Del Mar Riding Title a Surprise to Team Bejarano

To the surprise and deep satisfaction of his agent, Joe Ferrer, Rafael Bejarano was the runaway winner of the Del Mar riding title, 42-32, over Kent Desormeaux. It was the 19th Southern California crown for the 32-year-old Bejarano, who was sidelined just over two months recovering from multiple injuries suffered in a riding mishap at Santa Anita on May 10.

“When the Del Mar meet started, I told Rafael it would be a miracle if he ended up being leading rider,” Ferrer said. “He had never been off nine weeks before. The most he’d ever been off was a month, and usually in a month, a horse will run once.

“In nine weeks, they run twice. You can miss riding a horse the first time, and you’ll usually ride it back the second time. But once they run twice, and they win or run second, it’s hard to move the other rider off the mount, I don’t care who you are.

“Loyalties around here, relationships around here, are few and far between. Opening day at Del Mar we won one race for (trainer) Mike Pender, but after that it was a struggle. We won the title, but this was the worst meet we ever had at Del Mar. In money won, we had two-and-a-half million. We usually do over $3 million.”

That aside, an 11th-hour surge turned a close race into a runaway.

“We were about two in front with 10 days to go,” Ferrer said. “I looked at the new (condition) book, and I told Rafael, ‘If the race goes down to the last day, we’re going to get beat,’ because the last day we had no business.

“Friday and Saturday, we were loaded. So we won four one day and six the next, and after that, it was all over. But I went into that meeting with the mindset that I would be satisfied to be among the first three.

“I thought all the horses we’d been riding would come back to us immediately, and they didn’t. It took time. We lost a lot of good horses. So to me, of all the meetings that I’ve won as an agent, that was the most satisfying.”

Source: Santa Anita Park