Early Life and Career
From a Cajun family, Desormeaux grew up on a farm where he was first introduced to horses through 4-H. He first raced American Quarter Horses and was only sixteen years old when he began working as an apprentice jockey at the Evangeline Downs racetrack in Lafayette, Louisiana. He won his first career stakes race on December 13, 1986, riding Godbey in the Maryland City Handicap at Laurel Park Racecourse.
His immediate success and big break led to him moving north to compete on the Maryland racing circuit in 1987 where his performance earned him the Eclipse Award for Outstanding Apprentice Jockey. In each of his first three years racing in Maryland, Kent Desormeaux won more races than any other jockey in the U.S. He is one of only four jockeys to have won three national titles in a row. No longer an apprentice, in 1989 he won his the Eclipse Award for Outstanding Jockey and another in 1992. Desormeaux, along with Chris McCarron and Steve Cauthen, are the only jockeys to win the Eclipse Award in both the apprentice and overall categories.
In 1989, Desormeaux set the current record for most wins in a year with 598. In the early 1990s he moved to southern California and in late 1992 at the Hollywood Park racetrack he was thrown by a horse and trampled, suffering multiple skull fractures and permanent deafness in one ear. Despite the severe setback, he rebounded to his old form, riding Kotashaan to victory in the 1993 Breeders' Cup Turf and at the end of the year his peers voted him the prestigious George Woolf Memorial Jockey Award. In 1995, he scored his second Breeders' Cup title when he beat the "boys" in the Breeders' Cup Sprint with the filly Desert Stormer.
Amongst Desormeaux's other major stakes race victories, he became the first foreign jockey to win a Classic race in Japan.
He scored his 5,000th career victory on July 27, 2008 by guiding Bella Attrice to victory in the 7th race at Saratoga Race Course.
Read more about this topic: Kent Desormeaux
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early, life and/or career:
“... business training in early life should not be regarded solely as insurance against destitution in the case of an emergency. For from business experience women can gain, too, knowledge of the world and of human beings, which should be of immeasurable value to their marriage careers. Self-discipline, co-operation, adaptability, efficiency, economic management,—if she learns these in her business life she is liable for many less heartbreaks and disappointments in her married life.”
—Hortense Odlum (1892–?)
“Make-believe is the avenue to much of the young child’s early understanding. He sorts out impressions and tries out ideas that are foundational to his later realistic comprehension. This private world sometimes is a quiet, solitary
world. More often it is a noisy, busy, crowded place where language grows, and social skills develop, and where perseverance and attention-span expand.”
—James L. Hymes, Jr. (20th century)
“The life of a good man will hardly improve us more than the life of a freebooter, for the inevitable laws appear as plainly in the infringement as in the observance, and our lives are sustained by a nearly equal expense of virtue of some kind. The decaying tree, while yet it lives, demands sun, wind, and rain no less than the green one. It secretes sap and performs the functions of health. If we choose, we may study the alburnum only. The gnarled stump has as tender a bud as the sapling.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
““Never hug and kiss your children! Mother love may make your children’s infancy unhappy and prevent them from pursuing a career or getting married!” That’s total hogwash, of course. But it shows on extreme example of what state-of-the-art “scientific” parenting was supposed to be in early twentieth-century America. After all, that was the heyday of efficiency experts, time-and-motion studies, and the like.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)