A Runaway Winner

Hank Aaron did it in baseball with home run No. 715; Jim Brown did it in football with seven 1,000-yard seasons; Mark Spitz did it in a swimming pool with his seventh Olympic gold medal. Any day now, Jockey Willie Shoemaker, 44, will do it in horseracing, riding a thoroughbred to victory No. 7,000, setting another of sport's Olympian records for generations to test against. By week's end "Shoe," 4 ft. 11 1/2 in., was one win away, and well past the 6,032 mark set in 1966 by John Longden who was 59 at the time when he retired. No one else is within 2,000 wins of Shoemaker.

On the way to 7,000, Shoemaker, a jockey since 1949, has had some famous losses, like the time he was riding Gallant Man in the 1957 Kentucky Derby and miscalculated the location of the finish line. But on three other occasions, he won that race; ten times since 1951 he has been the top money-winning rider (his lifetime total: nearly $58 million). Shoe's overall winning average comes close to one race out of every four--or 260 victories a year. What next? If he rides until he reaches Longden's retirement age of 59 and wins only 200 races a year, he will reach 10,000.

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