He is horse racing's answer to Gordie Howe, as ageless as Damon Allen spitting in the face of Father Time.
Alan Cuthbertson is 59, the oldest jockey in Canada. This year, at Winnipeg's Assiniboai Downs, he also was the top jockey. He climbed into the saddle 415 times and on 82 occasions he outwitted men half his age to step down a winner.
Four weeks ago, almost 42 years since he started his career in Toronto, Cuthbertson climbed back on a horse at Woodbine.
"I'm not here to ride the occasional horse. I'm here to giddy up and go," Cuthbertson said this week. While most men his age are thinking of retirement, Cuthbertson is embarking on a new career -- in Toronto where, as he says, "the money is. I'm aiming to get some of it. I just love the game, I like the action. I like the danger and risk."
Danger has been Cuthbertson's hallmark. In life. In racing. Horse racing is no easy game and the creases of Cuthbertson's face tell a tale of a hundred racetracks, a hundred cities, too many late nights, a career filled of laughs, tears, triumphs and defeats. He has an easy smile and every wrinkle tells a story.
"I grew up in Hamilton. It was 1964 and my dad took me (to old Woodbine) and dropped me off and told me go get 'em. I remember (other jockeys) telling me, 'You only got a couple years left because you're going to be too big.' They said, 'You got two years in you; get what you can out of it.' Guess what? They should've added 40 on to the two."
When he won his first race, in 1964 aboard a horse named Buttermilk Pike, a coffee and doughnut cost a dime, Lester B. Pearson was prime minister and Canada had yet to adopt it's own flag. He wound up riding in the prairies, making his home at B.C.'s Hasting's Park. He rode throughout the U.S. against guys like Shoemaker, Cordero and Pincay.
He is a colourful remnant of a past in what has become a world of tiny automatons. There was that incident in 2004, when he lost his licence in B.C. after testing positive for cocaine. "I'd rather not talk about that," he says. "That'll hurt me here. That's a great story somewhere else but not here. That's going to damage my attempts to break in here, so I can't go there."
PROVE HIMSELF
He's afraid people will hold grudges. Any given day there are 30 to 35 jockeys at Woodbine and Cuthbertson knows he's in a whole new world trying to prove himself all over again. "I don't want it to bite me in the ass again. I'm over it. I'm very proud I overcame it. It's not an easy thing to do. I've seen a lot of people go down who couldn't get out of it."
He ended up dusting off his career in Winnipeg. "This sport is filled with ups and downs. I've seen guys win stakes races all over and now they don't have anything. Every year things can go bad to good to bad in a New York minute. It's a tough business to sustain success year after year. I wouldn't say that I've gotten rich out of it but," and there comes that rich, ripple of laughter again, "... the possibility is still there."
Nobody's quite sure how many races he has won but statsmen at Woodbine are working on it and say he will soon win his 2,000th -- a mark surpassed by only about 200 jockeys in the history of the sport. "I'm very proud of it but I haven't thought about it a lot because it's not like I'm thinking of closing it down. I don't see the end yet."
That's the curious thing about Cuthbertson. He doesn't think like he's 59. All he has to do now is make everyone else forget, too. "The first week we were here nobody put us on a horse. I was perceived like any 59-year-old; they like to use young riders. I was pretty much ... not ignored, but a curiosity. But when they see results that 59 number started to kind of go away on them."
Cuthbertson rode a horse named Charada to become the oldest jockey next to Hall of Famer Pat Remillard (who was a couple months older) to win a race at Woodbine. Cuthbertson remembers Remillard's ride. "The one he won on was E Day. It was my first year riding. He won and ... he rode another horse. He went to swing at him and missed the horse's butt.
"Anyway, when he missed he swung right off the horse and he fell and hit the ground. He was lying there and just as he's regaining consciousness a trailing horse's hooves landed about four inches on each side of his head. He got up and walked back to the jockey's room and said, "I quit."
REFUSES TO QUIT
So, Cuthbertson can say the word. He just refuses to do it. This past week he took a 37-1 longshot "and got her to fourth and closing and she never showed anything all year until I got on her."
He also has taken outsider Culpeper Moon to a second-place in a prep for the Ontario Fashion Stakes. "I think people are realizing I'm not just some 59-year-old guy trying to hang in," he says.
Perhaps it is because he loves the game so much that he can't understand why so many have deserted it. "The public's not there anymore. They're more interested in the casinos," he says of his near-half century of racing. "The thing I loved back then was you could hear the roar of the crowd. The grandstands were full. Now it's so quiet. Some people have phone-in accounts and don't even show up. It was electric back then. I miss that."
It is his only acknowledgment to the passing of time. "By next year," he says, "I'm hoping I can call Toronto home. When I start getting on better horses, we're going to start winning."
