New Jockey for Seoul, New Stallion for Jeju

The Japanese jockey contingent in Korea has risen to four again. Thirty-two year old Yoshiyuki Aoki has arrived in Seoul and looks set to make his debut at the track this coming weekend. He’ll join Toshiyuki Katoh at Seoul while Eiki Nishimura and Hitomi Miyashita are at Busan.

Meanwhile the KRA has been stallion shopping and it appears that they are close to bringing over the nine year old Peace Rules [Jules - Hold To Fashion (Hold Your Peace)], a prolific winner in his racing career taking the Haskell Invitational and Blue Grass Stakes amongst a number of Grade Ones. He’s found only moderate success as a sire and the Bloodhorse reports he will stand at the KRA’s Jeju Stud Farm where he will be alongside the likes of Volponi and fellow newcomer, Ecton Park.

Peace Rules will take the number of registered stallions in Korea to 96. Over the past year, two colts and a fiilly by Peace Rules have been imported. The best known of these is three year old Gangho [Honor Delilah (Honor Grades)], who won his first four races this Spring. Two year old filly Gwacheon Geojang [Copelan's Lily (Copelan)]has also made a positive start withe a win and a second place in her two outings to date.

Here’s Peace Rules winning the 2004 Suburban Handicap from Funny Cide at Belmont Park:

Bloodhorse Article

A video of Peace Rules at current home Vinery Farm.

(ht – FP)

Hitomi Goes Full-Time

Miyashita to make history at Busan
She won the International Lady Jockey Invitation race at Busan Race Park in August and clearly Japanese jockey Hitomi Miyashita took a liking to the southern track. On Friday, Miyashita will make her debut as a licensed freelance jockey at Busan and in doing so, becomes the first foreign female jockey to ride full-time in Korea.

Hitomi shared the Japanese National Association of Racing (NAR) Grand Prix award for best female jockey of 2008 and has been based recently at the Aichi racecourse.

Miyashita has secured a competitive set of rides for the upcoming weekend. She will debut in race 6 on Friday when she partners Chowolgeum - likely to be an outsider in a seven furlong contest. She’ll follow that up with three more rides, including taking the mount on Yongdu Baram in the feature race. On Sunday, she will partner Viva Galileo in Busan’s big race of the weekend, the Gyeongnam Shinmun Cup.

Hitomi Miyashita (centre) with Laura Cheshire and Chiaki Iwanaga at Busan

Enjoy racing has has more on Hitomi – including pictures of her putting her time in eating something re-assuringly Korean looking back in August.

Here she is winning the International Lady Jockey Invitational on Ima Firecracker:

Korean Racing Girls

Success and Tragedy – A short history of female jockeys in Korea
Back in the early days of this site, a not insubstantial proportion of traffic came from those googling for “Korean racing girls”. A high instance of the words Korean, racing and a lot of horses with the word “girl” in their name no doubt contributing to that. And probably disappointing those surfers. Hopefully those figures will now get another boost.

On Sunday, jockey Na Yu Na landed the KRA Jeju Cup on 9-1 shot Mangpouikkum and in doing so secured what was arguably the most prestigious ever win for a female rider in Korea. With Lee Shin Young and Lee Ae Li also in the Winner’s Circle at Seoul, it meant that 25% of all licensed female riders in Korean racing history tasted victory this past weekend. The story of female jockeys in Korea is brief, but contains elements of tragedy, frustrated ambition but also success in a challenging environment.

You have to go back to the now long-gone Ttukkseom Racecourse on the north bank of the Han River and to the Spring of 1975 when 21 year old Lee Ok Rae became the first woman to be granted a jockey license in Korea. South Korea was, at the time, under the authoritarian rule of President Park Chung Hee who had recently survived the second of three assassination attempts – this one had resulted in the death of his wife. Then, as now, racing held a near monopoly on gambling and Ttukkseom was full to bursting on each race-day.

Lee Ok Rae graduated in the same class as Bae Dae Sun and Ji Yong Cheol, who would go on to become two of the top riders of their generation and today are among the country’s most successful trainers. Lee was assigned to trainer Kwon In Deok and on March 17 that year rode in her first race. In true storybook fashion it was a winning debut as in race 4 that day, she partnered horse number 1, “Kansas” to victory over five and a half furlongs.

