May 2, 2011 • 18 mins
Jimmy Winkfield won the Kentucky Derby twice, and he was also the last African-American jockey to win the race. Winkfield moved abroad in 1904 to continue his career, but it wasn't until 2005 that Congress honored his work. Tune in to learn more.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm to blaying a chocolate Barty and I'm fair down
and the Kentucky Derby is coming up on May seven,
and so I thought this would be an okay time
(00:21):
to confess that I have an inexplicable fascination with horse racing.
Really surprised me about you. You told me this earlier
in the day. Yeah, I don't even know what it is.
It's not like I mean, I've ridden horses before, but
I wasn't really very much into it growing up. I
had some friends who were, but even they weren't into racing.
So I don't really know what it is except for
(00:43):
just the stories behind the jockeys, behind the horses and
the trainers. It always seems whenever I tune into the
Kentucky Derby every year, I hear all these stories of
triumph over adversity, and I don't know great comebacks. I
imagine you have like a secret hat collection you bring
out for the Kentucky Derby, Sarah, I only wish. But
(01:07):
before we go any further, for those who aren't familiar
with the Derby, It's one of the classic American horse
races and probably the most widely known in the US.
It started in eighteen seventy five and it takes place
annually the first Saturday in May at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Kentucky.
The race distance is about one point to five miles
one mile and a quarter and it's often called the
(01:28):
most exciting two minutes in sports. Yeah, And like I've mentioned,
we do associate things like big hats with the Kentucky Derby,
mint juleps, high rollers, that kind of thing. It's a
very elite event, and at least in the last one
hundred years or so, it's not that racially diverse. Certainly
that's not the way you think of it. But as
we're gonna learn, there was a time in the early
(01:51):
days of the Derby when African American jockeys dominated the
US horse racing scene. Yeah, and so here we're going
to talk about the last black jockey to win the
Kentucky Derby, Kentucky native actually, whose name was Jimmy Winkfield.
And we'll take a look at his short but successful
US career and the events that brought that to a close,
(02:11):
and his remarkable experiences abroad. But first, um, we want
to look a little bit at this history of African
Americans and horse racing, so we can trace African Americans
participation in the sport to colonial times when the British
brought their passion for horse racing to America, and according
to an article in The Smithsonian by Lisa KA Winkler,
(02:32):
even founding fathers George Washington and Thomas Jefferson frequented the track,
and former President Andrew Jackson had his own thoroughbreds. And
black jockeys so very much a part of our an
illustrious start. But the first black jockeys were slaves, and
they got their skills and their affinity for horses, their
connection to horses from doing sort of the menial we're
(02:54):
cleaning the stables or grooming the owner's valuable animals. And
Winkler point felt that being on the racing circuit once,
once black jockeys did start making it big, gave them
a sort of false sense of freedom. It was one
of the few ways that they could achieve real status,
and a lot of them did. They went all the
(03:15):
way to the top in American horse racing in the
first Kentucky Derby in eighteen sevent thirteen, out of fifteen
jockeys were black, and among the first twenty eight Derby winners,
fifteen of them were black. So they were they were
dominating the horse racing scene. Yeah, exactly. And this was
the environment that James Winkfield was born into on April twelfth,
(03:35):
eighteen eighty two, in Kentucky, and he was the youngest
son of George and Victoria Winkfield, who had a total
of seventeen kids. They were farmers, basically sharecroppers, and lived
in a shotgun shock so some of the kids actually
had to spill out on the porch at night to sleep. Yeah,
but little James definitely got interested in horses and racing early,
(03:57):
probably in no small part because he was growing up
bluegrass country and he heard he probably saw the horses
and also heard the stories of black jockeys making a
name for themselves and getting big. And lucky for him,
he didn't get big. He's stayed small, which is of
course a requirement for professional jockeys. Even though he had
some siblings who were six ft tall. This is quite
(04:19):
a discrepancy because by his teen years he was only
five ft tall and less than one hundred pounds, so
perfect build for a jockey. Yeah, and he started out
just bugging other groomers in his area until they finally
gave in and let him do some of their work
for free. Sounds like a pretty good deal to me
if you're one of those workers. But Jimmy then got
(04:40):
hired on as a groomer and an exercise boy, so
he got his own gig. And this is how he
got his experience in training and kind of got discovered
just riding horses as an exerciser. And there were some
trainers who were looking out for opportunities all the time
to turn riders into jockeys, looking for people who just
seemed to have that natural talent. And that's how Jimmy
got his first break in eighteen ninety eight at age sixteen. Yeah,
(05:02):
so he rode a race at Chicago's Hawthorne Race Course.
