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.
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