Decorated jockey Patrick Husbands poses for a portrait by the training track at Toronto's Woodbine Racetrack on Wednesday.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
Canada’s greatest jockey didn’t begin on horses. Almost as soon as he could walk, Patrick Husbands climbed aboard a donkey named Daisy on his family’s farm in Barbados.
“That’s how I first learned to ride,” Husbands said this week.
His father, Walter, ran a riding school and was a former jockey. By the time Patrick was 5 he hoisted him into a saddle. He was just 68 pounds and only 15 when he turned professional in his native country.
“In my first race, I fell off just near the starting gate,” Husbands said. “I rode another time three races later and by the end my knees were gone. I said, ‘I will never ever be a jockey. I don’t know how guys do this.’”
He will turn 53 in a few weeks and won more than 3,700 races before he quietly retired before the meet started at Woodbine Racetrack two weekends ago. The thoroughbreds he rode over 30-plus years earned US$184-million in prize money.
Husbands said he was influenced to retire due to the numerous injuries he sustained during his career. As a teenager in Barbados he suffered a traumatic brain injury when three horses fell in front of his. He was in a coma for 5 1/2 weeks.
“I came out of the coma and didn’t know what happened,” he said. “I didn’t recognize anybody. Today I have short-term memory losses because of it.”
Husbands endured painful injuries but also defeated all comers throughout his iconic career, including when he won the King's Plate in 2023 aboard Paramount Prince.Spencer Colby/The Canadian Press
He has broken his collarbone and broken ribs on the right side of his body that punctured his kidney and lung. He has broken both hands and both thumbs, snapped one leg in half, had a broken jaw and had his chest crushed when he was thrown by a horse and was then pinned by it against a rail. He has had knee surgery and had a sports hernia repaired.
A few years back he said a doctor warned him that if he continued to ride horses he would end up in a wheelchair.
“He didn’t know who he was dealing with,” Husbands said.
He established himself as one of the best riders in the Caribbean before he came in 1989 to Toronto, where his brother, Anthony, is a trainer at Woodbine. His father dropped him off at the airport in Bridgetown that day and that was the last time Patrick saw him. Walter died soon afterward.
“It was devastating,” Husbands said. “He only got to see me ride three times.”
He was barely 20 when he followed Anthony to Toronto to test his skills at a major racetrack. He began to ride for Reade Baker and Mark Casse and quickly climbed up the riders’ standings. He won his first of seven Sovereign Awards as Canada’s outstanding jockey in 1999, and in 2023 won the King’s Plate for the third time on Paramount Prince, who was trained by Casse.
He has maintained a relationship with Casse – who he described as “playing the part of [his] dad” in his life, and who was named Canada’s outstanding trainer last week. Casse is in Louisville for Saturday’s Kentucky Derby but had his horse Silent Tactic scratched this week due to a foot ailment.
Husbands and Casse have become one of the most successful one-two combinations in Canadian racing history. In 2023, along with his Plate triumph, Patrick led all Woodbine riders in stakes wins.
Trainer Mark Casse, left, and Husbands celebrate the jockey's Plate victory in 2014.Chris Young/The Canadian Press
Over the years he has won nine Canadian Triple Crown races (including the Triple Crown itself in 2003 aboard Wando), won 388 stakes races and finished first, second or third 49 per cent of the time.
“He was given a God-given talent,” said Leroy Trotman, Husbands’s agent for nine years. “I always say he wasn’t just a good jockey, he was a good horseman. There are things he sees and feels that other riders don’t.
“He was a horse whisperer.”
Trotman, who is also from Barbados, said when Husbands was a little boy he would come to the track in early morning and had to be shepherded to school.
“He would run around all over the place,” Trotman said.
Husbands said he hasn’t been able to use his left arm since he incurred a shoulder separation four years ago.
“I can’t raise it in the air,” he said.
He said he mulled retiring last year but finally did it on the opening weekend of the season. He hasn’t ridden a horse in 2026 but is still helping his brother and Casse by exercising horses in the morning.
“I just need a break,” Husbands said. “I need to see the world. All I know about is the hospital and the race track. I need to go on cruises. It will be like I am a little child. I will have a fresh, open mind.”