Man can fly.
You might not believe it, but that's because you aren't seeing the 110-pound jockey take flight at 45 mph, with his legs bicycling in the air seeking traction, his arms in a helpless pinwheel. The horse was underneath him, and then it was gone. Poof. Like a magic trick, 1,100 pounds of thoroughbred evaporated, changing the parameters of the race from horse vs. horse to human vs. gravity. So yes, nonbeliever, given these circumstances, man can fly.
This moment—the moment his fingertips abandon the reins and his toes depart the stirrups, the moment the horse named Skum disappears—is yet another opportunity for Chad Schvaneveldt to question his career choice. It's remarkable how time slows in moments like this, how neurons fire information to the brain in a matter of milliseconds. The flying man is surprised but not panicked, concerned but not afraid. This has happened before and he knows it will happen again, since he is a man with no interest in any other line of work.
He keeps riding despite the 17 broken collarbones (12 on the left, five on the right), the broken back, the broken left shoulder, the countless broken ribs, the broken thumb, the broken ankle, the lacerated liver and the left elbow that refuses to straighten. He keeps riding through the chronic pancreatitis that turns his stomach into a knife fight over a campfire. And yet, even if you could stop time to ask him the question in midair, he'd tell you the jockey's life is the life he loves.
When the gate opens and the horse charges and the competition starts, he's an athlete utterly consumed by the moment. He makes a good living—in the low six figures—and puts himself in serious jeopardy to do so. He's one of the best 100 in the world at his profession, and how many people can say that? Where else can a man his size aspire to be a star?
His body twists in the air. Through mud-specked goggles he catches the swirling blue-and-white glimpse of an ambulance speeding its way up the track, the two paramedics on board feeling the adrenal spike that comes from seeing a jockey thrown. (It has long been a source of black humor for jockeys that theirs is the only sport in which an ambulance follows the competitors.) He knows his wife, Jane, an outrider, is watching from her spot atop a horse on the outside rail. By now, her trot has become gallop and a brain-stem buzz of fear and helplessness has hit her. After the medics, Chad figures Jane will be the first to his side. He rides fast, she rides slow. Both have their stresses.
Schvaneveldt has been riding horses his entire life, the past 26 of his sometimes tenuous 43 years as a professional. He grew up in a racing family. Working for his father, a trainer at racetracks in Idaho and Arizona, he dreamed of riding in the Kentucky Derby. From the time he hit puberty, growth was the enemy. At 14 he began dieting and prayed his feet would stay small enough to fit stirrups. His feet obeyed—his shoe size is a men's 5½B, a size so impossible to find that most of his riding and hunting boots (quail is his game of choice) are women's. He's 5'8'', unusually tall for a jockey, but he often shops for clothes in the little boys section. To judge by his wardrobe, Wrangler has cornered the market on slim-fit 27-inch waist, 34-inch inseam jeans.
He never graduated from high school, and decades spent in stables have made him relentlessly pragmatic and opposed to introspection. His slicked-back hair, meticulously groomed mustache and cigarette habit make him the Hollywood ideal of a 1930s jockey. Asked to ponder the ephemeral nature of his work, the pained expression on his narrow face turns his Eastwood creases to canyons. The face says This is just what I do. You get the impression that everything he's learned, he's seen.
Schvaneveldt is a man who deals strictly in facts, and the facts are these: Skum, a horse he has never ridden, not even in a morning workout, has snapped its left front ankle approaching the final turn during the second race on a Thursday afternoon in December at Bay Meadows Racecourse near San Francisco. It is Skum's third, and last, race. Three inches of muddy slop atop a hardpan surface probably contributed to the accident, but right now that is mere speculation. It's best to keep it simple: The horse has vanished, leaving Schvaneveldt to cartwheel through the air like a circus act.
Purely as spectacle, removed from the pending realities of the jockey's imminent and painful—hell, potentially fatal—return to earth, watching this tiny man take flight is truly breathtaking.
