey school. Anyone who has endured Mexico City traffic knows the elite skills that must have been required! He aspired to more; his skill and determination resulted in successes reserved for the very fewest of the world’s top athletes. As the famed Dr. Robert Kerlan – who treated athletes at the highest levels of every major sport – once observed, “pound for pound, jockeys are the greatest.”

When honored by the Edwin J. Gregson Foundation, which has raised over $6 million from the racing community in 20 years—of which 98% is dedicated to backstretch programs including scholarships for its children—Victor again cited his luck in achieving what he has without much school, as well as his amazement at the Gregson’s success in its scholarship program. Hundreds of backstretch community children have gone to college because of it—in fields ranging from mechanical engineering to biology, nursing, graphic design, criminal justice, life sciences, sociology and everything else.  

A few are now even among the world’s elites in architecture and medicine. The backstretch teaches tenacity.  

And isn’t that just one reason why her late Majesty the Queen loved horses, racing, and its community, above all her other pursuits?