Lee continued to establish herself over the coming months, however, in August that year, disaster struck in the shape of a fall in which she sustained injuries that would end her career. She retired just six months after her first ride with seven wins from forty eight starts. No Korean woman would ride in a race for the next quarter of a century.

By the time they did, Park Chung Hee had been dead for two decades and his once bitter enemy Kim Dae Jung was now President of South Korea. Seoul had hosted the Olympic games in 1988 and Ttukkseom Racecourse was closed as the huge new track at Gwacheon opened. At the turn of the millennium, the KRA made an effort to get more women into the sport.

In 2001, two jockeys were granted licenses, Lee Geum Joo and Lee Shin Young. They were followed a year later by Lee Ae Li and Park Jin Hee. While Lee Geum Joo remains licensed, she hasn’t ridden for over two years. The other three, however, have enjoyed successful careers.

Lee Shin Young, known for an aggressive style that has her in the stewards’ room as often as the winner’s circle has the most thoroughbred wins with 82 while Park Jin Hee moved down to Busan when the southern track opened and has become well-established there. Lee Ae Li, meanwhile, continues to be the punters’ favourite with her pink silks and “Ae Li Gongju” (Princess Ae Li) nickname despite a recent dip in form. Booting home Enertein for a wire-to-wire win in race 1 last Sunday, however, may be the fillip she needs to get back in form.

Tragedy struck the next intake, however. Granted a license in 2005, Lee Myoung Hwa took her own life shortly afterward. She was found to have been suffering from depression that is believed to have been exacerbated by worries about constant reducing to make weight. A year later, newly licensed Kim Seo Jin quit

In 2006, the jockeys received nationwide mainstream publicity with the release of the movie “Gaksoltang” (“Lump Sugar”). Starring actress Im Su Jeong, key parts of the movie were shot at Seoul Race Park as the heroine takes on the role of a jockey (click here to watch trailer). KBS Television produced a one-off documentary about Lee Ae Li to coincide with the film’s release.

Meanwhile, down on Jeju Island Kim Joo Hee and Na Yu Na became the first women to receive jockey licenses for the pony racing there. Kim was formerly a promising athlete while Na was an Aerobics instructor. Both have become prolific winners with Na becoming the first woman to reach 100 career winners as well as landing the KRA Jeju Cup.

Na and Kim have found it easier to compete riding the Jeju ponies than their counterparts have on the thorougbreds on the mainland and in a short time have risen to first and third in the all-time female winners list.

Back in Seoul, Yoo Mi Ra qualified in 2008. It took her over a year to record her first winner and she languishes with one of the worst quinella percentages at the track. However, she has only ever ridden one horse with a clear chance of winning – and she won. Her time may come. Still searching for her first winner is this year’s graduate, Kim Hae Sun. With plenty of support from trainers, however, it seems this first win isn’t far away.

There will soon be an eleventh woman joining the ranks of licensed jockeys in Korea. Having won the International Lady Jockey Invitational last month, Japanese rider Hitomi Miyashita clearly took a liking to the Busan track and applied for a license as soon as she returned home. She’s anticipated to join in the coming weeks.

All time List – (Winners/Rides):

1. Na Yu Na* – 102 (963)
2. Lee Shin Young – 82 (816)
4. Kim Joo Hee* – 51 (897)
5. Lee Ae Li – 43 (808)
6. Park Jin Hee – 38 (586)
7. Lee Geum Ju – 16 (624)
8. Lee Ok Rae – 7 (48)
9. Yoo Mi Ra – 1 (132)
10. Kim Hae Sun – 0 (23)
11. Lee Myoung Hwa -
11. Kim Seo Jin –

*Jeju Pony Racing

* Much of the information for this post was sourced from the excellent Korean language blog “Enjoy Horse Racing”. Pictures of all the jockeys mentioned can be found at this link.