THERE ARE many occupational shortcomings in the jockey's world; flying is just one of them. In fact, there are enough workplace issues—no catastrophic insurance, dangerous track conditions, uninhabitable jocks rooms—to prompt a march on Capitol Hill. And that doesn't even get into the pay scale. A winning jockey takes home 10% of the purse, while second and third each take 5%. At the local tracks where Schvaneveldt rides, the mount fee for a jock who finishes out of the money is $55. Until this year, when it was raised to $500, the mount fee for the Triple Crown races was a laughable $105.
After paying 25% to an agent and 5% to the valet, Fernando Jara and Alex Solis, who finished tied for fourth in last year's Derby, cleared barely $70. Not much for finishing in the top five in the pinnacle event of a profession.
The life is one of institutionalized deprivation. Nothing in the job has changed in 100 years, even though the human body, especially the American human body, has gotten taller and heavier with each generation. Jockeys maintain a time-honored, carefully crafted system of self-abuse. They starve themselves, or eat and force themselves to throw up. "Heaving," or "flipping," is such an open secret in the profession that many tracks have specially designed flipping toilets in the jocks rooms. It is safe to say the racetrack is the only place where bulimia is not only legitimized but officially accommodated. As Schvaneveldt says, anyone who walks through the jocks room would consider calling the Humane Society.
The health issues of the country's 1,500 jockeys could keep daytime talk shows humming indefinitely. More than 2,000 racetrack injuries occur each year, including the occasional death. On-the-job hazards include dehydration, malnutrition, kidney stones, depressed immune systems, adult-onset diabetes, and drug and alcohol abuse.
Case in point: our flying friend. A recovering alcoholic who has been clean since Feb. 28, 2001, Schvaneveldt used to begin his days with a shot of vodka to steady his hands sufficiently to operate a razor without endangering his carotid. Back then, he'd drive to work at 5 a.m. with a pint of vodka under the driver's seat, a bag of coke in his pocket and a bottle of the diuretic Lasix waiting in his locker. He'd undertake his profession's necessary unsavory rituals—he ate and puked, drank and puked, sweated and puked—and when the morning buzz turned into the afternoon sag, he'd do a line or two to get through the rest of the racing card.
He raced wasted, the days a repetitive blur of drinking and heaving and sitting atop half-ton horses traveling at near-highway speed. Sometimes he didn't make it home. A positive drug test and a six-month suspension at the end of 1997 forced him to confront his addiction. The pint he tossed back as he sat next to Jane in the parking lot of the treatment center in 2001 was his last drink. "I'm not proud of what I did, but I'm proud I stopped," he says. "I'm lucky nothing serious happened. I put people in danger, not only myself."
Horse racing, reduced to its core elements, is a series of organized stampedes. Even for sober jockeys, it's a hell of a test of reflexes and nerves. Schvaneveldt and his fellow jocks are asked to impose order upon chaos. Crouching into a tight L, these tiny humans made almost entirely of bone and sinew control a multibillion-dollar business with just their fingertips and toes.
Schvaneveldt lives a different life now, a sensible one, driving his 16-year-old son and 14-year-old daughter to soccer practice in a Camry with a license plate frame that reads, "My other ride is a racehorse." He tries not to miss any of their games and is home every night for dinner.
And yet he still rides, and still dreams. His personal recovery hasn't altered his fearlessness on the track, although he's seen it happen to others. Jocks get married and have kids, then set up shop in the "married man's lane," on the outside, where there are fewer accidents—and far fewer wins. Even now, with his feet pointing to the sky and his head aimed at the ground, Schvaneveldt would tell you that the second you feel fear is the second you're done as a jock.
ON THE day he will take flight, Schvaneveldt arrives at the track at 6 a.m. to work out horses for trainers who've been here since long before dawn. He walks through the cold, dark stables smoking a Marlboro Light. His smoker's rasp greets everyone with an eagerness that belies both the early hour and the pain that courses through his body.
On good days, the pancreatitis announces itself as a few sharp knives in his gut. On bad, it feels like they're being juggled. Today's a juggler's day.
