VELASQUEZ ISSUE 21_Jerkins feature.qxd 20/07/2011 12:20 Page 1
PROFILE
V
ELÁZQUEZ was raised in Carolina, also the birthplace of Clemente. “I came from very poor,” he says, but there was always food on the table. A visit to the local track, El Nuevo Comandante (now called Hipódromo Camarero), left him wanting to ride racehorses for a living, and he enrolled in the island’s vocational jockey school. “The first three months we didn’t touch a horse, we didn’t see a horse. Everythin g was like regular school. And I hated it.” He laughs. “I had just left school and it was back to the same thing again. And then we started going to the barn. “The school had like ten horses, and we started learning how to clean them and how to take care of them.” Velázquez’s commitment was tested; he had “pretty bad” allergies to the dust in the barns. “I used to get hives on my arms, my legs – everywhere. I don’t get that anymore. I just get the itchiness and the sneezing and the throat thing.” They learned balance riding short on a barrel drum with unsteady springs, and he thought, “Man, this is not going to be easy, how do they do this?” As their training progressed, some of his classmates dropped out, either because they exceeded the 108 pound weight limit one time too many or because they lost their nerve after a fall. “I liked horses so I had to stick to it,” he says. He graduated from the program in December of 1989. Of 18
44 TRAINERMAGAZINE.com ISSUE 21