Wanna Be A Jockey?

"...and Good is taking Alfie to the outside for a clear run! Now they're hooking up with Pat Day and UPI Indy! Alfie is still under a hand ride! And down the stretch they come! It's Alfie in front by three parts of a length! Good goes to the whip on Alfie, and he's responding like a champion! Under the wire, it's Alfie and Judy Good winning the 125th Kentucky Derby!"

Secretariat? Bring him on. Seattle Slew? No problem. Astride Alfie, aspiring jockey Judy Good can dust any horse on any track.

Certainly it helps that the 32-year-old novice jockey has a vivid imagination. Crouched low, her whip a menacing arc above the homestretch, Good is momentarily oblivious of the fact that Alfie the wonder horse is nothing more than three bales of alfalfa hay with a saddle on top.

Yet while this high-fiber practice pony is no Derby prospect, he's a valuable part of the Paradise Ranch Racing School curriculum. Young men and women, some from as far away as Japan, come to Paradise Ranch in the desert community of Castaic, Calif., with the hope of becoming race riders. Their six to nine rigorous months of schooling include daily sessions on Alfie—horse racing's equivalent of a flight simulator—as jockeys build upper-body strength by isometrically holding the correct riding positions.

Traditionally jockeys and exercise riders have learned to ride at breeding farms, where they start out doing mundane chores like mucking stalls. "Most of us worked for free just to get a foot in the stirrup," says Kris Goddard, a former actress, exercise rider and the founder of the racing school. "Eventually a trainer would feel sorry for you and let you ride one of his horses. But learning to ride racehorses is a very dangerous activity if you don't have the right kind of instruction."

Goddard, who is around 40, knows whereof she speaks. Fifteen years ago, during her first year of exercising horses at Hollywood Park, she was catapulted into the rail by the dyspeptic 2-year-old she was riding. Goddard's left leg was broken in four places. "I really had no business being out there," she says. "Even though I was a good rider, race riding is something altogether different from pleasure riding. The horses are flying on adrenaline. It's very scary."

Goddard decided there had to be a better way for women to learn race riding. As she lay in a hospital bed with her leg in traction, she began planning her jockey school.

To earn money for the school's startup, Goddard continued doing commercial and film work after she recovered. And the following year, 1980, she founded the Women's Jockey Association, the forerunner of her school, using rented saddles and rented horses at an equestrian center in Castaic. She opened the school itself in 1982 and was immediately inundated with letters from women—and men—who wanted to attend. After opening the school to men two years later, Goddard moved it to its present location.

Surrounded by the Angeles National Forest some 45 minutes north of downtown Los Angeles, Paradise Ranch sits on 365 acres of rolling hills dotted with yucca plants. There are 80 stalls, living quarters, paddocks, electric hotwalkers, a shaded barn with a large wash rack and a half-mile training track complete with starting gate.

About 30 horses are kept at the school. Roughly half are 2-year-olds in training, and the others are retired racehorses. Most of the old campaigners, like 15-year-old Big Red, exhibit an astonishing unflappability that sometimes borders on torpor. Then there are the hellions, horses who were gelded as youngsters in a futile attempt to lower their irascibility quotient.