Schvaneveldt believes every day might be the day, every race might be the race. He shows up each morning hoping to find the one horse that will propel him off the local circuit and onto the national scene, the one horse that will bring him the moment of glory that offsets the lifetime of anonymity and selfabuse. Then again, what he battles now—the constant unbearable stomach pain, the lesser aches of aging, the monklike discipline—he considers atonement for all those years he spent deferring his considerable promise.
San Francisco might be a second-tier racing area, but every once in a while, in a Seabiscuit turn of events, a horse will burst out of this damp paddock and land in the Triple Crown. Lost in the Fog, a horse that became a legend after 10 straight sprint wins on its way to running in the 2005 Breeders' Cup, is the most recent example. Schvaneveldt wants to be atop the next one that blows through here on the way to someplace better.
Squinting through his cigarette smoke, he pages through a clipboard in search of the workout orders for Tribal Trouble. "It's every jock's dream to race in the Triple Crown, and I ain't no different," he says. "Everyone wants to be one of the riders who gets to travel the country to ride the best horses. That'd work for me."
Not 200 yards away, in an office underneath the grandstand, sits David Seftel, the track doctor at Bay Meadows and Golden Gate Fields. Seftel is a South Africa-born beanpole with broad features, a wandering mop of dark hair and a look that suggests eccentricity. He is a fiercely passionate advocate for jockeys, speaking strongly and eloquently in their defense. His proximity to these men, whom he calls "poundfor-pound the toughest, strongest people in sports," brought him to start the National Jockeys' Health Initiative, the first long-term study of the physical effects of this particular lifestyle. Seftel hopes to document the toll the profession takes on the body, and use the data to spur change.
His sharp barbs seem incongruous with the poetic lilt of his voice. He calls the weight limits set by state racing boards (generally no more than 118 pounds for a jockey and his tack) "government-mandated malnutrition" and "state-sanctioned starvation." Adding five or 10 pounds of jockey to the back of a horse is like "you or me putting on a pair of featherweight gloves to go jogging," he says. "These people are dying. They should not be sacrificed on the pyre of tradition."
Jockeys have to maintain weight throughout race day. So someone who has struggled to make weight for his first race inevitably will be light-headed, disoriented and dehydrated by the sixth or seventh race of the afternoon. "They haven't eaten all day and their blood sugar is 40," Seftel says. "Yet, if they drop their concentration for a second, they could be dead. It's insanity."
Schvaneveldt's body is skinny even for a jockey's, which is like being round for a circle. He is an anatomy sketch come to life, even if it is difficult to imagine all the necessary organs housed within that frame. The real estate simply doesn't exist. He no longer flips, but minimal food consumption and the pancreatitis allow him not to worry about the scales. The last time his body fat was checked, it was 1%. Given that anything below 5% is considered unhealthy, and anything below 3% skeletal, it is no wonder Seftel looked at him one day and asked, quite seriously, "How are you even alive?"
It is not the first time he's been asked. Back in 1990, a horse he was riding clipped the rail. Schvaneveldt was thrown and the colt landed on top of him. Because 110 pounds is no match for 1,100, it messed up his insides pretty good. Luckily, the incident didn't kill him, although the pancreatitis it left as a memento feels pretty close to how he imagines death. The years of flipping and drinking and dehydration also may have contributed to his ailment, but Schvaneveldt traces it back to the spill.
He eats one meal a day—dinner. On Thursday, he begins to think about Sunday night. With the tracks closed on Monday and Tuesday, that's when he can really gorge. Pizza, Jane's Reuben sandwiches. But he tries not to think about the feast too much.
Some mornings he heads upstairs to the jockeys lounge at Bay Meadows for two pieces of white toast (nearly burnt, buttered) and to chat with his friend Jack Leonard, a former jockey who runs the café and lives in the jocks room. Schvaneveldt drinks one cup of coffee in the morning and takes a few swallows of Red Bull before some races. He has a bucket of water near his locker for rinsing the track dirt out of his mouth, but he rarely drinks. Dehydration is his constant state. When they tried to draw blood just this morning, as part of Seftel's study, Schvaneveldt's veins collapsed. Sixteen needle pokes later, the phlebotomist gave up.
