Kent Desormeaux
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Kent J. Desormeaux (born February 27, 1970 in Maurice, Vermilion Parish, Louisiana) is an American thoroughbred horse racing Hall of Fame jockey who holds the U.S. record for most races won in a single year.
From a Cajun family, Desormeaux grew up on a farm where he learned to ride horses at a young age. He first raced American Quarter Horses and was only sixteen years old when he began working as an apprentice jockey at the Evangeline Downs racetrack in Lafayette, Louisiana. His immediate success led to him moving north to compete on the Maryland racing circuit in 1987 where his performance earned him the Eclipse Award for Outstanding Apprentice Jockey. In each of his first three years racing in Maryland, Kent Desormeaux won more races than any other jockey in the U.S. He is one of only four jockeys to have won three national titles in a row. No longer an apprentice, in 1989 he won his the Eclipse Award for Outstanding Jockey and another in 1992. Desormeaux, along with Chris McCarron and Steve Cauthen, are the only jockeys to win the Eclipse Award in both the apprentice and overall categories.
In 1989, Desormeaux set the current record for most wins in a year with 599. In the early 1990s he moved to southern California and in late 1992 at the Hollywood Park racetrack he was thrown by a horse and trampled, suffering multiple skull fractures and permanent deafness in one ear. Despite the severe setback, he rebounded to his old form, riding Kotashaan to victory in the 1993 Breeders' Cup Turf and at the end of the year his peers voted him the prestigious George Woolf Memorial Jockey Award. In 1995 he scored his second Breeders' Cup title when he beat the "boys" in the Breeders' Cup Sprint with the filly Desert Stormer.
In 1998 Kent Desormeaux rode Real Quiet to victory in the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness Stakes. Desormeaux lost his bid to win the U.S. Triple Crown, and racing immortality, when Victory Gallop beat his horse by a nose in the final stride in the Belmont Stakes. He then went on to ride the Canadian 3-year-old champion colt Archers Bay to victory in the Queen's Plate. In 2000, Desormeaux won the Wood Memorial Stakes and his second Kentucky Derby aboard Fusaichi Pegasus. Amongst his other major stakes race victories he became the first foreign jockey to win a Classic race in Japan.
In 2004, Kent Desormeaux was inducted into the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame.
