Former Thoroughbred racing star among UF veterinary graduates

When the TV series “Jockeys” ran on Animal Planet two years ago, senior University of Florida veterinary student Ramon Perez was quite the hot commodity with his classmates. That’s because for a three-year window in the 1990s, Perez himself was one of the biggest names in Thoroughbred horse racing.

“My classmates usually ask me things like, ‘what’s it like,’ or ‘what’s this mean,’” said Perez, now 32 and preparing for an internship at an equine practice near Sydney, Australia.

In 1995 alone, Perez raked in more than $4.6 million in purses, competing on the tough New York circuit. That year, at 18 years of age, Perez received the prestigious Eclipse Award for best apprentice jockey after falling three votes short of winning the same award a year earlier. Perez was associated with the Mott stable, generally regarded as one of America’s best training grounds, and his stepfather, Tim Jones, was Mott’s assistant trainer.

The late John Harrell, a highly regarded columnist for the Thoroughbred Times and Louisville Courier-Journal, wrote that the Perez’ performance riding Northern Emerald in the 1995 Flower Bowl may have been Perez’s “defining moment of the season.”

“Perez brought Northern Emerald from far back, coming from 3½ lengths back in midstretch to win by a length over Danish,” Harrell wrote. “It was a special victory for Perez, since the 6-year-old mare is trained by (Bill) Mott and owned by Hiram C. Polk Jr. and David Richardson, longtime clients of Mott.”

“We were tough to beat,” Perez said. “We had great horses; we won Breeders Cups and even as a kid, before I could ride, I had access to some of the most well-bred horses in the world.”

“It was satisfying for me to put somebody on a horse and go with them and have them do so well from the beginning,” Mott said. “He won a Grade 1 stake for us at Belmont when he still had the apprentice allowance, which was quite unusual, but that just shows the confidence I had in him, and the confidence that he had in himself to win a race like that.”

Ramon Perez approaches the racetrack at the $100,000 Emerald Stakes, a 1-1/16 mile race on grass. He won the race.

Perez won the first two races he ever rode. He raced and won at Churchill Downs, Aqueduct, Belmont Park and Saratoga Race Course while on the New York circuit.

A 1997 New York Racing Association calendar shows Perez grinning in a group shot of some of the best jockeys in the sport, including Hall of Famers Pat Day, Mike Smith, Julie Krone, John Velasquez, Jerry Bailey and others.

Smith, the “Jockeys” star who won the Kentucky Derby in 2005 on Giacomo and recently placed third on Jackson Bend in the Preakness Stakes, said Perez was like a son to him in the jockey room.

“He had a very short, but a great career,” Smith said. “He was just a great kid, and respected. But we had a lot of fun. He was so naïve; he’d believe anything you told him. It was always ‘yes sir’ and ‘no sir.’”

At Mott’s stable, Perez worked his way up, from hotwalker to groom to exercise rider. All his experience doing various jobs in the barn contributed to Perez’s almost uncanny sense of equine understanding.

After three years of intense riding, Perez retired and did something he’d always wanted to do more of and never had time to — he traveled. He backpacked in Europe, and worked in Dubai and England, where he rode briefly at a stable owned by Sheik Mohammed.

“My problem was, I started at the top and there is very little availability to ride when you start that high,” Perez said. “My career wasn’t going as well as it used to be.”

He returned to the United States and eventually started riding again, this time at smaller tracks where he said he felt he could be a “big fish in a small pond.” But the life of a jockey took its toll.

Perez’s “aha moment” was March 26, 2001, at a small Arizona track. He won the first race and was scheduled to ride the last, but Perez, all 110 pounds of him, was miserable.

“I had to sit in the jock’s room and I couldn’t eat or drink because I had to make weight for the last race. I just wanted a sip of Gatorade. So I sat in my cubby, and I said, ‘I can’t do it. I’m done.’ After I won that race at 12:30 p.m., I took off.”

Ramon Perez is shown on one of his jockey trading cards, issued by the Jockey’s Guild.

Soon after Perez left the track, his grandmother told him that his late grandfather always wanted him to go to college. He finished his associate’s degree at Santa Fe College in Gainesville. He completed his bachelor’s degree at UF in history — the discipline in which his grandfather had been a professor. Then he applied to veterinary school.

After he receives his D.V.M. degree May 29, Perez will head for Randwick Equine Center outside of Sydney, Australia. He performed an externship there and liked the opportunities he saw in surgery, lameness cases and even an ambulatory racetrack practice.

He hopes his next adventure will help him decide whether to pursue a residency in surgery and perhaps continue on with a career that would take him back to the horse business as a racetrack veterinarian. Perez admits that not a day goes by that he doesn’t miss the thrill of riding.

“He put up a good battle, but I think he will grow to appreciate and love what he’s doing,” said Perez’s old boss, Mott. “I think when you ride horses, it’s such a special bond that you create with the animal. It’s a satisfying experience when you know you’ve done a good job at it, but I think he’ll learn to appreciate the animal from another perspective.”