Woodbine racetrack is bracing for an invasion of bugs at the opening of thoroughbred racing today.
We're not talking about the winged kind, the kind that muck up the front grill of a car on a muggy summer night.
At the racetrack, bugs are apprentice jockeys, who ride with weight allowances. (So-called because in the racing program there is an bug-like asterisk or two beside the names of apprentice riders.)
At first, apprentice riders get two "bugs" beside their name and a 10-pound weight allowance. After they win five races, they get a five-pound weight allowance and one "bug." A year after their fifth win, they become full-fledged riders and lose the weight allowance that is the incentive for trainers to book them.
Never before has the Woodbine riding colony been so swarmed with bugs. There will be about 50 riders this year at the Toronto track, including 15 apprentice riders, five of which are women.
On opening day today, 13 of the 86 horses running in 10 races will be ridden by apprentices.
"They've all come out of the woodwork," said Robbie King, secretary/manager of the Jockeys' Benefit Association of Canada. "When a bug gets hot one year, it's the planting of the seed for two or three years later [for others] We went through a run with some very strong apprentices, like Emma-Jayne Wilson. When you have a young rider that impacts the industry, like an Emma Wilson and a Corey Fraser, the two of them back-to-back, it's almost like we reap the benefits years later.
"Right now, it's the fruition of that boost."
One of the opening-day bug riders is 20-year-old Betty Jo Williams, who took her inspiration not from Wilson, who became the first female rider to win the Queen's Plate, but from Julie Krone, the ultimate female jockey.
Krone, 46, stopped racing in 2004, after a career in which she became the first female rider to win a U.S. Triple Crown race (1993 Belmont Stakes, aboard Colonial Affair), the first to win a Breeders' Cup race (on Halfbridled in 2003) and the first to be inducted into the U.S. National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame.
She also won two major stakes races at Woodbine: the 1988 Dominion Day and the 1995 Molson Million.
For Williams, the racing seed was planted about 15 years ago, when she met Krone in a tunnel at Woodbine where the horses enter the track from the paddock. The apprentice rider calls it a turning point in her life.
"I remember my dad [a trainer at the Fort Erie, Ont., racetrack]grabbing my hand and security was yelling at him: 'No you can't come in here!' " Williams said yesterday. "He was like: 'No, she's meeting Julie Krone.' "
A father's perseverance prevailed.
"She was asking me my name and if I wanted to be a jockey," Williams recalled. "And I said: 'Yes, I want to be a jockey.' "
Krone told her to follow her dreams and gave her a pair of racing goggles.
Williams has been around the track as long as she can remember, and said she was probably put up on a horse when she was a year old.
"I love riding," she said. "I love going fast. I love the adrenalin rush."
Last season, at Mountaineer in West Virginia, Williams won in her second start. She stopped after winning four races to preserve her bug status this year.
Williams will ride 8-to-1 shot Sir Heart Throb for top trainer Mark Casse in the sixth race today.
Young female riders in Canada have done extremely well over the past 12 years, winning the Sovereign Award for apprentices eight times. Wilson won two of them; Chantal Sutherland, who has been riding in California over the winter, another two.
It has been said Sutherland is the best female jockey to come along since Krone.
"She's become queen of the long shots," Hall of Fame jockey Gary Stevens once said, on Sutherland's career in California.
"Those girls in the room are definitely something to look up to," Williams said. "They've paved the way for women riders at Woodbine. They've basically made it that female bug riders can ride here, too.''