But it didn't turn out to be the big break
he was really looking for it. In fact, it was
quite a disaster. His horse broke next to last at
the start, and then when he thought he saw an opening,
he broke fourth from the rail and cut across the
path of three horses and he took them all down
(05:23):
in the process and got suspended for a year because
of it. He came back though in eighteen ninety nine,
strong as ever. Yeah, he started winning races in Chicago.
For example, in nineteen hundred he rode in his first
Kentucky Derby and that was out of four races, four
Kentucky Derby races, I should say that he would ride
in total. In nineteen hundred he placed third. The next
(05:43):
two years he placed first in the Kentucky Derby, first
on a horse called His Eminence and then on Allan
a Dale And this made him only the second jockey
to win two successive Derby's. And I mean there's still
really aren't that many jockeys who can claim that their
feet indeed. And in nineteen o three he finished second
because he made his move too soon, and it was
a loss that always bugged him. I mean, he was
(06:06):
hoping to go for three in a row there, it seems. Yeah,
I've read that he actually talked about that loss until
his death. You know that he should have won it, Yeah,
the one that going away. So by that time, the
US horse racing scene was already changing thanks to racism, segregation,
Jim Crow laws and the economy played a part. Two
recessions at the time really shrunk the number of race
(06:27):
tracks and the attendance at the race tracks that were
still open. And they were also anti gambling groups going around,
so that was further shutting down the number of race
tracks that were operating. Yeah, definitely, they went down from
three tracks in eighteen ninety five by nineteen o eight,
so really big dive and white jockeys also didn't like
(06:48):
competing with black jockeys for the best mount so at
times there was outright violence. I mean during races on
the track, black jockeys would sometimes be pushed towards the rail. Um.
There was even a riot in Chicago between the white
and the black jockeys. Yeah. So times were definitely changing,
and you can really tell. Even though Winkfield one more
than one hundred and sixty races in nineteen o one,
(07:10):
Goodwin's annual Official Guide to the Turf admitted his name,
so he he wasn't even a player even anymore, even
though he was still winning. Yeah, and perhaps more seriously,
or definitely more seriously, I should say, he received death
threats from the Ku Klux Klan. Yeah, so it was
getting really hard for a black jockey to work in
(07:32):
the United States anymore, and all those reasons were contributing
for sure. But he really sort of put the final
nail in his own coffin for his US career because
in nineteen o three, he was scheduled to ride for
one owner in the Futurity Stakes in New York City
and then he accepted a three thousand dollar offer to
(07:52):
switch horses and ride on the favorite. And this was
a big faux pat I mean, as he can imagine,
switching horses at the last minute, and it really hurt
his reputation. Yeah, So after the horse switch incident, Winkfield's
number of rides dropped by a third. So he ended
up moving to Russia in nineteen o four, where he
accepted a position with an American owned stable, and there
(08:12):
his career really took off again. His first year there
he won the Czar's Triple Crown, which is the Moscow,
the St. Petersburg and the Warsaw Derby's and he was
also the nineteen o four Russian National writing Champion. Yeah,
and over the years he just kind of kept on,
winning the mof got Derby four more times on one
horse alone, and then several other times on different mouths.
(08:34):
He rode on and off for different owners, the Polish Prince,
the German baron. So he wasn't just riding in Russia.
