PERSISTENCE PAYS OFF FOR DERBY WINNING JOCKEY HERNANDEZ
PERSISTENCE PAYS OFF FOR DERBY
WINNING JOCKEY HERNANDEZ
The Week in Review by Bill Finley Thoroughbred Daily News
It was back in 2006 and Brian Hernandez, Jr. was mired in 12th place in the jockey standings at Churchill Downs with 14 wins. It wasn’t that he had been a failure. He won an Eclipse Award in 2004 as the nation’s top apprentice, winning 243 races that year. And before moving to the Kentucky circuit in 2006, he was among the top riders at Evangeline Downs and Delta Downs in his native Louisiana. It=s just that Hernandez had larger goals and he was starting to worry they would never come to fruition.
“There was one point right after I lost the bug around 2006 that I got pretty discouraged. I was planning on packing it in and returning to Louisiana,” he said Sunday, a day after his winning ride aboard Mystik Dan (Goldencents) in the GI Kentucky Derby and two days after he captured the GI Kentucky Oaks with Thorpedo Anna (Fast Anna).