TurfPublicists: NEARLY 82 AND STILL MUCH TO DO

**Please see attached photos of exercise rider Calvin Kaintuck. Credit NYRA.**

Friday, April 1, 2011

Contact: Ashley Herriman

NEARLY 82 AND STILL MUCH TO DO

OZONE PARK, N.Y. – Of the 11 Triple Crown winners to date, 10 have been coronated during exercise rider Calvin Kaintuck’s lifetime. The most recent six to accomplish the feat have done so during Kaintuck’s racetrack career, which spans more than a half-dozen decades. Now nearly 82, Kaintuck still gallops horses daily on the NYRA circuit and has no plans to retire.

Kaintuck was born in Baltimore on April 13, 1929, and, as he remembers it, the first horse he ever sat on was a mare named Ginger, who belonged to the milkman in his neighborhood.

“I used to climb up on her when I was in short pants – maybe seven, eight,” Kaintuck recalled. “One time I went to get off her, and my pants got caught, split my pants. And my brother and sister, they were teasing me, they said ‘You’re going to get it now.’”

If Kaintuck got into trouble for tearing his pants, it didn’t keep him from the nearby stables and it was on the local streets where he learned to ride the neighborhood’s work horses.

“When I came along, the traffic you see now, the cars, and the supermarkets, they didn’t have that. Everything was horse and wagons,” Kaintuck said. “All the produce, milk, and everything, a guy came around selling it. Hucksters they were called. I learned to ride those draft horses on the days they didn’t go out, so they didn’t get too hot for the next day.

“We had a big railroad lot, right by the train tracks in East Baltimore. It’s Amtrak now, but it used to be Pennsylvania Railroad, and the stable wasn’t too far from there. There were stables all over the area, in almost every alleyway and garage were stables. Five or six of them right near where I lived. So that’s how I learned to ride.”

His racetrack education came later, and by the time Count Fleet wired the field in the 1943 Preakness, Kaintuck was spending his weekends walking hots on the Pimlico backstretch.

“One morning me and my buddy were supposed to clean the pony up for a trainer by the name of Bowes Bond, very good trainer,” Kaintuck said. “[My buddy] took the saddle off, and I asked him to give me a leg up on the pony. So he gave me a leg up on the pony, and there I was riding around in front of the barn. Everybody just stood there looking, and then the trainer walked up. I thought he was going to give me heck for riding this pony, but he said ‘Calvin, if you’re interested in riding horses, galloping horses, go to my farm this winter and break babies and you can come up with me next spring.’”

While school kept Kaintuck from spending a full winter on the farm, he did go during Christmas break and said he might have stayed if his father hadn’t come to collect him when it was time for classes to resume. He returned that summer, and in 1944, applied for an exercise rider’s license at Pimlico, which he was denied because he was too young.

“The man said ‘When were you born?’ and I told him, and he folded the application and said ‘Come back next year, Calvin.’” Kaintuck said. “You had to be sixteen and I was fifteen. The next year I was sixteen and got a license, and went ahead and worked for Bowes Bond. We went to Garden State after that, and I worked for him all that summer.”

Kaintuck credits Bond, who trained 1969 champion 2-year-old Silent Screen, with getting him started in the business, and Bond was one of a small group of trainers for whom Kaintuck worked on a contract basis over the years. Citing economics, he says he prefers to freelance.

“This always used to be a cash and carry business,” Kaintuck said. “When you got off a man’s horse, he had the money right there. You’d ride two, three, four and he paid you the same morning. Now everybody wants you to wait until they get their paychecks and it’s been that way for a long time. He pays you like you’re on his payroll, but you’re not on payroll, so that kills you.”

Kaintuck has seen many changes in his years on the racetrack, some he likes better than others. Among the best, he says, were the addition of helmets and safety vests for riders, both items he appreciates daily having sustained his fair share of riding injuries. Among the worst are what he considers a general decline in horsemanship, and the extinction of the big stables.

“Anything goes now,” Kaintuck said. “Horse handling is terrible. You see horses in the afternoon, they’ve got to have a lip shank and all on [to be controlled]. Horses years ago, guys had them good, you’d never see that happen. A long time ago if you had art, property, horses, those things were tax shelters. Horses are no longer a tax shelter, and a lot of the big stables got out. I would like to see it return to the way it used to be, but you can’t go back.”

While the racetrack may be different, Kaintuck loves his work and always has. Ask what keeps him going when most octogenarians are long retired from both work and strenuous physical activity and the answer is simple:

“Riding. You get so it’s automatic to you, you know what I mean? Like you’re driving a car, I guess. I always wanted to ride horses, after I learned.”

These days, Kaintuck gallops for trainer Cleveland Johnson at Belmont Park and usually gets on just one horse, though he vividly recalls a morning at Laurel Park, years ago, when he rode 29 for legendary Maryland trainer King Leatherbury. The rider’s career has taken him to tracks across the United States, mostly on the East Coast, many of which have since been shuttered. For most of his life, Kaintuck was based in Maryland, and it was there he first saw Secretariat.

“I watched him win the race at Laurel, the Laurel Futurity for 2-year-olds,” Kaintuck said. “Some horse on the front opened up at the half-mile pole and everybody said ‘Wow, they won’t catch him.’ And Secretariat was running along with a big leaping stride, shaking his head, and I said ‘Except maybe that fellow on the other side.’ Sure enough.

“I used to gallop behind him. I’d see him on the track when he came for the Preakness, and I’d sit well off of him, but I loved to watch him, I just loved to watch him.”

Kaintuck has been in New York since 1985. He imparted his love for horses and riding on both of his children, and his son, who works on Wall Street, has recently been threatening to buy a horse for Kaintuck to train.

“I keep talking him out of it right now,” Kaintuck said. “I guess it’s nice to run a horse if you can get a decent one, but he keeps telling me he wants to get a racehorse and I’ll train him. Maybe.”

Would he pursue a training career after he stops riding?

“I think I will, eventually,” Kaintuck said, then paused. “I wouldn’t have to stop riding, necessarily.”

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