He was riding in Austria and Germany and France too,
and making a lot of money doing it. Yeah, his
salary at one point was seventeen thousand roubles, so it
would have been equal to about eight thousand, five hundred
(08:54):
dollars at the time per year, plus ten percent of
every purse that he won, So he was pretty well
off to say the least. He was living in this
fancy schmancy hotel, the National Hotel in Moscow, and having
caviare for breakfast. As we know, though, by nineteen seventeen
or so, there was trouble brewing in Russia and the
(09:15):
Bolsheviks and the Communists were getting organized, and the racing
community was really at risk because it was something that
rich people did. It was a symbol of the aristocracy,
and so Winfield, to protect himself, had to walk around
in tattered clothing to avoid getting arrested by Bolsheviks. I
still think that's quite I don't know, it's it's hard
(09:36):
to imagine this five foot tall guy walking around and
what did they think of him? Like he would still
stick out, I think definitely. He was working in Odessa
for Prince Loumo Misski of Poland and nineteen nineteen when
the Russian Revolution finally caught up to him. When they
started hearing the sound of cannons, he and the rest
of the racing community, which included horsemen and their families
(09:59):
and about two fifty two and sixty horses something in there,
they all took off an escaped to Poland. It was
a really hazardous journey one thousand, one hundred miles to Warsaw.
They had to cross the Transylvanian Alps, and they had
to actually unfortunately eat some of the horses along the
way because they got desperate for food. But they did
(10:20):
make it eventually. Yeah, And once he was in Poland,
Wingfield again resumed his riding career and started to recoup
his fortune, most of which he lost when he left Russia.
Even though he was getting older, he did become a
successful rider again. He continued as a jockey through the
nineteen twenties. He won several stakes races and altogether he
(10:41):
ended up winning two thousand, six hundred races in his
entire riding career. That was one amazing thing I thought
about this story. I kept expecting some sort of sad end,
but he keeps bouncing back time after time. He does.
In even when he was as he was building up
his racing again and still writing, he built a stable
(11:03):
in a home near Paris in Maison Lafitte. He had
a little family there with him too, by then, a
son and a daughter with his third wife, who was
an exiled Russian aristocrat named Lydia de Mickowitz. So when
he finally retired from writing in nineteen thirty, around the
age of forty eight, he decided to devote his life
entirely to training horses at his stable in France. So
(11:25):
he stayed put there, settled there instead of traveling around
racing all the time, and he trained his own horses
and horses for other owners too, and he ended up
doing really well by it. But unfortunately he loses his
fortune once again when the Germans invade France in one
and the Red Cross evacuates his family to the US.
He's home, so he's back home again, and black jockeys
(11:48):
had pretty much disappeared from the racing scene by the
early twenties, and Winkfield was looking for work and signed
up with the Works Progress Administration working on a road
crew and later had to work as a room and
an assistant trainer for a living, So I mean a groom.
That's back to where he where he started as a kid. Finally, though,
he got to return to France in nineteen fifty three
(12:10):
and start up his operation, his racing and training stable
again and he died in France March twenty three, nineteen
seventy four, at age ninety one. Again just bouncing back.
It's so impressive that he had he had it in
him to keep going and try again. Yeah, it was
a phenomenal life and a phenomenal career really and very impressive.
(12:32):
But it took Winkfield a long time to get recognition
that he deserved in his home country. In the US.
There's a story that's often told about he and his
daughter attending the nineteen sixty one Kentucky Derby. Actually it's
really sad. They were invited to a Sports Illustrated event,
a dinner at the Brown Hotel in Louisville, but they
almost got turned away at the door by the doorman,
(12:53):
and they had to have him go check several times
and insists that they were guests and they were supposed
to be there, and they finally got in, but even
when they did get there, they were essentially ignored by
the people at the dinner. The dinner kind of the
people at the dinner kind of came up to them
and said high and shook hands, and then they didn't
talk to anyone the rest of the time. His daughter
said in a two thousand two NPR Weekend Edition interview
(13:14):
that the only person who talked to us was a
previous jockey who had won the derby, and that was
Roscoe Goose. He was the only one who was friendly
enough to talk to us. Nobody else talked to us
the whole time. That's so sad and tragic and disappointing.