Champion Moon Se Young’s Season Is Over

The KRA has confirmed that Moon Se Young, 2008 Champion jockey and current leading rider this year, will miss the rest of the season following his horror fall at Seoul Race Park last Saturday. Moon, 29, was thrown into the rails by two year old Raipai as she veered wildly coming out of the stalls on her racing debut. The jockey escaped what initially looked a very serious situation with severely ruptured knee ligaments which, following surgery, will require six months of recuperation.

Moon Se Young (leading) will be out for 6 months

Last year, Moon Se Young became only the second Korean rider to land over one hundred winners in a calender year as he stormed to a record breaking 128 winners. This year, despite a number of suspensions – as well as a wedding to track announcer Kim Ryeo Jin and subsequent honeymoon – keeping him off the track on more occasions than he would have liked, Moon remains at the top of the Jockey standings with 72 winners.

Unlike last year, however, his closest rivals are much closer. Park Tae Jong, the rider with the most wins in Korean racing history lies in second just three behind and, following a remarkable eight wins over the weekend, Cho Kyoung Ho has joined the veteran on 69. Just one behind those two is Choi Beom Hyun on 68. It will now be a straight three way fight for the title.

Photo: letsbook

Nozi Bows Out

Nozomu Tomizawa has left Korea. The Japanese jockey recently brought to an end his two year stint at Seoul Race Park and is returning to Australia where his family lives and where he rode previously.

Initially arriving for six months in August 2007, Tomizawa started a month after fellow Japanese rider Ikuyasu Kurakane. While Ikuyasu was quick to become reasonably well established, it took Nozomu a little while to build up rides and eventually, winners. Once he did, however, his obvious talent came through as he notched up a decent winning record despite not generally getting the better horses.

Six months became a year and then one year became two. Slowly overcoming the traditional huge disadvantages faced by foreign riders in Korea, not least by learning a little Korean, Tomizawa finshed with figures of 730 rides with 48 winners, 56 seconds and 71 thirds. Top rides always remained hard to come by – being the regular jockey on Gamadongja, a top sprinter, the notable exception.

There was talk of Nozomu following in the footsteps of Ikuyasu and going to Busan for a final few months in Korea but it was not to be. Instead he leaves as a jockey who has advanced the reputation of foreign riders at Seoul no end and the track – and punters – will miss him.

www.horseman.co.kr followed Tomizawa during his last weeks in Korea and produced a short video about him. This, as well as a couple of his race videos can be seen at the Enjoy Racing blog.

Get Katoh: Nozi’s departure leaves Toshiyuki Katoh as the only overseas jockey at Seoul and he must have felt the horses were out to get him on Sunday. In race 6, Dublin Gypsy bolted wildly from the gate and tried for a full furlong to throw him off. Katoh eventually managed to bring the filly under control and get her home only for Money Pokpung to promptly dump him over the outside rail on the home turn in the very next race. Fortunately he escaped injury and was able to ride the rest of the card.

* In other jockey news, it’s been confirmed that Kim Ok Sung’s season is over. The veteran rider suffered a broken ankle during track work last Wednesday and will be sidelined for at least six months.

Sit in at Busan

Another overseas jockey rides into Busan this weekend as Hong Kong’s Vincent Sit takes up a four month licence. He’ll make his debut on Friday.

Sit (Shun Keung Sit) isn’t one of Hong Kong’s most prolific jockeys – he has 103 career wins from 2385 rides. His best season was in 2000-2001. In the 2008-2009 season he has three wins.

He will join what’s becoming a vibrant overseas jockey community at Busan. Eiki Nishimura and Martin Wepner have been thriving recently with Wepner currently the in-form jockey at the track. Stephan Swanepoel also recently transferred down from Seoul and has already landed his first winner – something he was unable to do in four months in the capital.

Back up north, Nozomu Tomizawa continues to valiantly battle on against the odds at Seoul where he was recently joined by fellow Japanese rider Toshiyuki Katoh .

Click here for Vincent Sit’s profile from the Hong Kong Jockey Club.