AS HIS 206 brittle bones near the apex of their flight, Schvaneveldt prepares for impact. He knows he has to land and roll. Experience has taught him a horse is more likely to sidestep a moving object than a stationary one.
From the moment Skum disappeared, though, one question has flashed through Schvaneveldt's mind like a searchlight: Where's the kid? There's an apprentice jockey in the race, and as Schvaneveldt nears the ground, the location of the kid is about all that matters.
At a moment like this, apprentices ("bug boys," in the lingo) scare the hell out of guys like Schvaneveldt. Bug boys usually ride with their heads down, unaware, intent on whipping their horses and impressing the trainers and just keeping the damn animal underneath them. It's part selfpreservation and part hunger. Bug boys live in a world of near-enslavement, working horses in the predawn hours for a $20 bill and a slap on the back. In context, a few $55 mount fees can be a windfall. Everyone is chasing the same dream, just on different planes.
Veterans, on the other hand, can be trusted to keep their heads up, ready to redirect their horses in a neural pulsebeat. They have learned to consider worst-case scenarios first. Jockeys race to win, take chances and are undoubtedly the cockiest men you'll ever meet, but still, they look out for one another. They know a horse can magically disappear from underneath a man at 45 mph. They know men can fly. They've seen it. They've been it. And so they ride with their heads up. There but for the grace of God, and all that.
Schvaneveldt concludes a brief prayer concerning the bug boy just as his right side smacks the mud. The shock is considerable, bone compressing into bone, body compacting like an accordion. There is nothing on Schvaneveldt's body to protect him besides a flyweight Kevlar vest and an eggshell-thin helmet. When 110 pounds are spread across 5'8" of skeleton, there is certainly nothing else to soften the blow.
He rolls in time to see a horse coming hard toward him, dead-center in line with his head. Please, God, don't let it be the kid. At the last possible instant, which is really the only possible instant, the horse veers sharply right and passes on the outside. Schvaneveldt doesn't so much see it as feel it, like when a train passes as you stand near the tracks.
Schvaneveldt lifts his head through the pain to give silent thanks to the man in the saddle. It's Frankie, Frankie Alvarado, an old pro. With a split-second to identify and act, he maneuvered his horse, Island Thunder, like a skier cutting a gate. Schvaneveldt could kiss sweet bastard Frankie right on the lips.
Within seconds the ambulance is parked beside him. The medics try to convince him to get in. Schvaneveldt refuses the offer out of both pride and superstition. "There are enough times when I've had to get in that thing," he says. "It's messin' with fate." Jane is there too, relieved, knowing there is no way in hell her husband is getting into the ambulance. He would sooner ride in the married man's lane.
Schvaneveldt stands and winces, but says he can walk. It takes him a while to straighten up, the rising flames in his stomach the only thing worse than the pain in his wrist. As he begins his trip across the muddy track and toward the jocks room, he can feel the eyes of the few fans in the grandstand who've now been amazed twice today—the first when he flew, and now as he walks away.
He is tough, and so he keeps his head up and his back straight and his eyes fixed ahead, willing his soaked and muddy body forward one tiny step at a time. Behind him, plans are being made to put down Skum and the jockeys are preparing to tell track officials they're done for the afternoon. Spills in each of the first two races, two dead horses and one flying man are enough for them.
When Schvaneveldt finally arrives in the jocks room, he fields a few sympathetic nods. His locker is in a back corner, a perk of his longevity. He takes off his silks, careful with the wrist, and hangs up his helmet. Then he sits and takes what passes for a deep breath. Someone says something about being lucky. Wet, bruised, sore and just minutes removed from a white-knuckle journey, he nods. Tomorrow's schedule sits on the bench next to him.
He'll be riding five races.