I guess this very that's the perfect way to describe it. Disappointing.
I think you mentioned that. I thought this was a
(13:37):
neat counterpoint to it. Even though he's so disrespected at
this event, he said he still really enjoyed the race
because that's his element. He liked it, he liked being there. Again, Yeah,
from what I've read, he really enjoyed being at the
race and kind of didn't care that people had treated
him that way, or really didn't seem to care. I
guess because he had been through so much in his life. Anyway,
Pennsylvanian alps probably puts things in perspective. Yeah, that would
(14:01):
definitely change your perspective on the whole thing. I think
that he was more embarrassed and worried about his daughter
in that situation necessarily than himself. But regardless, things have
changed a lot over the past decade. Winkfield finally got
inducted into the National Racing Hall of Fame in two
thousand four, and in two thousand five the House of
Representatives passed a bill honoring him, and in two thousand
(14:22):
Marlin sat Julian became the first African American to ride
in the Derby since ninety one. They've been a few
since then, so maybe things are starting to change, starting
to get back to how they were at the end
of the eighteen hundreds. Yeah, it's interesting to think of
going backwards as progress, but I guess in a weird way,
that's kind of what it would be. But I know
(14:44):
that I'll definitely be watching May seven to check out
the Kentucky Derby and um all the new stories that
they have this year, and learn about the present day
jockeys and what their deals are. UM And if you
want to learn more about Jimmy Winkfield, because of course
we only touched on his career, we didn't really go
into his personal life that much. And there's interesting stories.
(15:04):
There's some interesting points there. It's a little tumultuous. Um,
he's not necessarily always coming up roses and all those stories,
so you might want to check it out. It's really fascinating.
Their a couple of biographies. There's one Black Mice stro
The Epic Life of an American Legend by Joe Drake,
and there's another one called wink by Ed Hodeling. But
for now we'll just move on to listener mail. So
(15:28):
after our five Real Life Amazon podcasts, we got a
few comments from listeners saying that a European Howard is
a little different from a Japanese Halbard, sort of pointier
and less. Let's act like yes, But we also got
a really interesting email from listener Jen in California. She
wrote to say, hello, ladies, I just finished listening to
(15:48):
your Real Life Amazon podcast and I wanted to say
thanks for the part on the female samarai. Nicano. I
practiced a Japanese sword style called Ei. I just won
two first places a competition that was almost exclusively male
with male judges. There are only a handful of women
that practice the traditional Samurai sword styles, let alone a blonde.
(16:10):
I get killed bill references a lot, and there are
only a rare few stories of true Samurai women warriors,
So thanks for the podcast. Plus a fun fact, the
halberd called the Nagi Nata was traditionally a woman's weapon,
and its power comes from the core and hip, so
it's easy to see why it was wielded so well
by women. As practiced with it a few times. And
(16:32):
although I love the samurai sword, the Naga nata is
really a fun weapon. Keep the warrior women's stories coming,
especially Japanese one. So yeah, I thought that was cool.
Thanks everybody for the Halbard explanations. I'm impressed that there
are so many Japanese weapon experts out there listening. Definitely,
you know I have a Japanese weapon as well. I
(16:53):
have a sword. Oh my gosh, so you're learning all
kinds of things about me, Sarah, are you a samurai
sword fighting expert. I'm not no mine is an into katana,
but I don't actually know how to use it, which
I don't know if that's better for my opponents or worse.
But I guess hopefully I'll never have to find out. Yeah, well,
because their stories every now and then about when people
(17:14):
really use their sword collections for for good or for defense,
So I guess you never know. Well, just in case,
just got it next to my bed. You've got it
next to here, Kentucky Derby Hackler. All right, before I
get made fun of anymore, we better, we better say
goodbye for this podcast. If you have any suggestions for us,
(17:36):
or want to tell us about your own weapon wielding skills,
please write us at History Podcast at how stuff works
dot com or look us up on Twitter at Misston
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stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands
(18:01):
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on iTunes, m
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm to blaying a chocolate Barty and I'm fair down
and the Kentucky Derby is coming up on May seven,
and so I thought this would be an okay time
(00:21):
to confess that I have an inexplicable fascination with horse racing.
