Olympic dreams aside, Torres is ready for Jim Dandy moment

If not for a fork in his career road, Jaime Torres might have been far from Saratoga, where he will ride Preakness winner Seize the Grey on Saturday in the Grade 2, $500,000 Jim Dandy Stakes.

Dare to dream, but if progressive ability met his youthful ambition, Torres might have been competing for Puerto Rico as a 400-meter hurdler in the Paris Olympics.

“That was my goal when I was an athlete,” he said in a phone interview this week from upstate New York.

To be clear, Torres, now 25, would have had to improve a great deal to land in the Stade de France starting blocks. But before he decided to race horses, he started to make a name for himself as a track athlete. He described a competition that brought him together with the best of Puerto Rico’s college and university athletes.

“I got to the finals in my second year,” he told Horse Racing Nation’s Ron Flatter Racing Pod. “I wasn’t running for (national eliminations). I was 20 years old or 18 years old. That was like one (age group), and I could represent Puerto Rico.”

Sure enough, the World Athletics website shows Torres having a personal best of 54.83 seconds six years ago in the 400 hurdles, an age-group championship in 2018 and a top-three finish in the 2019 national finals. Maybe his times were not world-class, but they were worthy of regional competitions.

“It wasn’t the Olympics,” Torres said when asked what might have been in his reach. “It was the Pan-American or Caribbean or something like that.”

Track was a byproduct of college life, which ultimately was not for Torres. He reset his sights in a new direction less than five years ago after attending his first horse race at Hipódromo Camarero in Canóvanas, east of San Juan. Hoping to emulate his Hall of Fame countryman Ángel Cordero Jr., Torres spent six months learning his new craft at a Puerto Rico jockey academy.

A move to Florida followed. Trainer Saffie Joseph Jr. put Torres to work in the mornings for about 10 months. By the end of the summer of 2022, Torres was ready to ride in the afternoon.

Some 1,409 starts, 170 wins and $10,171,723 in purse earnings later, Torres has rocketed from the top apprentice jockey in the New York Racing Association last year to a classic winner who is riding in a pivotal race at America’s most revered meet.

“It’s super great,” Torres said. “All the time when I see those entries, I am very excited. My agent (Liz Morris), she’s a hard worker. She’s on top of everybody, and I’m very thankful to have her. I’m very blessed, and I’m just very excited. I’m riding almost every day, seven days a week, flying to Ellis Park and then going to (Horseshoe Indianapolis) and then going to Saratoga. I love it.”

With 88-year-old trainer D. Wayne Lukas showing his faith by keeping Torres on Seize the Grey, the top of that to-do list looks a lot different than it did just 22 months ago.

“My goal now is getting more opportunities with big trainers like Wayne,” he said. “I want to ride for those people, and they are giving me the opportunity. Like Bill Mott, Mike Maker, great trainers that I never rode for before.”

Even though Torres found steady success rather quickly, it was his muddy, front-running ride to the Pimlico winner’s circle May 18 in his very first Triple Crown race that gave him the look of an overnight success.

“He rides very smart,” Lukas said the morning after that Preakness triumph with Seize the Grey. “He’s an up-and-coming good one. He’ll be around, and he’s in that tradition of those Puerto Rican riders that do so well. He’s going to be one of them. He’s never gotten in trouble on this horse.”

Living up to the nickname Coach that he earned teaching basketball as a young adult in Wisconsin, Lukas is not only encouraging. He can be fiercely critical. Torres found that out in April when Lukas went into the Churchill Downs jockeys room and, as the trainer put it, “chewed his ass” after the young rider eased 3-year-old filly Social Affair to a ninth-place finish in a maiden race.

“I told him if you ride for me, I want fourth place if you can get it,” Lukas said. “If you can’t get fourth, then I want fifth. I want you all the way to the wire. I want you tired. I gave him quite a lashing.”

“I was super surprised,” Torres said. “I had never seen Wayne like that. He’d never talked to me before like that. I was very surprised. I couldn’t believe that was happening. ... I didn’t say anything. I waited like two days to let him calm down. Then I went back to the barn, and I apologized.”

Since a good coach knows when to grind on a protégé and when not to, Lukas was confident Torres learned his lesson. That confidence was rewarded in the Preakness, where Lukas watched as Torres and Seize the Grey surged to an early lead and never looked back.

“I think you can overcoach a little bit on these riders, especially Jaime,” Lukas said in the media conference after the Preakness. “If I’d have told him I wanted him to lay third or fourth or back mid-pack or something, as mad as I chewed his ass the first time, I think he’d have probably tried to do that. Here all of a sudden he breaks, and he’s on the lead and cruising. ... When he hit the half-mile pole, I turned to my wife Laurie, and I said watch out. We’re home free.”

The Preakness triumph came two weeks after Seize the Grey scored in the Pat Day Mile (G2) on the Kentucky Derby undercard. It also was only three weeks before the Belmont Stakes at Saratoga, where those three races in such a short amount of time left the Arrogate colt owned by MyRacehorse with barely enough juice to finish a distant seventh.

With seven weeks of freshening since, Seize the Grey may be primed to set the pace again Saturday cutting back from 1 1/4 to 1 1/8 miles for the Jim Dandy. For the first time, though, he will face Eclipse Award winner Fierceness, who has been on or close to the lead in all three of his wins.

“I’ll have to talk with Wayne first and see what he thinks and what he wants me to do and what he feels with my colt,” Torres said. “If I see that we are not going to get enough out there going for the lead, I won’t take it. He doesn’t need to be there. He can come from off the pace, too. I will just let him be comfortable, make him happy, and I know he’s going to give me a lot.”

Belmont Stakes winner Dornoch moved to the top of the 3-year-old male division when he finished first last week in the Haskell (G1). If Seize the Grey were to come through Saturday, that would mean he, too, would have both a classic and an important summer stakes in his win column. That it would come against Fierceness and Sierra Leone, both of whom also have Grade 1 victories this year, would put Seize the Grey in the championship conversation.

A win Saturday also could get Lukas pointed in the right direction at Saratoga, where he is 11: 0-2-1 this season.

“I’m not having the best meet so far, but I stopped working on my résumé a long time ago,” Lukas told the NYRA media team this week. “Seize the Grey can turn things around for me. Up here you’ve got to win 10 races and two Grade 1s to break even.”

Torres will be looking to improve on his 14: 1-2-1 record this Saratoga summer, although he did win the meet’s opener on trainer Robert Falcone’s 8-year-old horse Empty Tomb.

Aside from all that and the chance to get the third graded-stakes triumph of his budding career, Torres has a race within the race that he wants to win, specifically against the Ohio Derby (G3) victor.

“I want to beat Batten Down,” he said. “My girlfriend, she gallops that horse every single day, and she breezes him. ... Brittany Troxtell, she works for Bill Mott.”

Whether it is looking forward to getting the better of Troxtell or riding into the winner’s circle after another graded stakes or even the memories of breaking the tape in footraces, Torres exudes a modest confidence.

“I have been running on big stages in Puerto Rico, like really important races,” Torres said. “I learned in my life about being nervous and being around a lot of people and having to control your emotions.”

The pressure, then, of finishing in front in the Preakness or facing a big assignment at Saratoga or getting yelled at by someone he respects falls into the been-there, done-that folder.

“Not new,” Torres said. “Not new.”