Update: Shaka has collected some videos of Vincent Sit in action in Hong Kong

Three New Jockeys for Seoul

Just three new apprentices make up the class of 2009 set to join the jockey ranks at Seoul Race Park this month. Park Sang Woo, Lee Ki Woong and Kim Hye Sun graduated from the Jockey’s Academy in Wondang last month (should anybody be interested, the ceremony can be viewed here). Park joins top trainer Park Dae Heung while Lee will be attached to Son Young Pyo. Kim, who will take the number of female jockeys currently in action at Seoul to four, will join trainer Jung Ho Ik.

The standard of riding in Korea has been on the up recently. While the bringing to Korea of foreign jockeys has, by and large been botched, another aspect of the KRA Internationalization program has brought success. The addition of a South African riding instructor would seem to have had a postive effect on the training of young jockeys. Almost all of last year’s apprentices have been able to establish themselves with all seemingly respected by punters. Seven apprentices debuted last June, here’s how they’ve been getting on in order of winners:

Name – Rides/1st/2nd/3rd

Lee Sang Hyuk – 198/18/12/15
Kim Cheol Ho – 211/16/16/18
Jo In Kwen – 151/14/8/12
Park Si Cheon – 193/13/10/18
Park Byoung Yun – 194/11/16/18
Kim Dong Min – 179/9/12/14
Yoo Mi Ra – 95/0/4/3

Of course the quality of rides that they have had has varied but Lee Sang Hyuk did enough to get a ride in the Grand Prix race last December and som of the others have also found themselves trusted with big mounts. Yoo Mi Ra remains winless although on the sole occasion she has found herself riding a favourite, she was edged out by a neck by none other than Park Tae Jong.

Meanwhile, another Japanese jockey looks set to join at Seoul shortly.

Tight at the Top but Tougher at the Bottom

Top jockeys flourish but Foreign riders are still struggling
Not only did he score his 400th career winner in the process of landing a treble at Seoul Race Park on Sunday, Moon Se Young also managed to put some distance between himself and his main rivals in what has been so far a tight race for the 2009 Jockey’s Championship.

After a slow May, which yielded only 9 winners, last year’s Champion scored five winners across the weekend to take his year’s total to fifty and open up a gap of six over his closest challenger, the veteran Park Tae Jong. Cho Kyoung Ho, who reached the 400 winner milestone a week before Moon, is one behind Park on 43, while Choi Beom Hyun is the only other rider in touch, on 39.

Park Tae Jong meanwhile, remains on the verge of becoming the first Korean rider to land 1500 career victories. Park was also the first to reach 1000 wins back in 2004. While such figures may not sound impressive to those accustomed to US or European racing, where the top jockeys can amass huge numbers of winners over their careers, with racing confined to two days a week in Korea, it is not possible. Aside with limited races, another diffculty to overcome is the lack of rides.

Park is a freelance jockey, which means he may accept as many rides as he is able to secure. However, the freelance system has only been in operation in Korea since 2005. Prior to this, all jockeys were attached to a trainer and they were limited to a maximum of five race rides per week. This is still the case for all but the 21 jockeys (and a further 10 at Busan) who hold freelance status which is why all of those filling out the top places in the Jockey’s championship are freelance.

Being freelance is all very well (and all very lucrative – the KRA estimates that freelance jockeys can make four times as much money as their retained counterparts) for established riders, but for for those less known it is anything but easy. And here is the problem for overseas riders granted licenses under the KRA’s Internationalization program. In reporting the departure of Santos Chavez, an American jockey who joined in February this year and opted not to renew his four month license, the Korean Racing Journal noted that an overseas jockey at Seoul generally gets far less opportunities for rides than a brand new apprentice. With the limit on rides stable jockeys can have, apprentices are quite rightly guaranteed some rides and, while life is far from easy, they have a steady stream of horses to ride out in the mornings.

For the overseas jockeys, there are no such guarantees. South African Stephan Swanepoel debuted in March and has since ridden just 48 times. He has no winners so far but that is hardly surprising given the calibre of those 48. Swanepoel has managed to guide 17 of them to minor money finishes and gives every impression of being a talented rider. However, few would blame him if he was follow Chavez in calling it a day at the earliest opportunity. The Journal reported that there is a possiblity of him transferring to Busan where overseas riders are starting to fare a little better.