Really surprised me about you. You told me this earlier
in the day. Yeah, I don't even know what it is.
It's not like I mean, I've ridden horses before, but
I wasn't really very much into it growing up. I
had some friends who were, but even they weren't into racing.
So I don't really know what it is except for
(00:43):
just the stories behind the jockeys, behind the horses and
the trainers. It always seems whenever I tune into the
Kentucky Derby every year, I hear all these stories of
triumph over adversity, and I don't know great comebacks. I
imagine you have like a secret hat collection you bring
out for the Kentucky Derby, Sarah, I only wish. But
(01:07):
before we go any further, for those who aren't familiar
with the Derby, It's one of the classic American horse
races and probably the most widely known in the US.
It started in eighteen seventy five and it takes place
annually the first Saturday in May at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Kentucky.
The race distance is about one point to five miles
one mile and a quarter and it's often called the
(01:28):
most exciting two minutes in sports. Yeah, And like I've mentioned,
we do associate things like big hats with the Kentucky Derby,
mint juleps, high rollers, that kind of thing. It's a
very elite event, and at least in the last one
hundred years or so, it's not that racially diverse. Certainly
that's not the way you think of it. But as
we're gonna learn, there was a time in the early
(01:51):
days of the Derby when African American jockeys dominated the
US horse racing scene. Yeah, and so here we're going
to talk about the last black jockey to win the
Kentucky Derby, Kentucky native actually, whose name was Jimmy Winkfield.
And we'll take a look at his short but successful
US career and the events that brought that to a close,
(02:11):
and his remarkable experiences abroad. But first, um, we want
to look a little bit at this history of African
Americans and horse racing, so we can trace African Americans
participation in the sport to colonial times when the British
brought their passion for horse racing to America, and according
to an article in The Smithsonian by Lisa KA Winkler,
(02:32):
even founding fathers George Washington and Thomas Jefferson frequented the track,
and former President Andrew Jackson had his own thoroughbreds. And
black jockeys so very much a part of our an
illustrious start. But the first black jockeys were slaves, and
they got their skills and their affinity for horses, their
connection to horses from doing sort of the menial we're
(02:54):
cleaning the stables or grooming the owner's valuable animals. And
Winkler point felt that being on the racing circuit once,
once black jockeys did start making it big, gave them
a sort of false sense of freedom. It was one
of the few ways that they could achieve real status,
and a lot of them did. They went all the
(03:15):
way to the top in American horse racing in the
first Kentucky Derby in eighteen sevent thirteen, out of fifteen
jockeys were black, and among the first twenty eight Derby winners,
fifteen of them were black. So they were they were
dominating the horse racing scene. Yeah, exactly. And this was
the environment that James Winkfield was born into on April twelfth,
(03:35):
eighteen eighty two, in Kentucky, and he was the youngest
son of George and Victoria Winkfield, who had a total
of seventeen kids. They were farmers, basically sharecroppers, and lived
in a shotgun shock so some of the kids actually
had to spill out on the porch at night to sleep. Yeah,
but little James definitely got interested in horses and racing early,
(03:57):
probably in no small part because he was growing up
bluegrass country and he heard he probably saw the horses
and also heard the stories of black jockeys making a
name for themselves and getting big. And lucky for him,
he didn't get big. He's stayed small, which is of
course a requirement for professional jockeys. Even though he had
some siblings who were six ft tall. This is quite
(04:19):
a discrepancy because by his teen years he was only
five ft tall and less than one hundred pounds, so
perfect build for a jockey. Yeah, and he started out
just bugging other groomers in his area until they finally
gave in and let him do some of their work
for free. Sounds like a pretty good deal to me
if you're one of those workers. But Jimmy then got
(04:40):
hired on as a groomer and an exercise boy, so
he got his own gig. And this is how he
got his experience in training and kind of got discovered
just riding horses as an exerciser. And there were some
trainers who were looking out for opportunities all the time
to turn riders into jockeys, looking for people who just
seemed to have that natural talent. And that's how Jimmy
got his first break in eighteen ninety eight at age sixteen. Yeah,
(05:02):
so he rode a race at Chicago's Hawthorne Race Course.
