Jockey Growing Too Big to Race Horses

Mark Johnston was 14 years old and dreaming of the grand life as a jockey when he stepped on the backside of a racetrack for the first time, at Keeneland in Lexington, Ky. He had not been there an hour when a man who worked in the barns looked down at his size-6 feet and laughed.

“Son, there’s no way you’ll ever get to be a jockey,” the man said. “Look at those big feet of yours. You’re going to grow right into those feet and right off the back of a horse.”

Johnston smiled as he recalled the moment the other day in the jockeys’ room at Pimlico, where Magic is his nickname. “It made me mad,” he said in his Kentucky twang, “and I kept hearing it again and again, from everybody. ‘Aw, you’re going to be too tall,’ they said. It made me that much more determined.”

He is 19 now, with blue eyes, a thick plate of blond hair and a pale, wispy mustache begging for life over his upper lip. Half of the man’s prophecy has come true: At 5-foot-8, Johnston is much taller than the average jockey. Magic, indeed. But he has not grown off the back of a horse. Not yet, at least.

“My day probably is coming,” he said. “I’ll probably stop growing, but then I’ll have to worry about filling out. I weigh 109 right now, and my arms and legs are thin. If I fill out a little, I’m in trouble. I think I need to make the most of what time I have in this business.”

He certainly is doing that. He won 249 races this year as an apprentice jockey, a total likely to earn him an Eclipse Award as the nation’s top rookie rider. His apprentice year ended two weeks ago, but he has continued to win without the 5-pound advantage given apprentices.

Steve Cauthen lost more than 100 straight races after his apprentice year ended; it can be a traumatic time for a young rider, primarily because trainers, many of whom are infatuated with weight advantages, often begin assigning their top mounts elsewhere.

But Johnston won four races on his second post-apprentice day. He is second in the standings at the current Pimlico meeting and has continued to get most of the mounts from King Leatherbury, the state’s top trainer.

The Maryland circuit is loaded with riders who boomed as apprentices but have not kept it up since they lost their weight advantage: Allen Stacy, Mike Luzzi, Alberto Delgado. Johnston hopes to be different.

“Ninety percent of the trainers who were using me have stayed with me,” he said. “Things have been real positive so far. Now, I just have to do my part and keep winning.”

It is a bountiful set of circumstances he could not have envisioned when he quit high school 14 months ago in Lexington, after his junior year, to become a jockey. He wanted to get his diploma, but he was growing quickly, an inch a year. “I was afraid I was going to get too big and miss my chance,” he said.

His parents were reluctant to let him go. Unlike most people around the track, Johnston was not born with the sport in his blood. His father is a barber. His mother comes from a farming family. He grew up in Springfield, Ky., an hour’s drive from Lexington. He went to the races only occasionally.

But he loved the thrill of riding quarter horses on his grandparents’ farm, and when his family moved to Lexington in 1985, he headed straight to the track to find a job. He wound up working for Lee McKinney, the sister of Olympic skier Tamara McKinney. She was a trainer, one of the few who didn’t tell him he was going to be too big to be a jockey.

“We had a deal,” he said. “I helped her out around the barn, cleaning up and everything, and she taught me to ride. I was on top of a horse every day.”

He was on his own at the track. “Most of the people around the track, their parents usually have something to do with the business,” he said. “They have the connections to get them rolling. I never had that. I had to make my own connections. It made me more mature. I learned I had to do things for myself. It made me grow up fast.”

When he left home last summer, he tried his luck first at Churchill Downs, then Chicago’s Arlington International Racecourse, then Turfway Park outside Cincinnati. “I was having trouble getting going,” he said. “My agent suggested Maryland. He said apprentices seem to do well here.”

His timing was perfect. Soon after he arrived, Luzzi lost his apprentice’s weight advantage and Kent Desormeaux left for California. Johnston began winning races, his smooth, steady style attracting attention. “It couldn’t have worked out better,” he said. He got to ride in the Preakness, and now he has hired a publicist to help ensure that he wins his Eclipse.

The only cloud in his sky is one that he cannot control. “If I keep growing like this, I’m going to be Michael Jordan’s size,” he said. “I hope it doesn’t happen, but if it does, it does. I don’t know. No one else in my family is tall. I don’t know where I got it.”

It might end his career prematurely, but he can laugh about it. “I’d put a rock on my head if I thought it would make me stop growing. I’d try anything. But the truth is I have no control over it. So I’m going to enjoy doing this while I can still do it.”