Yankee Doodle Dandy

By Richard Stengel

Gentleman Steve Cauthen rides to the top again, in England

He takes tea with earls as easily as he takes the lead down the stretch. When he doffs his racing silks, he often dons a fine tweed jacket (courtesy of his Savile Row tailor) or a cashmere sweater and, yes, an ascot on occasion. If he is not on the track, he might be found on a golf course or perhaps riding to hounds with the local gentry. His manners are impeccable, complemented by a bearing that is slightly distant. His accent is what practiced observers of the Anglo-American scene have always called, with a touch of condescension, mid-Atlantic: neither here nor there.

But what the soft-spoken Kentucky-born and -bred young man does off the track is beside the point. Steve Cauthen, once the most celebrated American rider since Paul Revere, has gone over to the British, and last week he became the first American since World War I to carry off the coveted British jockey's title for most winners during the year.

With 128 victories and a week to go in the season, "Gentleman Steve," as one tabloid calls him, is uncatchable. Cauthen, 24, has not only won more races than anyone else, he has won his spurs with the British public and ridden roughshod over those who wondered whether he was all washed up. And a good thing it is too, for Cauthen was in danger of becoming just another Trivial Pursuit question. Remember young Stevie? In 1977 the scrawny 5-ft. 1-in. 17-year-old dazzled the pari-mutuel bettors with an uncanny number of winners at Aqueduct on his way to earning a world-record $6 million in purses, the most sensational apprentice-riding performance in racing history.

For an encore in 1978, Cauthen, with a little help from a horse named Affirmed, went on to become the youngest rider ever to win the Triple Crown. Some wondered aloud whether his nerve and savvy, his seeming oneness with the animal he rode, would make him the greatest jockey in the world.

Then something went awry. He took a bad spill at Saratoga that fractured his knee. When he returned to the Santa Anita track in California during the winter of 1979, his fairy tale turned to nightmare: a seemingly endless 110-race losing streak. Other riders murmured that he was tentative, for a jockey the kiss of death. The once-upon-a-time darling was lustily booed. Recalls Cauthen, with typical stoicism: "I was a bit shocked about the way people reacted to what was happening to me." At his lowest point, he accepted a lucrative offer from the wealthy English horse owner Robert Sangster to race for him during the English flat season. Why not, Cauthen mused. "I felt I was a bit burned out. I'd never visited England and I thought, I'm young and this is the time to try it if I'm ever going to."

Living up to his advance billing was not easy. "They seemed to think I could win on a donkey," he recalls. Although he did win his first race, his performance soon fell behind the pace of his publicity. There were rumors of a "Get the Kid" campaign by established jockeys. Moreover, Cauthen had to become accustomed to the English racing scene, which is, by some standards, a bit eccentric. "In America all of the race courses are flat, lefthanded, about a mile around and usually dirt," notes Cauthen. In England, "they are just where they laid them out 200 years ago. If there was a hump or a bump there, it just went with it." Some tracks go uphill, some down, others have odd turns or unusually long straightaways. During his first year, like a golfer studying a new course, he trudged around every track, memorizing each idiosyncrasy.

For all that effort, New Boy Cauthen just did not have the horsepower. In England, where each jockey is primarily affiliated with a trainer, a rider is only as good as his trainer's stable. For two years, Cauthen's stable was afflicted with an equine virus. During his first year, he won 52 races; during his second, 61. Respectable, but nothing to write the folks back home about. "It wasn't that I lacked ability when I first came," says Cauthen carefully. "I lacked experience. But I stuck it out, and it's paid off for me. I think most people felt that after the first year I'd bugger back off to America with my tail between my legs."

Last year Cauthen, who at 5 ft. 5 in. is four inches taller than when he left, rode 102 winners and was voted jockey of the year by a racing magazine. In the Newmarket Champion Stakes, he steered his way through 18 horses to go from last to first in the final two furlongs. "As near to being a masterpiece as is possible in race riding," said Racing Writer Brough Scott. A computer chart showed that a horse had a better chance of winning with Cauthen aboard than with any other jockey, including the legendary Lester Piggott. Piggott, 49, is Britain's Willie Shoemaker, a gritty, no-nonsense veteran who has won eleven jockey championships. His terse appraisal after his first matchup against Cauthen: "I wouldn't let him mow my lawn." The stony-faced Piggott later relented slightly: "He's good, but not that good." As for Gentleman Steve, he is as ever respectful of his elders. "Piggott is one of the greatest jockeys who has ever lived," he says. "We learn from him every day." Cauthen will also take from him next season, when he replaces Piggott as the No. 1 jockey for Henry Cecil's 150-horse Newmarket stable, arguably the country's best.

The new champion, whose ancestors left England for America, feels less like an expatriate than a transplanted native son. "A born-again Englishman," approves the Times. The pace of life, like the slower tracks, suits him. In America, he says, "everything is slightly more hyped up. Instead of running on six cylinders, they are running on eight." Earlier talk that he was overdoing the high life has subsided. "I've given up the champagne." he says of one of his two loves, "but not the sweets." In England he can ride at 117-118 lbs., a pound or two more than he would have to maintain in the U.S. Cauthen revels in the traditions, the variety and the genteel, countrified atmosphere of British racing. And all of England seems to reciprocate his anglophilia.

From the tabloid Daily Star: "Gentle Steve, with his calm good manners, has done more for American-British relations than any politician."

The Kid no more, Cauthen seems better able to savor his success. "The title means a lot to me," he says. "I appreciated the Triple Crown then, but I didn't understand it nearly as well, didn't understand what it took to do it. Now, having had to really work for it, I appreciate it that much more." He has long had the fluid mechanics of a great rider, and his wondrous hands and natural affinity for horses helped to set him apart. Now he is adding the sophistication that makes a grand master in the galloping chess match of flat racing. "Being able to look ahead in the race and see what's going to happen before it happens," as Cauthen puts it. Says his father, a former blacksmith who remains close to his son: "He's grown up from a boy into a young man and adapted to the environment very well."

He has adapted and been adopted, but does that mean Cauthen will never come home? "I'm very happy in England, and this is really where I think my career lies," he answers. It would be nice to win the British Triple Crown; no one has ever doubled in Triples. But perhaps his American chewing tobacco suggests divided loyalties. He keeps it in an English snuff tin. an unconscious metaphor for his life abroad. For the Yank at Ascot is still a dyed-in-the-wool Kentuckian under the Harris Tweed. "Sometimes I'm sitting alone and something reminds me of home. A sound or a smell and suddenly my mind's back in Kentucky." He discloses this in a track restaurant as high tea is being served. Steve Cauthen likes the ceremony and all. but orders a pot of coffee for himself.

--By Richard Stengel. Reported by John Wright/London

With reporting by John Wright/London