But it didn't turn out to be the big break
he was really looking for it. In fact, it was
quite a disaster. His horse broke next to last at
the start, and then when he thought he saw an opening,
he broke fourth from the rail and cut across the
path of three horses and he took them all down
(05:23):
in the process and got suspended for a year because
of it. He came back though in eighteen ninety nine,
strong as ever. Yeah, he started winning races in Chicago.
For example, in nineteen hundred he rode in his first
Kentucky Derby and that was out of four races, four
Kentucky Derby races, I should say that he would ride
in total. In nineteen hundred he placed third. The next
(05:43):
two years he placed first in the Kentucky Derby, first
on a horse called His Eminence and then on Allan
a Dale And this made him only the second jockey
to win two successive Derby's. And I mean there's still
really aren't that many jockeys who can claim that their
feet indeed. And in nineteen o three he finished second
because he made his move too soon, and it was
a loss that always bugged him. I mean, he was
(06:06):
hoping to go for three in a row there, it seems. Yeah,
I've read that he actually talked about that loss until
his death. You know that he should have won it, Yeah,
the one that going away. So by that time, the
US horse racing scene was already changing thanks to racism, segregation,
Jim Crow laws and the economy played a part. Two
recessions at the time really shrunk the number of race
(06:27):
tracks and the attendance at the race tracks that were
still open. And they were also anti gambling groups going around,
so that was further shutting down the number of race
tracks that were operating. Yeah, definitely, they went down from
three tracks in eighteen ninety five by nineteen o eight,
so really big dive and white jockeys also didn't like
(06:48):
competing with black jockeys for the best mount so at
times there was outright violence. I mean during races on
the track, black jockeys would sometimes be pushed towards the rail. Um.
There was even a riot in Chicago between the white
and the black jockeys. Yeah. So times were definitely changing,
and you can really tell. Even though Winkfield one more
than one hundred and sixty races in nineteen o one,
(07:10):
Goodwin's annual Official Guide to the Turf admitted his name,
so he he wasn't even a player even anymore, even
though he was still winning. Yeah, and perhaps more seriously,
or definitely more seriously, I should say, he received death
threats from the Ku Klux Klan. Yeah, so it was
getting really hard for a black jockey to work in
(07:32):
the United States anymore, and all those reasons were contributing
for sure. But he really sort of put the final
nail in his own coffin for his US career because
in nineteen o three, he was scheduled to ride for
one owner in the Futurity Stakes in New York City
and then he accepted a three thousand dollar offer to
(07:52):
switch horses and ride on the favorite. And this was
a big faux pat I mean, as he can imagine,
switching horses at the last minute, and it really hurt
his reputation. Yeah, So after the horse switch incident, Winkfield's
number of rides dropped by a third. So he ended
up moving to Russia in nineteen o four, where he
accepted a position with an American owned stable, and there
(08:12):
his career really took off again. His first year there
he won the Czar's Triple Crown, which is the Moscow,
the St. Petersburg and the Warsaw Derby's and he was
also the nineteen o four Russian National writing Champion. Yeah,
and over the years he just kind of kept on,
winning the mof got Derby four more times on one
horse alone, and then several other times on different mouths.
(08:34):
He rode on and off for different owners, the Polish Prince,
the German baron. So he wasn't just riding in Russia.
