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May 16, 2008 8:38 pm US/Eastern
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Big Brown's Jockey On Mission At The Preakness
BALTIMORE (AP) ―
Plenty of great jockeys wait a lifetime in vain for one horse good enough to win the Triple Crown.
The stars are aligned for Kent Desormeaux's second chance in 10 years, but even that can't come soon enough.
Desormeaux's 9-year-old son, Jacob, was born with Usher syndrome, a genetic disorder that stole his hearing at birth and is progressively robbing him of his sight.
For all Desormeaux's fame and fortune, the father knows there are few gifts that he and a muscular colt named Big Brown can bequeath Jacob better than a memory that will last a lifetime.
"My wife Sonia and I have endeavored to show him as many things as we can as early as we can. For him to be there during something we all know would be history-making would be just awesome,"
Desormeaux said on the eve of the Preakness, where Big Brown will again go off as the favorite.
"And I'd say it was his angels who were guiding us."
In just about any other Triple Crown season, Desormeaux's comeback story would be one of the most compelling out there. He left Maurice, La., a speck of a town in the heart of Cajun country, as a kid and success came so fast it went right to his head. Then he got knocked back on his butt.
"I thought I was the reason all the horses were winning. I didn't realize at 16, much less at 22, 23, that the people who owned and trained these horses were giving me this opportunity. The reason for the decline," Desormeaux said, swallowing hard, "was my arrogance."
Desormeaux led the nation in victories his rookie year in 1987, and each of the next two years, setting a single-season record with 598 in 1989. Then he moved from Maryland to the West Coast in the 1990s and scaled the 3,000- and 4,000-win plateaus with breathtaking speed.
In 1998, Desormeaux climbed aboard Real Quiet and notched wins in the Kentucky Derby and Preakness for fast-rising trainer Bob Baffert.
But a partnership that looked like it might last forever came unglued just three weeks later. Desormeaux rushed Real Quiet to the front too early in the Belmont and got nicked by the length of a nose with the Triple Crown on the line.
At the last second, Desormeaux saw Victory Gallop closing at the wire and desperately tried to swerve Real Quiet into his path. All the small, know-it-all sins that had bothered Desormeaux's elders for years crystallized in that moment.
Desormeaux's fall was hardly as precipitous as his rise. He found work with another big-time trainer, Neil Drysdale, on the rebound and won a second Kentucky Derby aboard Fusaichi Pegasus two years later.
But his cockiness continued to rub some important people the wrong way and soon enough, the trainers and owners who once sought him out with open arms turned tail and headed in the opposite direction the moment he showed up at their barns.
Humbled, Desormeaux headed to Japan and reinvented himself as a rider with something to prove. He started winning again, but learned a different lesson.
"I figured if I could move and prove my character in a country where I don't even speak the same language, what could happen if I moved to New York? If California was tired of my character, I figured go to New York, where maybe they had read about me, but they didn't know me," he recalled. "So I showed up in New York and created the character I wanted them to know me as ... fresh, new and hungry. Almost like a new athlete in a new place having to prove something."
That was 2006, and uprooting a family proved a tougher challenge than landing topflight mounts. Desormeaux's earnings doubled in his first year on the East Coast, to $8.5 million, but the emotional toll and the medical care that Jacob required constantly tugged at his heart.
Jacob has endured 17 major surgeries and hears through the use of cochlear implants, which generate signals that are sent to the auditory nerve in the brain and translated into sounds.
"It's actually nice to come to work sometimes, because I get to be in my element," Desormeaux said, "and put everything else behind me."
And work never seemed nicer than when he climbed aboard Big Brown. Anyone who saw Desormeaux drive the colt around the outside of Churchill Downs' famed oval to a thrilling 43/4-length victory in the Kentucky Derby knew the feeling vicariously.
But that emotion was even more apparent a moment later, when TV cameras flashed from the finish line to the grandstand as Sonia Desormeaux wrapped Jacob and Joshua in an embrace and celebrated the win.
Small wonder her husband is in such a rush to win the Preakness and then the Belmont in three weeks.
"He's probably going to lose his sight by adulthood, and it's very sad, very gut-wrenching.
At this time, we don't know of any cure," Desormeaux said in a reflective moment, "but we certainly have had a world of love from this exposure."
And there may be more to come.
(© 2008 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)
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