Saratoga Springs, NY, February 3, 2009--As any regular HRI reader would know, I haven’t found much to be Pollyanna about recently. Then the overnight mail brought news of a positive development about the game that temporarily has changed all that.

If all 12 episodes of the upcoming Discovery Channel reality based docu-soap series, Animal Planet’s “Jockeys: Win or Die Trying,” are as good as the rushes that came in the mail Monday, it will be a good start toward getting America to feel good about the sport of thoroughbred racing again.

The job was difficult; scaling down for mass consumption a story about jockeys as athletes so that spectators can learn more about and appreciate the spectacle of men and women racing each other on horseback knowing that, if 2009 were an average year, two of their colleagues will have been killed in racing accidents.

Horse racing: The story of human and equine athleticism combining in partnership to put on a sparkling death-defying show. Or it can be something else. Like the man on camera said: “It’s a drug called action and it makes this whole thing work.”

It sure does, and the film’s executive producers combined to make the piece gritty, realistic and multi-layered. Only knowledge of the game can accomplish this and Liz Bronstein, who, along with co-executive producer Tina Gazzerro took the project from concept to conception, gets what it means to be a racetracker.

As she explained during an NTRA Monday teleconference: “Our family spent the Jewish holidays at the track.”

The captivating imagery came in bursts: There was Old Thamesian who reared at the start of the third race and inadvertently crushed the foot of his jockey, a fresh-faced Kayla Stra, who may be a long way from her native Australia but who nevertheless brushed herself off and got right back up on the 30-1 shot.

It was her first American mount and she was trying to convince the Southern California horse colony that her talents are worthy of riding and winning at Santa Anita because, you know, “winning a race is better than sex.”



Two races later, it was the powerful image of budding champion Zenyatta winning the Lady’s Secret with those incredibly long strides. It was a well executed ride by Hall of Famer Mike Smith in a paceless four-horse field, but who would be the first to tell you what it means to ride a filly like her.

“I’ve been blessed. You get to ride champions like her that you may never see in a lifetime. If she ever got beat, it would be my fault, not hers.”

Then, a few frames and a couple of hundred yards out of the Santa Anita starting gate, Corey Nakatani and Easy On The Eye both fell to the turf course, Nakatani losing any live mounts he might have had for the upcoming Breeders’ Cup courtesy of a broken collarbone.

There was Joe Talamo’s girlfriend, Elizabeth, saying “I like everything about him except what he does for a living. He’s risking his life every day.”

Talamo’s thoughts on the subject? After winning a race in which a horse and rider went down but escaped injured, Talamo said: “Yeah, saw it out of the corner of my eye. A broken arm. Broken legs, a broken collarbone, that’s a given,” he shrugged.

The image of an emotional Chantal Sutherland talking about leaving her parents back in Toronto, telling brother Doug she will take her career to Southern California, and informing boyfriend Mike Smith after moving into his Sierra Madre condo that he was about to lose all his closet space.

Life never gets more real than that.

And on what it means to be a veteran rider, Jon Court and Aaron Gryder talked about the challenge of competing in a hungry, young man’s game. A family man, Gryder spoke of the dangers jockeys must live with every day.

“I’m 38-years-old and being a jockey is my livelihood,” Gryder said. “If I die I want my children to know I loved them every day I was alive.”

The camera caught everything viewers would want, what fans of the reality genre surely would recognize as “the tension stare.” And, more to meaning, the lens captured the special vibe that lives inside the people who ride race horses for a living.

Some of Trevor Denman’s race calls seemed staged for dramatic storytelling effect and continuity, but that’s a small quibble in a piece that portrays horse racing as genuine sporting theater.

If something like “Jockeys” had been mass marketed every year for the last two decades, horse racing might not now be perceived as something that happens five days a year and summers in Saratoga and Del Mar.

Bornstein talked about filming jockeys as compared to other athletes. “So often we work with people who badly want to be on TV. Desperation has an odor. But the jockeys were different, they were dedicated to what they were doing.”

According to one reviewer, the series, which debuts Friday at 9 p.m. EST on Animal Planet, hits the drama trifecta: animals, jockeys and danger.

Set your DVRs.