He was riding in Austria and Germany and France too,
and making a lot of money doing it. Yeah, his
salary at one point was seventeen thousand roubles, so it
would have been equal to about eight thousand, five hundred
(08:54):
dollars at the time per year, plus ten percent of
every purse that he won, So he was pretty well
off to say the least. He was living in this
fancy schmancy hotel, the National Hotel in Moscow, and having
caviare for breakfast. As we know, though, by nineteen seventeen
or so, there was trouble brewing in Russia and the
(09:15):
Bolsheviks and the Communists were getting organized, and the racing
community was really at risk because it was something that
rich people did. It was a symbol of the aristocracy,
and so Winfield, to protect himself, had to walk around
in tattered clothing to avoid getting arrested by Bolsheviks. I
still think that's quite I don't know, it's it's hard
(09:36):
to imagine this five foot tall guy walking around and
what did they think of him? Like he would still
stick out, I think definitely. He was working in Odessa
for Prince Loumo Misski of Poland and nineteen nineteen when
the Russian Revolution finally caught up to him. When they
started hearing the sound of cannons, he and the rest
of the racing community, which included horsemen and their families
(09:59):
and about two fifty two and sixty horses something in there,
they all took off an escaped to Poland. It was
a really hazardous journey one thousand, one hundred miles to Warsaw.
They had to cross the Transylvanian Alps, and they had
to actually unfortunately eat some of the horses along the
way because they got desperate for food. But they did
(10:20):
make it eventually. Yeah, And once he was in Poland,
Wingfield again resumed his riding career and started to recoup
his fortune, most of which he lost when he left Russia.
Even though he was getting older, he did become a
successful rider again. He continued as a jockey through the
nineteen twenties. He won several stakes races and altogether he
(10:41):
ended up winning two thousand, six hundred races in his
entire riding career. That was one amazing thing I thought
about this story. I kept expecting some sort of sad end,
but he keeps bouncing back time after time. He does.
In even when he was as he was building up
his racing again and still writing, he built a stable
(11:03):
in a home near Paris in Maison Lafitte. He had
a little family there with him too, by then, a
son and a daughter with his third wife, who was
an exiled Russian aristocrat named Lydia de Mickowitz. So when
he finally retired from writing in nineteen thirty, around the
age of forty eight, he decided to devote his life
entirely to training horses at his stable in France. So
(11:25):
he stayed put there, settled there instead of traveling around
racing all the time, and he trained his own horses
and horses for other owners too, and he ended up
doing really well by it. But unfortunately he loses his
fortune once again when the Germans invade France in one
and the Red Cross evacuates his family to the US.
He's home, so he's back home again, and black jockeys
(11:48):
had pretty much disappeared from the racing scene by the
early twenties, and Winkfield was looking for work and signed
up with the Works Progress Administration working on a road
crew and later had to work as a room and
an assistant trainer for a living, So I mean a groom.
That's back to where he where he started as a kid. Finally, though,
he got to return to France in nineteen fifty three
(12:10):
and start up his operation, his racing and training stable
again and he died in France March twenty three, nineteen
seventy four, at age ninety one. Again just bouncing back.
It's so impressive that he had he had it in
him to keep going and try again. Yeah, it was
a phenomenal life and a phenomenal career really and very impressive.
(12:32):
But it took Winkfield a long time to get recognition
that he deserved in his home country. In the US.
There's a story that's often told about he and his
daughter attending the nineteen sixty one Kentucky Derby. Actually it's
really sad. They were invited to a Sports Illustrated event,
a dinner at the Brown Hotel in Louisville, but they
almost got turned away at the door by the doorman,
(12:53):
and they had to have him go check several times
and insists that they were guests and they were supposed
to be there, and they finally got in, but even
when they did get there, they were essentially ignored by
the people at the dinner. The dinner kind of the
people at the dinner kind of came up to them
and said high and shook hands, and then they didn't
talk to anyone the rest of the time. His daughter
said in a two thousand two NPR Weekend Edition interview
(13:14):
that the only person who talked to us was a
previous jockey who had won the derby, and that was
Roscoe Goose. He was the only one who was friendly
enough to talk to us. Nobody else talked to us
the whole time. That's so sad and tragic and disappointing.
I guess this very that's the perfect way to describe it. Disappointing.