At Busan, while opportunities are not significantly greater, there has been one interesting development. Martin Wepner has just become the first foreign jockey to be retained by a trainer. Despite Wepner walking away from his Derby mount on Namdo Jeap for Kim Young Kwan after a breakdown in communication, the trainer decided that Wepner was worth keeping in Korea and offered him the opportunity to be his main rider until his contract finishes in July. Whether this will be successful or whether there is any possibility for this to be repeated in the future remains to be seen.

What is once more clear though is that in its current form the “Internalization” program benefits no-one and as more jockeys return home with nothing but bad things to say, its prospects for future success – indeed its prospects of attracting quality jockeys – diminish. Which no doubt is a source of great satisfaction for certain elements on the backstretch.

Seoul Jockeys’ Championship 2009 – Current Standings

1. Moon Se Young 50
2. Park Tae Jong 44
3. Cho Kyoung Ho 43
4. Choi Beom Hyun 39
5. Kim Ok Sung 17

Continuing the jockeys theme, later this week we’ll have a look at the newly qualified apprentices who will make their racing debuts shortly and grade the performance of those coming up to their one year anniversary in the saddle. We’ll also take a look back over the career so far of the only man in Korean racing whose name is known outside racing circles, Park Tae Jong.

Hardride for Shinde’s Debut

A week later than planned, Indian jockey Rahul Shinde is scheduled to make his Korean debut at Busan Race Park on Friday. After missing his one riding engagement last Sunday, with illness the reason given to punters, Shinde is booked to partner last year’s Busan Metropolitan winner Hardride in Friday’s feature race.

Shinde joins the jockey ranks at Busan on an initial contract until the end of August. Like all overseas jockeys, he’ll be a free agent. In India, Shinde has been Champion Jockey at the Hyderabad meet five times and earlier in his career also won three titles in Sri Lanka.

His greatest successes came before 2005 when the previously closed Hyderabad relaxed its rules over none-local jockeys competing. Shinde’s most recent figures for the recently concluded 2008/2009 winter meet were just one win from over ninety rides with nine second and ten third placed finishes.

Meanwhile, Stephan Swanepoel has been telling the KRA’s blog about his time in Korea so far – it’s not been easy but he’s giving it a go, seems to be the gist. The South African jockey mentions being impressed by the infrastructure, if less so by the racing. Click here for the link (in Korean) with photos.

Thanks to Shyam from the “Horses and Races” Indian racing site

Three Go Free

Bang, Moon, Jung go freelance / Park Soo Hong warned off
Three more jockeys have taken on freelance status at Seoul Race Park bringing the total number of unattached riders to twenty out of the sixty-one currently holding a license. Bang Choon Sik, Moon Jung Kyun and Jung Ki Young are the latest to go it alone.

The main benefit to being freelance is that the jockey can ride in as many races per week as he can find a mount for. Jockeys who are attached to a stable are limited to a maximum of five race rides per week. Figures released by the KRA last year showed that freelance jockeys had an average of 9.6 mounts per week whereas stable jockeys had 3.4. Average earnings for freelancers was over KRW 12 Million per month compared with KRW 5 Million per month for retained riders.

The figures do hide a disparity between the freelancers, however. The top freelance jockeys, such as Moon Se Young or Park Tae Jong, who will pick up a ride in nearly every race over a weekend – a large proportion of them well-fancied – will earn much more whereas most will earn far less.

This has particularly been true for the overseas riders who have often struggled to get mounts in their early days in Korea. All overseas riders are given freelance status and while it can work out very well, as for Toshio Uchida and now Ikuyasu Kurakane at Busan, it can take a long time to get established. With the race fee less than KRW 60,000 per ride, freelance jockeys need to consistently be getting quality rides to make ends meet.

In other jockey news, Park Soo Hong, who rode Subsidy to victory in the 2005 Owner’s Trophy and Grand Prix races, has been permanently warned off by the KRA for passing on inside information. Local media reported at the weekend that thirty four year old Park confessed to police that he accepted money for information. A groom and a trainer also found to have been involved, were handed lesser penalties.