I think you mentioned that. I thought this was a
(13:37):
neat counterpoint to it. Even though he's so disrespected at
this event, he said he still really enjoyed the race
because that's his element. He liked it, he liked being there. Again, Yeah,
from what I've read, he really enjoyed being at the
race and kind of didn't care that people had treated
him that way, or really didn't seem to care. I
guess because he had been through so much in his life. Anyway,
Pennsylvanian alps probably puts things in perspective. Yeah, that would
(14:01):
definitely change your perspective on the whole thing. I think
that he was more embarrassed and worried about his daughter
in that situation necessarily than himself. But regardless, things have
changed a lot over the past decade. Winkfield finally got
inducted into the National Racing Hall of Fame in two
thousand four, and in two thousand five the House of
Representatives passed a bill honoring him, and in two thousand
(14:22):
Marlin sat Julian became the first African American to ride
in the Derby since ninety one. They've been a few
since then, so maybe things are starting to change, starting
to get back to how they were at the end
of the eighteen hundreds. Yeah, it's interesting to think of
going backwards as progress, but I guess in a weird way,
that's kind of what it would be. But I know
(14:44):
that I'll definitely be watching May seven to check out
the Kentucky Derby and um all the new stories that
they have this year, and learn about the present day
jockeys and what their deals are. UM And if you
want to learn more about Jimmy Winkfield, because of course
we only touched on his career, we didn't really go
into his personal life that much. And there's interesting stories.
(15:04):
There's some interesting points there. It's a little tumultuous. Um,
he's not necessarily always coming up roses and all those stories,
so you might want to check it out. It's really fascinating.
Their a couple of biographies. There's one Black Mice stro
The Epic Life of an American Legend by Joe Drake,
and there's another one called wink by Ed Hodeling. But
for now we'll just move on to listener mail. So
(15:28):
after our five Real Life Amazon podcasts, we got a
few comments from listeners saying that a European Howard is
a little different from a Japanese Halbard, sort of pointier
and less. Let's act like yes, But we also got
a really interesting email from listener Jen in California. She
wrote to say, hello, ladies, I just finished listening to
(15:48):
your Real Life Amazon podcast and I wanted to say
thanks for the part on the female samarai. Nicano. I
practiced a Japanese sword style called Ei. I just won
two first places a competition that was almost exclusively male
with male judges. There are only a handful of women
that practice the traditional Samurai sword styles, let alone a blonde.
(16:10):
I get killed bill references a lot, and there are
only a rare few stories of true Samurai women warriors,
So thanks for the podcast. Plus a fun fact, the
halberd called the Nagi Nata was traditionally a woman's weapon,
and its power comes from the core and hip, so
it's easy to see why it was wielded so well
by women. As practiced with it a few times. And
(16:32):
although I love the samurai sword, the Naga nata is
really a fun weapon. Keep the warrior women's stories coming,
especially Japanese one. So yeah, I thought that was cool.
Thanks everybody for the Halbard explanations. I'm impressed that there
are so many Japanese weapon experts out there listening. Definitely,
you know I have a Japanese weapon as well. I
(16:53):
have a sword. Oh my gosh, so you're learning all
kinds of things about me, Sarah, are you a samurai
sword fighting expert. I'm not no mine is an into katana,
but I don't actually know how to use it, which
I don't know if that's better for my opponents or worse.
But I guess hopefully I'll never have to find out. Yeah, well,
because their stories every now and then about when people
(17:14):
really use their sword collections for for good or for defense,
So I guess you never know. Well, just in case,
just got it next to my bed. You've got it
next to here, Kentucky Derby Hackler. All right, before I
get made fun of anymore, we better, we better say
goodbye for this podcast. If you have any suggestions for us,
(17:36):
or want to tell us about your own weapon wielding skills,
please write us at History Podcast at how stuff works
dot com or look us up on Twitter at Misston
history or on Facebook. And if you want to check
out what we've been blogging about lately, you can look
us up on the homepage where at www dot how
stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands
(18:01):
of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com. To
learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon
in the upper right corner of our homepage. The how
stuff works iPhone app has a ride. Download it today
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